You really don't need a deep dive into Donald Trump's personality disorders. It's all right there, on his Twitter account, an inch-deep pig-shit lagoon of thin-skinned grievance, narcissism, conspiracy theories, and racism. Like a crude pastiche of Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, no one is really home, just a philosophical zombie reflecting whatever is on Fox.

But if you want to go deeper, there's this book by Trump's niece, a PhD psychologist and longtime witness to the family's dysfunction. Mary Trump places the origin of the trauma in Fred Trump, her grandfather (Trump's father, for those who might need diagrams). Fred was a demanding, unyielding, unloving man; a grasping skinflint slumlord who genuinely built a real estate empire of cheap apartments in the Bronx.

The family drama concerns Mary's father, Freddy Trump. Freddy was the heir-designate, but he couldn't be as hard or mean as Trump Sr. wanted. Despite an attempt to break free as a TWA pilot in the 1960s, when flying for TWA meant something, Freddy sunk into alcoholism and a shadow existence near his parents. He and his children were disinherited, cut out of the corrupt schemes that made the rest of the family millionaires.

Donald served as Fred's surrogate, the villainously charismatic frontman who'd take the family into the bright lights of Manhattan real estate and being a name people respected. Donald, as we all know, squandered the actual business on bad speculative casinos and debt laden projects. He's a joke, a disgrace, and to our infinite pain, the president.

If you've read the New York Times reporting based on Mary Trump's lawsuit documents, (Decade in the Red, May 7, 2018), you have the facts of the story. There are some good burns, though the memesters at Meidas Touch and The Lincoln Project are better. And in the end, this is most about the texture of growing up in Fred Trump's orbit.

And finally, could Mary have told us any of this in 2016, when it might have mattered? Everyone thought some other part of the American institutions could have protected us, but she knew better than most how much of a disaster Donald would be.

Blowout is a lot of interesting notecards, and a lot of red string, but falls short of presenting a compelling narrative.

The topline thesis should be easy enough. Oil and gas extraction is a business which has made some people incredibly wealthy and mass prosperity possible. It is also corrupt, has catastrophic environmental costs, and is willing to see the planet destroyed rather than accept any regulation or limits on its power.

Some of the cast of characters are big figures. Vladimir Putin, Rex Tillerson, John Rockefeller. But there's lots of interest in lesser luminaries, like Chesapeake Energy CEO Aubrey McClendon, who pioneering fracking and leveraged his company to destruction and himself to antitrust investigation and probable suicide. Harold Hamm made a lot of money fracking, and then pushed the Oklahoma legislature to enact permanent tax breaks for fracking. Teodoro Nguema Obiang Mangue, son of the corrupt President of Equatorial Guinea, spends millions on a Malibu shopaholic lifestyle, which his county is one of the most impoverished in the world.

The two key events are the growth of fracking in the United States, and Putin's 'energy diplomacy' policy in Europe. Fracking, the injection of high-pressure water into horizontally drilled wells to break up rock formations and liberate oil and gas, has unlocked massive new fossil fuel reserves. It also produces billions of gallons of saline wastewater laden with heavy metals and radioactive particles, and likely causes earthquakes in regions which have been seismically inert for centuries. Putin saw Russia's energy reserves as key weapon in maintaining Russia's great power status, and his personal power, but corruption and US sanctions have hampered Russia's energy policy.

There are lots of interesting pieces here, but as a coherent narrative, especially one about our collective involvement in the energy business, Blowout doesn't quite hit home. I read it, and my wife listened to it as an audiobook, and I think that the latter format might play better to Maddow's strengths, she's a good author and a great newshost, and this works better an extended special episode of her show, rather than a serious book.

Season of the Witch is all about the human interest stories of San Francisco, in that tumultuous time from 1967 to 1982. This was when Haight-Ashbury invented the hippie counter-culture, and then that brief glimpse of utopia curdled and imploded in a mass of drug addiction, racial violence, and finally a brutal political assassination.

