Happy City

Happy City: Transforming Our Lives through Urban Design
© 2013 Charles Montgomery
368 pages

City air makes one free, but -- happy? Throughout the 20th century, Americans fled the urban centers seeking Arcadian bliss. They didn’t find it, and despite an abundance of material wealth the nation continues to writhe in anxiety.  We’re addicted to medication, legal or otherwise;  many live lives of quiet desperation, and others lash out violently in scenes that horrify the imagination.  The suburban experiment was a failure from the start, says Charles Montgomery, because we were made for one another. In leaving the cities to decay, we uprooted ourselves from the social fabric which sustains us. It doesn’t have to be this way; we can come home to the village, even to the city. We can restore our cities to the picture of health, and ourselves in the bargain. Montgomery’s Happy City is a masterful work,  bringing together Greek philosophy, urban economics, and social commentary.

Why care about the city? Globally, the human race is half-urbanized, using a loose definition for urban that includes suburban sprawl. The semi-urban forms we choose to live in can either contribute  to our well-being by meeting our needs, or they can serve to frustrate us. Montgomery opens  with a review of what constitutes 'happiness'  and its connection to the urban form. There are sound objective reasons for wanting to make the setting of most human lives 'better';  traditionally-planned cities are more economically productive and allow for both greener and healthier lives by making it easy for people to walk or bike to work, for instance. Montgomery touches on these arguments, but he's not just writing to city planners or mayors who hold the fate of others in their hands. He writes to appeal to the common citizen, someone less interested in return-on-investment breakdowns and more concerned with the quality of everyday life.  Being able to walk to work or shops is good for our bones and good for the air, but it's also good for our spirits; we're not dependent on a car, we're out in the fresh air, we're seeing and being seen.  There are material pleasures to consider, of course; the concentration of diverse restaurants and stores in dense neighborhoods, and the bliss of pedaling down to the library through leafy streets , but there is more to the human experience than simple sensuality...even though there's nothing like a well-placed park to relax stressed brains.

We are political creatures, wrote Aristotle, not because we like to vote and share "Hooray For Our Side" memes on Facebook, but because people like other people. We like to watch people; we like to bump into them   We don't like to be crowded against people, however; there are tricky dynamics at work that the design of cities and the buildings within have to account for. There's a big difference, for instance, between apartment buildings that are designed around impersonal corridors, and those designed around suites that allow people to occupy a goldilocks area between the private and public realms. The front porch of southern homes in the US had the same effect in detached housing, allowing just the right amount of engagement and privacy. Montgomery is sneaky, exposing readers to brief chats about building codes  and housing policy while offering touching stories about people coming together to make their lives together.  In one neighborhood, for instance, residents turned an intersection into a public square by painting it and filling it with places to sit and talk.  They did this over the protests of the municipal government, which had steadily ignored residents' request for traffic-calming measures at that intersection.  A happy city is one where people can be agents in their own lives. Montgomery also stresses that a happy city is one that works for everyone, where even the poor and marginalized can feel like members of the city, and not just clients of its social services office. He goes into many examples of how even something mundane like traffic infrastructure can frustrate or quicken the ability of a person to thrive.  

Happy City is a supremely thoughtful book on what makes happy, and why urban design is important  in cultivate it.  America is plainly in a bad way judging by the politicians we favor with success.  Maybe we don't know what we want -- from one another, from the places we live. I think Happy City can help with directions. When I first heard someone speak on the importance of the urban form to human flourishing, I was blown away by the insight -- and that came from a grating critic. Montgomery is far more amiable, though not less impassioned.  The book itself offered a look at places that were healthy and growing more so, and both the information it provides and the examples it shows are tremendously encouraging.  

As a final note, this review has been a work in progress since  2015, and the state of it above is more or less the state it's been in since then. I've read the book twice since then, and re-skimmed it a few times more, and every time I just can't hit the button.  Maybe I just don't want to stop thinking about the book? At any rate, it's one of my very favorites. 

Related:

Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam
The Great Good Place, Roy Oldenburg, both on the human need for connection and 'place'.
The Geography of Nowhere, James Howard Kunstler, a history of suburban malaise

The Green Metropolis, David Owen

Walkable City,  Pedaling Revolution, and Straphanger 
It's a Sprawl World After All, Douglas Morris, focusing on sprawl's impact on the human need for community.
The Death and Life of Great American Cities, Jane Jacobs; Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn; and Suburban Nation, Andreas Duany

LikeWar

LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media
© 2018 P.W. Singer & Emerson T. Brooking
412 pages

The digital world is not simply one in which people can tweet restaurant reviews from the very table at which they're ignoring their dinner date.  It is a world which has made the border between peace and war practically nonexistent, and allowed virality to become the shaper of reality.  LikeWar introduces us to urban gangs who war not over territory, but their online reps -- to states quickly creating different ways of manipulate both their and others' populaces, and to modern celebrities who have built colossal followings and become world leaders on nothing but theater.  The image created here is frightening, a proposed future where unreality is king.  That's not to say we're abandoned to despair, because the social media platforms themselves are facing increasing pressure to police  the activity they effectively promote, and in the last year have in fact began banning various personalities. That in itself is potentially problematic, carrying a strong odor of partisanship,  and is only the first move in what will presumably be a very long cat and mouse game.

Singer and Brooking begin with a quick history of the internet and of the predominant platforms, chiefly  Google, Facebook, and Twitter.  This is not simply background, because these three dominate social media,  and their success at becoming the primary carriers means the platforms are easy to weaponize; once something ignites there, it can take over.  The algorithms that push rising content accelerate  it all the more, as does negative attention when people comment their boos and hisses.  Politicians, recognizing the power of virality, are following its siren call to become ever more extreme and nonsensical. Other algorithims, helpfully promoting related content to what users are already viewing,  can be used to railroad users into viewing ever more extreme content  -- unless they themselves backtrack. In a such  a way vapid morons become millionaires, and ISIS turns Google into its brand promoter.

If  promoting hate and ignorance were not bad enough,   the railroading takes users deep into a filter bubble,  with the effect that people are now beginning to live in different realities from one another.  There is so much content out there that people can experience an apparent variety of thought which is  in actuality fairly constrained compared to what's outside the bubble.  It is incredibly easy for people to listen to perspectives from their own side, appreciate their apparent rationality, and scratch their heads in wonder that other people don't see this.  But the divergent realities can also be a tool of those who wish to manipulate us; famously, in 2016,  the State of Russia promoted fractiousness within the US by employing social media warriors to create divisive content from different ideologies; others pushed the same content forward by commenting and promoting it.  These were not small scale maneuvers, either; some  were quoted and retweeted by prominent personalities, and would be shared over a hundred million times before they were caught and deleted.  Even worse, some states like that of China's are starting to use people's social media against them directly, by turning it into the basis of "social credit rating" that will help or hinder them in society based on how faithful to the Party they are. 

This is a daunting book, but one those living in the 21st century need to read -- not only so they can understand what they're seeing in society, to appreciate why things have developed they way they have, but so readers can evalute ourselves. No one is immune from this; we all go for narrative, we all follow familiar scents and find our internet bubbles cozy.  No one can keep us off the railroad but ourselves. Actively disengaging,  actively scrutinizing what we see, and actively pursuing other tracks are our only hope for not becoming part of the problem.

The Water Will Come

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
© 2017 Jeff Goodell
332 pages

Complex problems of enormous scale rarely have a patent solution. There are, however, rational responses. In The Water Will Come, Jeff Goodell reviews the way a few cities across the globe are moving to address the growing problem of rising sea levels, from flat denial  to grandiose plans to raise entire city centers. Goodell visits Miami, New York,  Venice, and communities in the Arctic circle, Nigeria, and the Marshall Islands.  Although Goodwell is hopeful that action can be taken, he's left with the grim conclusion that many communities may simply be abandoned and their people removed to higher ground.

Goodell reviews both the various ways rising water will threaten communities near seaboards, as well as their responses. Rising waters will lead to widespread property forfeiture, of course, but floods and storm surges will become worse.   Invasive waters are not simply the ocean with a bigger footprint:   waters sweeping through urban areas become toxic soups of offal and waste fluids,  providing a perfect vector for health crises  While it's easy for most people alive today not to worry about 2100, and easier still to shrug and say that those clever people of 2099 will no doubt have extraordinary technology to solve these problems,  rising floods today are an immediate risk.  Hurricane Sandy added particular impetus to New York City's own risk assessment goals: they intend to build floodwalls around some of the most vulnerable areas.    Venice, Italy, has been fighting its own reclamation by the sea for centuries, but tidal flooding has grown worse and the city now finds itself struggling to complete a controversial tidal barrier.   While Miami is wealthy enough that it can conceivably plow money into infrastructure to help it adapt to the future, places like the Marshall Islands can only look abroad for help.  If the Marshalls are reclaimed by the ocean, their population will have to find new homes abroad -- and as the migrant crisis provoked by the ISIS gang-state indicates, that won't be pretty.

Goodell's survey involved interviews with policymakers and scientists alike, and helps readers understand why more actions aren't being taken.  Many Miami developers don't care about sea level changes because they're short-term investors: once they sell the development, they move on.  The future peril of the development is for its owners and subletters to worry about.  There's also the fact that climate response  has to be mediated through society and governments that are not only unwieldy, but beset with other considerations as well. President Obama may have believed strongly in the threat posed by change, but when he's badgered by the author as to why he allowed the Alaskan oil pipeline to continue, the president patiently explained that no president is truly free to do what he wants; he enters office with wheels already in motion, and  he has to not only work through Congress but take into account politics and economics. If Goodell succeeds in promoting the need to plan for rising sea levels, it will owe to the threat itself and not his delivery; he appears to see only this problem, and dismisses any opposition. He refers to multiple people as "[cityname]'s Trump", or "the [country-adjective] Trump",  but that's confusing to say the least. Are they trumplike because they're developers? Populists? Overenthusiastic twitter-ers? 

This is an important matter for concerned citizens to consider, especially in seaboard communities like Miami which are already fighting "sunny day flooding" because increases in sealevels have submerged their seaside drain outlets. 

The Grid

The Grid: The Fraying Lines Between Americans and Our Energy Future
© 2016 Gretchen Bakke
384 pages

The Grid is a brief history of how our present electrical network evolved in the  United States,  an layman-friendly analysis of its weaknesses -- some inherent, some developed over time as demand soared and different areas of the country made their own adaptations -- and a look at the future of the grid. Bakke imagines nano- and micro-grids will become much more common -- in part because it's increasingly affordable to generate one's own power through solar panels,  and in part because as the system continues to age it will be necessary out of self-defense.  "But wait," you said, "Solar panels and wind turbines only work part of the time!"     Bakke acknowledges this, but is hopeful that the ever-evolving Internet of Things, and especially the allegedly inevitable rise of electronic cars,  will  allow for more evenly-dispersed power distribution, as we continue to contrive ways of storing electricity for future release.   In Alabama, for instance, one station uses electricity to compress air during the day, and then at night the compressed air is released and used to power turbines.  Said station uses nearby salt caverns for storage, and that's a rare enough resource that this station is literally the only one of its kind in the United States.  Not exactly a repeatable approach, but it's only one example of how determined engineers can flank the problem of 'storing' electricity.

I owe this one a re-read because  my brain checked out 70% through. Usually I enjoy reading about infrastructure, but I just tired of the subject here.

Related:

• Empires of Light: Edison, Tesla, Westinghouse, and the Race to Electricity the World
• Energy Myths and Realities, Vaclav Smil. 
• The Grid: A Journey through the Heart of our Electrified World, Philip Schewe

Lessons from a Lemonade Stand

 Lessons from a Lemonade Stand: An Unconventional Guide to Government
© 2017 Connor Boyack
145 pages

Who knew  lemonade was a gateway drug to anarchism?   Beginning with the true story of several girls who were bullied and fined by their local Officer not-so Friendly because they were selling delicious beverages without a permit from the city, Connor Bayack asks readers old and new a question: what does it mean to be lawful? Where do laws come from, and what happens when laws support oppression, or suppress something innocent or even good?   In a short work that draws from Frederic Bastiat, Hannah Arendt, and Monty Python,  Lessons from a Lemonade Stand is an education in law, and rights, as well as an appeal for youngsters to go forth and smash the state.  Or at least, sell lemonade and braid hair without a license.

Although Lessons from a Lemonade Stand  is written for teenagers,  the content is by no means juvenile,  exploring as it does the nature of law, rights, and the legitimacy of government. Drawing on Frederic Bastiat’s The Law, Boyack argues that everyone has natural rights which exist regardless of any government or other person’s respect of them, and that natural law exists to protect these rights.  Because the natural law is based on the respect and protection of these rights, laws cannot violate them and retain their own legitimacy.  The same is true for governments, which are organized to protect these rights: its existence is predicated on those rights being respected, and thus it cannot do what is unlawful for the people who created it do.  Legitimacy also requires consent, since the government has no life beyond what its members give it.  There is then a difference between something being bad because it violates  natural rights – theft and murder being the two most obvious --  and something being bad because some entity, be it a gang or a federal regulatory board,  has declared it bad.   Similarly, there is a difference between the natural rights guarding life, liberty, and property, and the statutory  ‘rights' created by governments, which vary widely from place to place and often involve infringing upon the natural rights of others. Having established the difference between violations of the natural vs statutory law, Boyack then reviews a heroes panel of people, many of them young, who have stood for what was ‘right’ against the government’s actions.  They stood in the US, in Germany, in Egypt, in Pakistan – across the world, people recognize that just because the  ‘government’ says something is right doesn’t make it so. Even those with the best of intentions can go dead wrong when they violate the rights of others.

There’s a lot of information compressed in this little book and it’s full of real-world examples that will add a little fire to the blood. I'd never heard of Helmuth Hübener, the youngest boy (17) to ever be sentenced to  death by the 'people's court' in Nazi-controlled Berlin. The moment when a person realizes that truth and right exist independent of authority -- that police, or teachers, or politicians can be absolutely wrong -- is the moment that a person begins their own journey as an independent thinker and human being.  Although I'm in the choir a book like this is preaching to,  I also found its review of law helpful.

Connor Boyack is head of the Libertas Institute, which in Utah exists to fight the lemonade police and others. In addition to organizing legislative challenges to casual tyranny, Boyack also writes children's books about the principles of economics, politics, and liberty. My favorite title is The Tuttle Twins and the Road to Surfdom.  His illustrator is Elijah Stanfield.

From The Tuttle Twins and the Miraculous Pencil, based on Leonard Reed's "I, Pencil".

"Must the citizen ever for a moment, or in the least degree, resign his conscience to the legislator? Why has every man a conscience, then? I think that we should be men first, and subjects afterward. It is not desirable to cultivate a respect for the law, so much as for the right". - Henry David Thoreau, "On Resistance to Civil Government"

Energy Myths and Realities

Energy Myths and Realities: Bringing Science to the Energy Debate
© 2010 Vaclav Smil
232 pages

Nothing lasts forever, including coal and oil. Regardless of their environmental impact (as noxious fumes or released greenhouse gases), ultimately humanity will have to transition away from fossil fuels for want of supplies. Vaclav Smil warns in Energy Myths and Realities, however, that a shift to renewable energy is a long-term project, not something that can be done in a mere decade. In this brief on the intersection between science and public policy, Smil analyzes the prospects of various energy alternatives, and takes apart viral hopes and hysteria.