At it's base, San Francisco was a blue collar town, run by a machine of Irish and Italian Catholics. The police force was on the take, the unions were strong, and the stolid families and fringes of Barbary Coast dissolution had their nicely separate spheres. But the arrival of thousands of teenage runaways in the Summer of Love was something else, entirely. As many turned from sex and LSD to harder drugs, 'heavy hippies' organized free clinics and alternative civic services for people the city wanted to push into the Pacific Ocean.

But the scene turned bad, and turned bad hard, as speed and heroin ate the heart out of the movement. A few 'heavy hippies' held on, but most burned out or fled to the country. Predators in love beads took over the Haight, with the Altamont Rolling Stone show definitively ending the 60s.

Then the terror started in earnest. The Fillmore district had long been home of San Francisco's Black middle class, but an urban renewal project shuttered the businesses and left it a wasteland. Prisons served as pressure cookers for radicalism, including the Symbionese Liberation Army and the Zebra killers, serial killers who targeted white victims for alleged mystical purposes.

As the hippies were winding down, gay liberation was winding up, with the Castro becoming the epicenter a bold uncloseted homosexuality. Harvey Milk was elected to the board of supervisions, with the administration of Mayor George Moscone breaking the old guard Catholic machine to represent the city's diversity. Both men were deeply tied to cult leader Jim Jones, who's People's Temple was an octopus in the city's progressive movements. The Jonestown massacre and political assassination of Moscone and Milk by ex-supervisor Dan White was a comprehensive shock, the worst day since the 1906 Earthquake.

Talbot ends on a happy note, arguing that the 1982 victory of the 49ers healed the city, but the epilogue, on the scything effects of AIDS on San Francisco's gay community, is the real story of the end of the period, a new batch of horrors. Talbot's book is flawed as sociology, and it overlooks the city's Asian and Hispanic residents in favor of charismatic White boomers of various stripes. But it's also a fantastic story page-by-page, and a vivid, fun book.

Blood, Sweat, and Pixels is a celebration of crunch time, and of all the pieces that have to come together to make a video game work. Video games are as complex an entertainment medium as we have, yet making them is a process beset by managerial chaos, incredibly bad tools (and I thought SQL Management Studio was a drag), and long long hours.

It's weird that 35 years on from video games becoming more than just a toy for geeks, the process for making them is so chaotic and poorly understood. Worse, what makes a game good is an emergent property of many different systems, all of which could depend on the tiniest details, so problems don't emerge until the game is almost done. And that doesn't even get into online games, which depend on thousands of real humans to make them work.

Schreier's stories are interesting, but his ten case studies tend to blend together, aside from the indie studios behind Stardew Valley and Shovel Knight. Video games are big business, bigger than the movies these days, but we still don't seem to know to make them, aside from whipping programmers and artists.

I've read a William Gibson novel. Yes, this is definitely a novel by William Gibson, and it's about scifi stuff like time travel, alternate futures, telepresence, and exotic nanotech weapons, rather than viral social media videos or pants.

In a decaying rural America, perhaps a decade or from our from our own, Flynne takes care of her family, an ill mother and a brother occultly wounded while serving as a Marine in something called Haptic Recon. She's covering her borther's job, playing what she thinks is a strange video game, when she witnesses a woman die in skyscraper, killed by .

It's not game, it's a future. Not her future, but a world after a collapse and rebuilding called the jackpot, a world ruled by hidden forces, and a world that can make limited connections to pasts. Wilf Netherton works for one of these mysterious forces. He's an alcoholic public relationships representative, and his job is to manage the chaos in Flynne's timeline to enable her to identify the murderer before an opposing power gets her killed.

The book is composed of these little facets, average length 4 pages, alternating between Flynne and Netherton . And individual, these facets are glittering Gibsonesque miniatures, but when assembled I'm not sure they make a story. "Peripheral" refers to both a key technology of the novel, the telepresence biorobots Flynne uses to visit the future, and a distance from the center of events or influence. Both Netherton and Flynne dance at the strings of Lowbeer, a British cop/spy/spook of immense age and influence. But the agendas are so submerged that the events of the novel just happen, arbitrarily. I've no sense of what Netherton's world actually operates on, or why they care about Flynne. And while the tropes "the future is already here, it's just not evenly distributed" and "contemporary America is a cyberpunk dystopia already" are already cliches, Gibson's version of America feels a lot like Snow Crash played straight, an already tired joke.