Immediately after the Fukushima disaster, Germany announced that it would be abandoning nuclear power and replacing it in toto with renewable energy. The fact that certain economic realities have instead forced the planning of new coal power plants is not surprising; historically, every transformation of the energy sector has taken decades, and at the early stages there’s no way of knowing which application of a technology will prove the best. Smil is therefore not optimistic about the prospects for an all-electric automobile fleet; it would require supporting infrastructure (networks of charging stations, for instance), and such an increase in energy that only doubling down on coal and oil could meet. Because wind and solar are still struggling to make inroads into the energy market, they can hardly be relied on to supply a greatly expanded electric fleet. An expansion of coal and oil to power these new cars would thus only transfer the pollution. The right approach to the cars themselves is still being tinkered with, from fuel cells to hybrids. A more recent approach, used by the Chevrolet Volt, is to use gasoline as a generator inside the car, recharging the battery.

Smil is more dubious about biofuels, which he argues are both inefficient and disruptive to food markets. He is ambivalent about wind and solar, either, at least at the national-grid scale proposed for them. In certain locales and markets, they can make sense and pull their weight, but the chances of their supplanting coal and oil in terms of reliability and affordability are remote in the extreme. Smil is more hopeful about hydroelectric (when geographically possible) and nuclear energy, though the latter has a serious public relations problem. Even so, there’s a chance for revival: even in Japan reactors are coming back online, with more scheduled for the future. In addition to analyzing the prospects for various alternatives, Smil also addresses popular misconceptions relating to energy, from peak oil to nuclear energy too cheap to meter.

Ultimately, the author says, the world will move away from fossil fuels, particularly oil; economics and technology may expand our current capacity, but it is a finite resource. He does not expect any drama, however, -- neither a sudden peak oil global collapse, or a sudden leap forward into the bright and happy carbon-clean future.

Related:
Book review by Bill Gates

Infrastructure: A Field Guide

Infrastructure: A Field Guide to the Industrial Landscape
© 1999, 2014 Brian Hayes
544 pages

Here at last is a book for those of us who constantly gaze out the car window at the fixtures on utility poles, or drums mounted in the sky above the telephone building, and wonder: what are those and what do they do?  Chris Hayes offers in his introduction that there are many books for understanding the various kinds of trees and birds we see around us; his hope is to help readers understand the built environment which can be beautiful in own right. Hayes'  field guide is not a dry catalog of pipes and antennae, organized alphabetically. Instead, he offers a narrative laced with humor that explores the built world, system by system -- beginning with mining raw resources and ending with waste disposal.  In between are covered farming, waterworks, power production, the power grid, telecommunications, roads, bridges, railroads,  aviation, and shipping.  Hayes' writing combines history and description,  allowing the reader to understand not only how things work,  but how they got that way. Photographs abound, most of which were taken by the author himself and include unusual shots.

The fact that this book has gone through three editions indicates it has been a success with readers, and I'm not surprised.  We live in the midst of and are sustained by systems built with human hands, but which few understand. There's enormous appeal in opening the hood on modernity  and gaining even a little knowledge as to how it all works, especially when systems link together. Although this is a guide to the 'industrial landscape',  Hayes' writing brings a strong humanistic touch. The book is about the world humans have created for ourselves, for our needs;  reading the built landscape  is an act not just of technical analysis, but of human interest.   Admittedly,  there are topics in the book harder to appreciate; mining, for instance, usually happens far from where we live.  The majority of this book, however, is the stuff of everyday: traffic lights, radio towers,  food, and highways.  Although I've  done a good bit of reading on infrastructure, Hayes' book was full of interesting facts and stories. For instance,  in the early 1980s a network of eight radio towers were set up to aide in global navigation: one of the stations was maintained by the US Coast Guard in the middle of Nevada. The system only lasted ten years before being supplanted  totally by GPS.

I referred to Kate Asher's The Works as a dream of a book, and I can only repeat the statement here:  it's a gorgeous and helpful piece of work.

Hey, look, it's the Very Large Array!

Related:
The Works: Anatomy of a City, Kate Ascher
On the Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems That Make Our World Work, Scott Huler
Tubes: A Journey to the Center of the Internet, Andrew Blum
The Grid: A Journey to the Heart of Our Electrified World, Phillip Schewe
Divided Highways: Building the Interstates, Transforming American Life, Tom Lewis

Civics Literacy Test

Within the last few weeks I stumbled across a pdf  labelled "1960s Alabama Literacy Test".  The host is a state university that has put it in a 'jimcrow' folder, so I assume it is presented as an example of the ways people were excluded from the vote when they attempted to register.  I post it here as a curiosity, as  I suspect even those like myself who are well-versed in history and civics will find it challenging.  For the answers, click here for another version of the test hosted by PBS.

1. Which of the following is a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights?

• Public Education
• Employment
• Trial by Jury
• Voting

2. The federal census of population is taken every five years.
_____True _____False

3. If a person is indicted for a crime, name two rights which he has.


4. A U.S. senator elected at the general election in November takes office the following year on what date?


5. A President elected at the general election in November takes office the following year on what date?


6. Which definition applies to the word “amendment?”

• Proposed change, as in a Constitution
• Make of peace between nationals at war
• A part of the government

7. A person appointed to the U.S. Supreme Court is appointed for a term of:

8. When the Constitution was approved by the original colonies, how many states had to ratify it in order for it to be in effect?

9. Does enumeration affect the income tax levied on citizens in various states?

10. Person opposed to swearing in an oath may say, instead:
(solemnly)

11. To serve as President of the United States, a person must have attained:

• 25 years of age
• 35 years of age
• 40 years of age
• 45 years of age

12. What words are required by law to be on all coins and paper currency of the U.S.?

13. The Supreme Court is the chief lawmaking body of the state.
_____True _____False

14. If a law passed by a state is contrary to provisions of the U.S. Constitution, which law prevails?

15. If a vacancy occurs in the U.S. Senate, the state must hold an election, but meanwhile the
place may be filled by a temporary appointment made by:

16. A U.S. senator is elected for a term of _____ years.

17. Appropriation of money for the armed services can be only for a period limited to _____ years.

18. The chief executive and the administrative offices make up the ___________________
branch of government.

19. Who passes laws dealing with piracy?_________________________________________
________________________________________________________________________

20. The number of representatives which a state is entitled to have in the House of Representatives is based on:

21. The Constitution protects an individual against punishments which are _______________
and _______________________.

22. When a jury has heard and rendered a verdict in a case, and the judgment on the verdict has become final, the defendant cannot again be brought to trial for the same cause.
_____True _____False

23. Name two levels of government which can levy taxes:

24. Communism was the type of government in:

• U.S.
• Russia
• England

25. Cases tried before a court of law are two types, civil and _________________________.

26. By a majority vote of the members of Congress, the Congress can change provisions of the Constitution of the U.S.
_____True _____False

27. For security, each state has a right to form a:

28. The electoral vote for President is counted in the presence of two bodies. Name them:

29. If no candidate for President receives a majority of the electoral vote, who decides who will become President?

30. Of the original 13 states, the one with the largest representation in the first Congress was:

31. Of which branch of government is the Speaker of the House a part?

• Executive
• Legislative
• Judicial

32. Capital punishment is the giving of a death sentence.
_____True _____False

33. In case the President is unable to perform the duties of his office, who assumes them?

34. “Involuntary servitude” is permitted in the U.S. upon conviction of a crime.
_____True _____False

35. If a state is a party to a case, the Constitution provides that original jurisdiction shall be in

36. Congress passes laws regulating cases which are included in those over which the U.S. Supreme Court has ____________________________________________ jurisdiction.

37. Which of the following is a right guaranteed by the Bill of Rights of the U.S. Constitution.

• Public Housing
• Education
• Voting
• Trial by Jury

38. The Legislatures of the states decide how presidential electors may be chosen.
_____True _____False

39. If it were proposed to join Alabama and Mississippi to form one state, what groups would have to vote approval in order for this to be done?

40. The Vice President presides over:

41. The Constitution limits the size of the District of Columbia to:

42. The only laws which can be passed to apply to an area in a federal arsenal are those passed by ___________________________________________ provided consent for the purchase of the land is given by the _________________________________________.

43. In which document or writing is the “Bill of Rights” found?

44. Of which branch of government is a Supreme Court justice a part?

• Executive
• Legislative
• Judicial

45. If no person receives a majority of the electoral votes, the Vice President is chosen by the Senate.
_____True _____False

46. Name two things which the states are forbidden to do by the U.S. Constitution.


47. If election of the President becomes the duty of the U.S. House of Representatives and it fails to act, who becomes President and when?


48. How many votes must a person receive in order to become President if the election is decided by the U.S. House of Representatives?

49. How many states were required to approve the original Constitution in order for it to be in effect?

50. Check the offenses which, if you are convicted of them, disqualify you for voting:

• Murder
• Issuing worthless checks
• Petty larceny
• Manufacturing whiskey

51. The Congress decides in what manner states elect presidential electors.
_____True _____False

52. Name two of the purposes of the U.S. Constitution.

53. Congress is composed of:

54. All legislative powers granted in the U.S. Constitution may legally be used only by

55. The population census is required to be made very _____ years.
56. Impeachments of U.S. officials are tried by:

57. If an effort to impeach the President of the U.S. is made, who presides at the trial?


58. On the impeachment of the chief justice of the Supreme Court of the U.S., who tries the
case?

59. Money is coined by order of:

• U.S. Congress
• The President’s Cabinet
• State Legislatures

60. Persons elected to case a state’s vote for U.S. President and Vice President are called presidential __________________:

61. Name one power which is exclusively legislative and is mentioned in one of the parts of
the U.S. Constitution above:

62. If a person flees from justice into another state, who has authority to ask for his return?

63. Whose duty is it to keep Congress informed of the state of the union?

64. If the two houses of Congress cannot agree on adjournment, who sets the time?


65. When presidential electors meet to case ballots for President, must all electors in a state vote for the same person for President or can they vote for different persons if they so choose?

66. After the presidential electors have voted, to whom do they send the count of their votes?

67. The power to declare war is vested in:

68. Any power and rights not given to the U.S. or prohibited to the states by the U.S. Constitution are specified as belonging to whom?

Garbology

Garbology :Our Dirty Love Affair with Trash
© 2012 Edward Humes
288 pages

Readers who are passionate about garbage -- a description which includes sanitation workers, victims of SimCity, and ecologists, I assume -- will find no shortage of books on the subject.  Susan Strasser has a history of waste, for instance, and Gone Tomorrow and Garbage Land both follow  refuse through the waste stream.  Garbology has a little history, a little waste-stream-kayaking, and a little of other  trashy topics:  landfill archaeology and oceanic stewardship, for instance.    You may have heard of the Great Pacific Garbage Patch, but it is less an island of debris and more a vast expanse of water filled with tiny bits of plastic, a chowder of sorts which is an enormous challenge both to clean and to understand the impact of. How does that much plastic particulate affect the human food chain?   Much of the trash comes from the plastic that covers every aspect of our everyday lives: the plastic wrapping around anything we buy from the grocery store, the plastic inside boxes of goods, etc. Accordingly the rise of plastic merits its own chapter, as does the story of one woman who was driven by economy to reduce as much waste  as she could.  Eventual author of The Zero Waste Home, Bea Johnson's interview offers many ideas for replacing expensive consumer products with homemade alternatives, like three-ingredient cleaning supplies that can handle pretty much anything.     There are other stirring tales of ordinary citizens being inspired to take action, like one man who launched a campaign to end ubiquitous one-time use of plastic bags.   For the reader with a vague interest in waste and environmental stewardship, Garbology affords a brief look at many different aspects of the question, though more detailed works are out there. They include the ones I mentioned in the beginning, as well as works like Plastic: A Toxic Love Story.    Although there's not an enormous amount of information on any one particular topic, I liked the scientific aspects and the zero waste author's approach. Humes' fundamental conviction -- that consuming natural resources to produce goods and then immediately shoving them underground, consuming more resources to lock them away,  is staggeringly wasteful and sloppy -- bears repeating.


Related:
Garbage Land:  on the Secret Trail of Trash, Elizabeth Royte
Waste and Want: A Social History of Garbage, Susan Strasser
Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of NYC, Robin Nagle
Gone Tomorrow: The Hidden Life of Garbage, Helen Rogers
Plastic: A Toxic Love Story, Susan Freinkel

You know what's strange? All of these books about garbage are by women. It doesn't strike me as topic that would necessarily have a strong sex bias, but at least now Humes has broken the monopoly.

The Twilight of the Presidency

The Twlight of the Presidency: An Examination of Power and Isolation in the White House
© 1970, 1987
200 pages

In Twilight of the Presidency, George Reedy uses his personal experience as a Johnson aide, along with the study of other administrations of the 20th century, to comment on the apparent decline of the US Presidency as an effective force for serving the public good.   Writing in an age that had seen the ill repute of the Johnson and Nixon administrations, followed by the benign but inept administrations of Ford and Carter,  Reedy was pessimistic about the future of the presidency.  In our own age the imperial presidency has revived and waxed even stronger,  to the degree that  American families may hear or mention the president by name more than their own  relations!    Yet for all the time that has passed, Twilight of the Presidency's insight into how the presidency as an office works remains incredible.

Reedy refers to the office as an elective monarchy, and maintains it had that potential from the beginning.  Yet except for Abraham Lincoln, no president of the 19th century really used the office to its full  authority.   The essential advantage of the presidency, Reedy writes, is the will to action: the Supreme Court can only decide on such issues arrive at its doorstep, and the Congress is an enormous bureuacracy whose wheels are clogged with corruptive grime.  The president can act on his own accord, can be  -- The Decider.    He can seize the initiative and put everyone else on the defense while Congress is still attempting to get a bill from a subcommittee to the floor.     Another advantage in the president's court is the aura of his office; the American president is simultaneously the head of government and the head of state.  He enjoys much of the reverence given to a figure like Queen Elizabeth the II,  escaping direct personal abuse as someone like Tony Blair or Nick Cameron might have to endure during "Question Period".

In one chapter, Reedy dwells on more of the monarchical trappings of the office of POTUS: the fact that the chief executive is surrounded by hundreds of people every day, all of whom are fixated on him. They may be White House staff serving his needs so he can focus on the issues of the day,  or enthralled aides waiting for their chance to bask in the royal farr and be noticed.  This bureaucratic cloud has the effect of isolating the president from society at large;  their own opinions being the only ones the president hears. They're hardly representative: Reedy writes that Johnson couldn't understand the youth rebellion against him, because all of the young men in his employ were  perfectly at ease with the administration's current Vietnam policy.    More substantially, Reedy comments that because the host around the president is there to serve and administer his wishes,  he rarely receives pushback from policy suggestions.  (Reedy alleges that the only president of the 20th century who was nearly completely successful at staying connected to the people, instead of being hemmed-in by his advisors, was FDR. )  Reedy comments mournfully that there were numerous times that  the United States might have resisted further entanglement in Indo-China, but when Johnson passively expected alternatives, all he received were alternating views on what his aides thought he wanted to do -- stay the course.     Staying the course is almost always the easiest thing to do,  even when considered objectively it's unwise. Presidents are not objective,  however; they are the subject of national attention, and of history books. They are the face and will of the nation.   If a private citizen makes a mistake that costs him dearly, he is free to cut his losses and walk away with a slightly reddened face and a lighter wallet. But if a President decides engagement in Vietnam or Iraq was a mistake, he has not only wagered money but lives and honor.   To write off the lives of thousands of young men and women is not a task easy to do in a democracy.

The office's isolation and policy inertia of part of the reason why perfectly intelligent men can make  astonishing missteps in office, whether it's invading Cuba on bad intelligence, or invading Iraq on....can the WMD threat even be dignified as 'intelligence'?. Another aspect, though, is the growth of the office itself: we've come a long way from Washington and his three secretaries.    Because so much authority has been delegated to executive agencies, it is perfectly possible for people of one department to make pivotal decisions under the aegeis of presidential authority without the executive actually knowing about it.  The bureacracy is now so large that it has institutionalized itself;  it moves under its own inertia, and  a particular department's  long-running policies and officers can outlive presidents.  This is why Reedy, despite being a Democrat, thinks it is perfectly possible that Iran-Contra could have been created and implemented without Reagan actually knowing in full what was happening.

Twilight is incredibly insightful, and admirable. Although he wrote out of concern for an office  whose efficiency was fast diminishing,  his exposure of why remains true today.  At least in part, that is; I assume the presidency has become even more isolated from the American people because of security concerns.  The 2016 election results, which took D.C. utterly by surprise, may indicate how out of touch the imperial center is with the people beyond the coasts.  I wonder if such a book could be written today: Reedy had the advantage of witnessing or knowing people who remembered the presidency when it was still boring, before  Hoover and Roosevelt made the office a source of daily fixation. Could an author who has grown up with the imperial presidency analyze it in this fashion? I doubt it.

Related:

• The Cult of the Presidency, Gene Healy, which quoted on this and recommended it to me. 
• The Once and Future King, F.H. Buckley. Buckley contends that effective monarchy has re-established itself in the form of the American presidency and the prime ministers of the UK and Canada,  echoing some of Reedy's chapter on the making of the American monarchy. This is one I really must re-read..

You Have the Right to Remain Innocent

You Have the Right to Remain Innocent
© 2016 James Duane
152 pages

"One of the Fifth amendment's basic functions is to protect innocent men who otherwise might be ensared by ambigous circumstances." (Ohio v. Reiner)

"People are inherently honest, and that's their biggest downfall." - Officer George Bruch

It is perfectly possible for good and innocent people to lose decades of their lives languishing in prison because a stray word ensnared them in the criminal justice machine.  Like clothes and hair in a factory setting, both of which  must be securely fastened to avoid a nasty accident, words must be guarded in the presence of a police officer or a federal agent -- especially the latter.  In You Have the Right to Remain Innocent, legal professor and defense attorney  James Duane expands a captivating lecture he gave some years ago into a case for keeping mum.

Long gone are the days when an individual's conscience was a good rule-of-thumb guide to ward one away from criminal behavior.  Assaulting people,  invading their homes destroying or stealing goods -- all these are moral norms that everyone  is aware of and can avoid transgressing.  Today, though, writes Duane, the US criminal code expands with such rapidity that not even defense attorneys who are paid to stay conversant with it can keep pace -- in part because not all criminal infractions are contained within the criminal code. Many are the spawn of regulatory agencies, who instead of merely fining citizens for  running afoul of a policy they had no idea even existed,  tar them with the same brush as a rapist or bank robber: criminal.     (Hence the title of a book edited in 2004 by Gene Healy: Go Directly to Jail: the Criminalization of Everything)

Innocent people can be hooked and booked for legitimate offenses they had no association with, only because they were too eager to share information with investigating officials who use every tidbit they can to try and fill in the blanks of a crime.   Duane cites many examples: , but  in one instance a man who was brought in denied being on a given street at a specified time. Of course, he added, he had a girlfriend on that street previously, but he wasn't OVER there.  That little detail, unsolicited and useless for him to share with the police, was used as part of case to damn him.  If a person attempting to remember facts makes a mistake,  innocent hiccoughs of memory will be spun as willful deceit.  Police interviewers may also unknowingly manipulate innocent people into confessing by strongly implying that they're doomed anyway, but a confession will ease the consequences. Detectives and judges can be perfectly conscientious -- utterly moral, veritable knights in shining Armani suits. -- and still make mistakes.  Even if a case is appealed, someone who is drawn into the system will lose years of their lives and considerable money.

Unfortunately, minimizing one's profile isn't as simple as pleading the Fifth, because the Gang of Nine, in its infinite wisdom, has decreed that overtly invoking the Fifth Amendment can be used as evidence of guilt.  (Another marvelous bit of judicial wisdom: recently a court decreed that cops breaking and entering to execute a warrant can shoot the house dog if it 'barks or moves'.)  In response, Duane advises readers rely on other parts of the Bill of Rights: by all means, don't volunteer information and decline to answer questions beyond one's name -- but employing the Sixth amendment, the right to an attorney, is a more reliable shield against a black-robed inquisition.

This briefing in avoiding justice jihads is short, to the point, amply referenced, and.well organized   I watched his lecture in 2010 and have since viewed it several times, along with its companion talk by a seasoned detective, who shares the various ways well-meaning cops can elicit confessions from even the innocent. (One of his favorite tricks: bringing in a recorder into an interview room, and then visibly 'turning it off' to coax the suspect into being more forthcoming -- not knowing that there is no off the record, because the room has other recording equipment!)

A must-read for any American -- there's more to the Bill of Rights than the first two!

Related:

• Don't Talk to the Police, James Duane &Office George Bruch. Warning: Duane talks fast.  There's an updated version of the speech also available, "You Have the Right to Remain Innocent".
• Go Directly to Jail -- the Criminalization of Everything, ed. Gene Healy. I read this earlier in the year and will revisit it.
• Busted: the Citizen's Guide to Surviving Police Encounters.  Civil liberties program with dramatized scenes.  Revised and released as 10 Rules for Dealing with the Police. 

The Works

The Works: Anatomy of a City
© 2005  Kate Ascher
240 pages

Cities are, for my money, mankind's most astonishing invention. Their complexity is stupefying -- system within system, handling tons of material at any given time, whether the subject is cars across a bridge or the contents of a thousand home's flushing toilets. And the stakes are always high, with the health and happiness of millions on the line -- or at least, thousands. The Works is a dream of a book, a visual-rich guide to the many systems that keep cities thriving.  Author Kate Ascher throws light not on just the expected -- roads and utilities, say -- but also minor things like the postal service.  Using New York City as case study, Ascher explores systems for transportation, energy, communication, and sanitation in turn.

The Works stunned me again and again with its visuals. Readers are treated to an astonishing array of informative little diagrams: cutaways that show what's inside the Holland tunnel, for instance, or the underbelly of a street-sweeper, or the waterworks inside your average skyscraper. The pictures also demonstrate systems -- the chain of equipment required to convey power from a generating station into the average home, the links involved in a cell phone conversation,  Some of the visuals are clever: for instance, to illustrate the variety of goods a train might carry,  a cartoon representation of a real train runs along the bottom of every page in the chapter, each car marked with its contents. The same tactic is used to illustrate the electromagnetic spectrum in the chapter on communication.  The bounty of visual information here is ludicrous -- showcasing fleets of sanitation vehicles and subway cars,  mapping out train yards and container ship docks, -- it's staggering, really.  Statistics are presented visually, too, and of course there are tons of maps -- including one that shows all the traffic cameras in the city. There are a few sample pages on Streetsblog, all from the chapter on streets.

That's not to say The Works is merely a picture book, because there's no small amount of text here explaining the importance of all these systems, reviewing their evolution within New York City, and sharing the particulars of their operation.  Reading this book is kind of like reading Gone Tomorrow, Picking Up, The Grid,  Flushed! On the Grid, etc, all at once, all rolled into one, and with gobs and gobs and gobs of illustration.   It does lack a chapter on  the infrastructure of the internet, which isn't an oversight that would be made if it were published today.

• Related:
• On The Grid: A Plot of Land, an Average Neighborhood, and the Systems that Make Our World Work, Scott Huler.  Kind of like this but on a smaller scale with more detail and sans pictures.
• Straphanger,  Tom Standage
• Picking Up: On the Streets and Behind the Trucks with the Sanitation Workers of NYC, Robin Nagle

The Road Taken

The Road Taken: The History and Future of America's Infrastructure
336 pages
© 2016 Henry Petroski

What, exactly, is The Road Taken?   Its title declares it a history, which is mostly true. It does have a bounty of historic sketches on the creation of paved roads and interstates in the United States, along with material on the evolution of traffic lights, curbs, and sidewalks. But there are loving tributes to bridges in New York and San Francisco here, with much chatter about cantilever versus suspension. There's even a chapter or two with a focus on finance, which is quite brave indeed -- there's a reason Jim Kunstler titled his own chapter on property taxes in Home from Nowhere, "A Mercifully Brief Chapter On A Frightening, Tedious, But Important Subject". The ending chapter looks to the future of infrastructure, but with the exception of cement mixtures that heal themselves (cracks open and expose bacteria to water, bacteria produce limestone), that's really more about the future of cars than roads.   It's all interesting, but the further along the reader gets the more miscellaneous  it all seems. The author obviously believes that interstates and bridges are a good thing and produce jobs, but the book itself isn't an argument.  He doesn't try to make any connections between infrastructure and economic growth; the jobs mentioned are always in building interstates.

I'd say this is for people who want to read a chapter about the history of interstates instead of a whole book. It's right between the chapter on asphalt and the chapter on stop signs.

Related:
Fighting Traffic, Peter Norton;  Divided Highways, Tom Lewis

Divided Highways

Divided Highways: Building the Interstate Highways, Transforming American Life
©  Tom Lewis 2007, 2013
416 pages

No engineering project in the United States is more impressive than the interstate system; dense with the connections of a street grid, it serves not blocks but an entire continent.  In Divided Highways,  Tom Lewis tells the story of that system's creation, inside a broader history of how motoring in general transformed American life.  Lewis principally concerns himself with the political rise of the highways, and the problems that followed once the ideal became a reality and people realized that reality comes with smells, noises, shadows, and bills.  Lewis connects the drama of the highways with ever-changing American society as a whole. though, integrating their story in which whatever else was happening (the oil crises of the 1970s, for instance) and commenting on the morphing nature of urbanism as downtowns bled out into the broad puddles of edge cities.  Though Lewis is enamored of the interstate, motoring, and the American dedication to constant motion, he doesn't shy away from giving critics a voice.

The story of the highways begins with the automobile, of course, since before then road building wasn't a priority: given the distances involved. water transportation dominated until the train made overland transit more competitive. The rising popularity of automobiles and bicycles -- an individualistic alternative to crowded trolleys and trains controlled by some of the more powerful corporations of the day-- led to a demand for places to  use them, and no road is worth much if it doesn't connect you to other  roads going other places. Enter Thomas Harris MacDonald,  an intensely thorough, dedicated,  and prudent fellow who would dominate the Bureau of Public Roads from the Wilson administration to that of Eisenhower's. MacDonald's prudence was such that he only built roads when they were deemed immediately necessary -- much different from today's build-it-and-they-will-come-and-pay-taxes attitude.  Although not aggressive,  his thoroughness did produce sketches of what a national highway system might look like, and how it might be ordered. Such a system was well underway when he died in retirement, his own fledging highways being supplanted by the limited access freeways that now create a massive asphalt circulatory system for the nation.

Building interstates involved a bit of juggling of responsibility between the state governments and D.C, and this became particularly thorny in regards to cities. The interstate system didn't just connect cities; from the beginning, many cut through cities themselves, becoming a kind of rapid transit system. When President Eisenhower became entangled in freeway construction enroute to Camp David, he made a few terse inquiries as to who was responsible for plowing this great road into the city, whereupon some Nathan-like figure informed him...Mr. President, thou art the man.  (Apparently, the interstate bill he signed was one of the 'we have to pass it to see what's in it' variety....) Running interstates through cities proved the source of most of the system's political problems, as the city spans became quickly congested, occupied large swathes of formerly tax-paying real estate, and functioned as a massive wall running through the cheapest real estate that could be found...that of the poor, who became poorer still when industry began following the interstate out of the city.  In New Orleans, the destruction of the French Quarter's charm by an interstate was narrowly avoided by citizen protests, and in our own time other cities (San Francisco, for instance) have gone to the mattresses to get rid of view-obstructing spurs.

As mentioned, Lewis also comments on the ongoing transformation of American society, the rise of franchise chain stores and the like. This was done with far more detail in Asphalt Nation, but presumably he wanted to write on something more than the exciting world of transportation finance. The connections made to broader US history -- the anti-interstate reaction concurring with the civil rights movement and youth rebellion --  not only make the history more 'personable', but provide welcome  context.  The subtitle of 'transforming American society' isn't a big component of the book, though, and he doesn't mention  influences of the freeway on other transportation infrastructure in general, like the worrisome tendency of larger roads to mimic interstates even though it's dangerous to encourage higher speeds in areas with pedestrians, buildings, and cross traffic.

Useful as a history of how the interstates happened, Divided Highways  deserves praise for hailing the interstate system  while simultaneously delivering the stories of people disrupted by it and rebelling against it.

"We could do anything, then, and do it to excess; our Interstates boldly proclaimed the triumph of engineering. Like our cars, whose fins could not be too high, they made a statement with adolescent vigor. We thought little of the Interstate's ability to rend the landscape, to divide communities, and to alienate citizens. The roads were a concrete snapshot of ourselves when we believed nothing was beyond our reach."

Related:

• Asphalt Nation, Jane Holtz Keay
• Getting There: the Epic Battle Between Road and Rails, Stephen Goddard
• The Geography of Nowhere, James Kunstler

Glass Houses

Glass Houses: Privacy, Secrecy, and Cyber Insecurity in a Transparent World
© 2011, 2013 Joel Brenner
320 pages

Glass Houses, originally titled  America the Vulnerable, outlines some of the major ways that private citizens, corporations, and the government itself are exposed to attack through digital measures, and closes with measures to strengthen defenses. While not as sweeping as Future Crimes,  Brenner offers a different kind of insider perspective -- the NSA's.  Brenner was formally the head of counterintelligence, and thus his work primarily concerns itself with national security.  He argues that an ordinary citizen's desire for privacy, and the government's own need for secrecy, are essentially the same. (And what about a citizen's desire for privacy from the NSA?)

*chirp*

Brenner isn't nearly as fear-inducing as writers like Marc Goodman,  but his piece stands out because of his role within the government. While arguing for better data hygiene, he also criticizes the still-disjointed approach of D.C. to cybersecurity.  There are several 'cyber' organizations within the aegis of the government, but all of them have completely different priorities, and none of them truly cover civilian infrastructure that the government relies on. One of the early points Brenner makes is that not only is everyone utterly exposed  to digital threats --  hacking tools are cheap,   marketable, and encouraged by governments  in China and Russia --  but the boundaries between public and private are increasingly gone. Corporations are now under attack by national governments, and the United States relies more and more on private services  for essential functions.   Brenner likens the current division of cyberdefense --  one on military security, one on collecting information about foreign states and securing the information of the government --  to that which prevailed in the armed services before World War 2.  Then, the Army and Navy departments were separate, and rivals:  they are both contained within the Department of Defense and officers commonly serve tours in connection to other branches.

While Brenner doesn't argue for militarization of non-military departments, he does maintain that closer cooperation is vital. The president's cybersecurity 'czar' does nothing but ineffectually urge everyone to work together, a la Gladhands in West Side Story.  Brenner's specific policy recommendations don't involve creating a new Cyber Homeland Security department, though; instead, his measures are more subtle. He suggests that antitrust laws that discourage ISPs and cybersecurity firms from working  more closely together  be relaxed, and that the federal government use its buying power to insist on more security from the equipment and software it uses, dictating to the market a la Wal-Mart. Such a demand will filter through to the consumer market shortly enough.  He also echoes the advice of other books:  disconnecting the control networks of energy companies from the public Internet (Richard Clarke, Cyber War), and companies practicing deliberate and methodical digitial hygiene (various, incl. Swiped).  Companies whose networks contain vital information, for instance, should forbid the use of outside flashdrives, and issue instead encrypted drives which are collected and purged periodically.

Unless the current Dear Leader candidates have savvier advisors than themselves, the outlook of the United States' cybersecurity remains fairly grim.  Glass Houses is effective citizen awareness -- not technical, not long, and with quasi-fictional 'scenarios' to illustrate how a cyberattack might look, and how the mere threat of it might alter foreign policy -- that stands out especially  for the look into the American intelligence community.  It's unusual to read a book from the NSA's perspective,given their secrecy and recurring roles as uber-villain in  other books about data security, but aside from the unapologetically hostile attitude toward Julian Assange, there's nothing too partisan.  I appreciated Brenner's prudent recommendations, which are more about incentives and pressure and less about outright coercion.

Related:

• Future Crimes: Everything is Connected, Everyone is Vulnerable, and What We Can Do About It, Marc Goodman.
• Cyber War, Richard Clarke. Another book written about national security, this one from a general's perspective.
• Lights Out, Ted Koppel. A bit of investigative journalism about the potential effects of cyber war on the American electric grid.

Lights Out

Lights Out: A Cyberattack, a Nation Unprepared
© 2015 Ted Koppell
288 pages

In Lights Out,  investigatory journalist Ted Koppel comments on the vulnerability of the United States' power grid to a cyber attack,  and reviews the way government agencies, private citizens, and other organizations are attempting to prepare for a grid-down scenario.

The story begins with the integration of the internet and the electrical grid, which allows for an efficient market but at the cost of vulnerability of outside attack. The threat doesn't come from nation-states like China and Russia, however;  although they almost certainly have hooks deep inside energy's cyber infrastructure, they have too much to lose from reprisals. Entities like North Korea and Isis have no such qualms.  The most dire attack would be one similar to that which the United States and Israel employed in Iran: a viral program introduces commands into their centrifuges which slowly undermined their functionality.  If the large power transformers which are the backbone of the electrical network are destroyed or seriously damaged,  widespread and prolonged outages would follow. Not only are these massive machines custom-built for each location, they require special rail cars for transport; replacing one would take anywhere from six months to two years.

After establishing the problem, Koppel moves to attempts a solution. Although various government agencies, including the White House, have expressed concern over the vulnerability, plans at redressing the situation are slow in coming. Washington's stance toward cyber attacks against civilian infrastructure seems motivated by a conviction that the United States can and will strike first, as though cyber shocks can be predicted.   There is a growing awareness of the problem, but response has been marginal at best. Not only  is the American government not ready to defend against a pointed cyber attack on its electrical grid, it is not ready to deal with the chaos that would ensue from widespread power outages. Without electricity,  the constant production and shuttling of goods and services would shut down completely; major cities would exhaust commercial supplies in less than days, and after that -- what social hell would follow?   FEMA's plans seem to involve evacuating major cities like New York, but to what end?  Keeping supplies for that many people is problematic, considering that if there's no emergency, the supplies simply go to waste. The agency is far more prepared for regional disasters than it was after 2005's Katrina, but that's a fairly low bar.

 In the last third of the book, Koppel examines communities like the Mormons and the prepping community which steel themselves for emergencies. The Mormons are motivated by a series of nasty altercations -- small-scale wars, even -- between themselves and state militias in the 19th century, but their entire church structure seems engineered for resilience.  Likewise impressive are rural communities in Wyoming, who acknowledge that in the event of a grid-down scenario, they would be left to their own devices while D.C. prioritizes places like New York City. People in sparsely-settled states like Wyoming are more kin to their pioneer forebears  than they are the naked urbanite, who is at the mercy of complex systems working as planned.

Lights Out is a most interesting book, with at least three subject areas: energy, cyberwar, and emergency preparation.  Given Koppel's name recognition, I could see this book as one introducing a lot of citizens to the general idea of cyber attacks, or even the importance of electric infrastructure -- subjects that few people would be willing to pick up a book about.   It's not exactly complete --  Koppel doesn't mention, for instance, that there are three grids in North America, so damage wouldn't necessarily be continent-wide. (The three grids are the eastern seaboard, the western seaboard, and Texas. The publisher's cover actually hints at the segmentation, though) It succeeds at isolating the key points about abstract systems and distilling them into a warning, however.


Related:
Cyber War, Richard Clarke. Clarke is quoted extensively.

Cyber War

Cyber War: The Next Threat to Our National Security and What to Do About It
© 2010 Richard Clarke, Robert Knake
320 pages

Soon, the ultimate tool will become...the ultimate enemy! So said the 1982 trailer for Tron, a heavily dated computer film that comes to mind with every mention of "Cyber Warrior" here.  The word sounds like a teenager flailing around in a 1990s mall wearing a bulky VR helmet.  Whatever the awkwardness in adapting military terminology to the brave new digital world, however, the threat posed by war in cyberspace is real -- both because of multitude of potential attack vectors, and because the United States has been such a boundlessly optimistic first-adopter that no nation on Earth is as exposed to digital attack.  In Cyber War: The Next Threat to Our National Security,  long-time security official Richard Clarke  reviews how hacking can be used to utterly cripple the United States' elaborately interconnected electrical and telecommunications infrastructure and  briefs readers on how the military and government are attempting to get a handle on what to do next -- and, given his status as an adviser to four presidents, he has suggestions of his own.   Cyber War is filled with horror stories and dire predictions, but at root is a useful introduction to how increasingly fragile our digital world is becoming.

Although the United States has led the way in the adoption of the internet for military purposes -- the internet was created for military purposes --the enthusiastic embrace of net integration by civilian infrastructure has made the United States one of the most vulnerable targets for cyber attack.  Especially problematic is the fusion of the power grid and the internet;  while it allows for convenient remote management ,  the connectedness of the grid itself means it is possible to disable one  subsystem and force cascade failures on either the west or east coast.  The absence of power doesn’t mean a few hours of going without the television, either, because a carefully-planned attack could cause physical damage to the generators themselves….and they are monstrous machines that would have to be laboriously rebuilt. Another vulnerable target is the financial system; not only could a disruptive attack aimed at that quarter destabilize the economy, if the public lost trust in digital dollars, outright paralysis might ensue.

Cyber attacks aren’t theoretical, either. Although China receives the most attention as a digital threat, Clarke contends that the Russians are (circa 2010) ahead of the pack, and points to havoc wreaked in Estonia and other Warsaw escapees when they  courted Moscow’s wrath.   Because the United States offers so many soft targets, both military and civilian, cyber warfare has an asymmetrical nature:  America has a lot more to lose from cyberattacks and reprisals than either North Korea or China –-  the former,  because it has little in the way of functional systems to begin with, and the latter because they have a firebreak that can separate China’s internal internet from the global web.  In a democratic system like the United States, that’s not an option.

Clarke proposes a cyber triad:  secure the ‘trunks’, the main ISP lines through which everyone connects, using a filter to automatically scan for and deep-six malicious code; harden the power grid by distancing it from the main internet;  and shore up the vulnerabilities of the military and government networks.   The ISP security would be a private-public venture, with administration of the filter left to the ISPs themselves to head off the aspect of censorious abuse. Cyber War is only six years old,  but the future is arriving more quickly these days. There is very little said about the danger of data collection, for instance, and cybersecurity firms are far more skeptical about the conventional viral-definitions approach Clarke endorses here.   Cyber security is definitely a red-queen arms race..


The datedness aside,  for those who have never considered the subject his review of how the internet basically works, highlighting its weak spots,  will be most useful. There is the added attraction of watching successive governments become aware of and attempt to respond to the problem of  IT security; Clarke had an inside view, serving in several administrations crossing party lines.He also proposes diplomatic action, a cyber version of SALT. The core of Clarke’s argument – that our systems, particularly our electrical grid, are vulnerable – remains intact, if not the particular defense he proposes -- holds good, and the authors' largely-jargon free if doom-laced style makes it an easy if alarming read.  One thing that isn't dated is the danger: a recent study indicated that the US government is still far behind in the realm of cybersecurity when ranked against IT firms, and to make matters worse it is in the same tier as the energy and telecommunicatons companies.

Related:
Future Crimes, Marc Goodman
The Grid, Phillip Schewe
@ War, Shane

Saving Congress from Itself

Saving Congress from Itself: Emancipating the States and Empowering their People
© 2014 James F. Buckley
120 pages

According to the latest Gallup poll, only 11% of Americans approve of Congress’ job performance, but virtually every senator or representative who runs for reelection will receive it.  Americans want Congress to do more, even as the institution proves itself incapable of doing much of anything.  The problem lies not merely in entrenched partisanship, but in misplaced priorities.  James Buckley argues that Congress is overworked --   not with its own responsibilities but of those of governors, state legislatures, mayors, and city councils.

The core problem is the existence of “grants in aid” programs, which transfer money to the states as assistance, and which carry with them stipulations for their use.  This allows Congress to  directly influence the policies of the states by offering money, and then explaining it can only be given out if the States follow Congress’ wishes.  The creation  and administration of these grants has become a major devourer of Congressional time.   Because the number of programs granting aid has multiplied several times over since the 1960s, there are more committee reports to listen to than there are hours in the day. Buckley, who prior to serving as a federal judge was a member of the Senate, offers a sample  daily agenda as illustration. Of the fifteen items spanning 9:00 a.m. to 10:00 p.m, only three had a national-interest scope, being items like reports from the US Army Corps of Engineers and a briefing on Iran. The rest were grant aid reports and requests, and so numerous were they that nine of the fifteen scheduled events had schedule conflicts with one another.  Congressional members either skip meetings altogether, or dash from one to the other to put in an appearance, relying on aides to fill them in on the substance.  Where is the time to read legislation, let alone pore over and discuss thousand-page bills?   (A bill forcing Congress to read the bills it passes has yet to make it out of committee consideration.)

Congressmen use their time in this fashion because it pays, at least for them.   While a national body should not be spending its time arguing and administrating local affairs,  this is the sort of thing local citizens actually expect their Congressmen to do.  When Mr. Smith goes to Washington and returns to townhalls with his constituents, they complain about bus routes and schoolrooms – and he, if he is able to finagle some funds for the locals, has an easy in come election day.   That’s not chump change, because when they’re not missing meetings or voting for bills without reading them, congressmen are constantly working to get themselves reelected, spending hours on the phone to beg for money.

This is a situation that must be altered.  Not only has Congress become patently dysfunctional, ceding every Constitutional prerogative to the executive branch,  but the weight of ever-multiplying grants is fiscally unsustainable. The United States government doesn’t generate money; it either takes it from citizens, issues bonds that future generations will have to pay for, or prints more and weakens the value of the currency.   Not only has the national government ceased to be effective, but the stipulations attached to these grants often compromises the aid as the funds are leached away on both ends in administration and in hiring lawyers who can interpret the Talmudic policy requirements.  The number of agencies is such that many have redundant -- and sometimes even conflicting -- goals, with fuzzily-defined metrics for success.  Aid can be done better, and so can government.  A constant theme in Saving Congress from Itself is that of subsidiarity, that in matters of politics, responsibility should remain at the level most capable of dealing with it. A city should take care of its own infrastructure; outside grants only prop up poor planning, like low-density sprawl,  and the ease of spending other people’s money means the funds won’t be put to their most productive use. (There’s no ‘skin in the game’, to borrow Nassim Taleb’s way of putting it.) The national Congress, with an entire world of challenges in front of it, certainly should not be deliberating on local issues.

 Buckley ends the argument with several propositions that would serve to end this legislative torpor.    To curb the amount of time officials spend working on their reelection campaigns, he suggests we (1) restrict Congressionals to two terms, and (2) limit the president to one six-year term.  More drastically,  he proposes that federally-issued grants end altogether, being phased out. Initially, money would simply be issued with no stipulations, and after a pre-fixed number of years to allow state governments to adjust their budgets,  the grants would be no more.  Buckley cites the example of Rhode Island, which was given an opportunity: if it agreed to receiving less money, there would be no rules whatsoever attached to the use.  With no outside pressure, Rhode Island was allowed to tailor its own plan to its own particular need, with effective service increasing and costs declining.  If Congress does not admit or pass the necessary legislation, a convention called by the States could also propose and pass amendments.

Saving Congress is a short little book, and Buckley doesn’t waste a word.  I was aware of political corruption in regards to military contracts, but had  little idea for how Congress conducted its business.  Truth be told, I generally imagine Congress-folk to spend their time golfing, eating, and conspiring against the public.  Buckley's argument is valuable in form as in substance. He approaches this from a nonpartisan observation that Congress is simply not performing. He doesn't deny that people still need help, but the current approach isn't doing it -- and it''s costing local cities who keep looking to Congress, and distracting Congress from its actual constitutional responsibilities.  If nothing else,  Saving Congress illustrates why the American public continues to elect their senators despite loathing Congress altogether: it's only pork on the other guy's plate.: One senator's wasteful spending is another's putting 'tax dollars back to work for you'. How about we dispense with the middle man and put our dollars to work for ourselves?


Related:
Thoughts on Building Strong Towns, Chuck Marohn.