Come for the sentences, because there's not much under the surface.

Agency is a card trick masquerading as a novel. Pick a chapter, pick any of the 110 short chapters, shuffle it back into the book, pick a San Francisco techie stereotype, some postmodern melding of start-up and intelligence tradecraft jargon. Is this your plot? Rinse, repeat. Compared to The Peripheral, Agency is more artful, more authentically voiced as kind of urban technocracy story, but way less interesting.

Two timelines. In one it is the 22nd century, after the Jackpot, an event which killed 80% of humanity and a whole lot of animals, and where the most potent surviving political organization are 'klepts', criminal families. The 22nd century can reach back in time through an unspecified anomaly to interfere in alternate pasts. In one alternate past, a stub in the terminology of the book, it is 2018 or so, futuristic meddling means Hillary Clinton is President and Britain is in the EU, but things are still one minute to midnight, with nuclear war threatened over an escalating Syrian Civil War.

Verity, our main character (I decline to say protagonist. Protagonists make choices and exhibit a character arc), is couchsurfing in SF, hiding from the media after her breakup with charismatic tech CEO Stets, when she's given a new job to beta test an app. The app is strong AI, going by the name Eunice, with expertise in counter-insurgency and hybrid warfare courtesy of the US military.

Verity is plunged like a pinball into a world of crowd-sourced spies, next generation drones, and Silicon Valley couture. Meanwhile Netherton, a public relations flack in 22nd century London, and his new wife Rainey act as of kind of Greek chorus, bemoaning nuclear war and the worse prospects of the Jackpot ahead for the stub. They have their own troubles. Netherton's eldritch spy/police employer Lowbeer is being conspired against by a senior member of the klept, and the whole thing could be very dangerous.

But there's no so much a plot as a series of events, orchestrated by entities so powerful and enigmatic that they might as well be gods. The characters are thin, even by Gibsonian standards. Gibson's best work has a lot to say about the nature of power, the power of obsession, and the thin tissue of humanity in the hurricane of power, technology, and obsession. I follow Gibson on Twitter, and his Twitter, plus the premise of this novel (an alternate reality where the alt-right crest broke just short) signals a terminal case of Lib Brain. There's this notion that the world is going to hell because of klepts, spooks, hidden networks that run counter to democracy. And it's true, deliberative bodies of democratically selected representatives have no place in that Gibsonian cyberpunk nightmare that is our present. But the thing about all the enemies is the triumph of the private over the public, of personal interest over the public interest. And it's not like this takes genius. You can do it with a half dozen guys with AKs in the back of pickup truck, or a half dozen bought judges on the Supreme Court and a cast iron gall. These enemies of the world are not so much superior, it's just that we're unwilling to fight them. And as a counter, Gibson imagines a distributed conspiracy of highly-paid experts coming together to deliver... some kind of fucking illegal art happening in San Francisco.

I'm not sure if it's being played straight, or incredible deadpan irony. Either way, not a fan.

The Workshop and the World is utterly perplexing. Framed as an investigation of science denial, as exemplified by the Trump Administration (pre-COVID-19, so the blood on Trump's hands was much more remote), what the book contains is a series of ten intellectual biographies, focusing on the lives and major ideas of Francis Bacon, Galileo, Descartes, Giambattista Vico, Mary Shelley, Auguste Comte, Max Weber, Kemal Ataturk, Edmund Husserl, and Hannah Arendt. If there's a point, it's lost in faulty analysis of this current moment, and a kind of willful blindness of every significant advance in science studies since 1970, construing the field as inclusively as possible without disciplinary prejudice.

The biographies vary in quality, striking a balance between the kinds of humanizing/salacious details that would keep an undergraduate interested, and a serious discussion of ideas and influences. Vico's chapter, exploring the ideas of a frustrated Humanist scholar who penned some of the first serious warnings against the then-new mechanical philosophy, is stronger than most. Conversely, the chapter on Ataturk is notably weak, wandering through a 19th century where Ataturk was either unborn or a small child, and spending almost no time exploring the deliberate use of science and technology as a state-building apparatus (with some genocide on the side, forming Turkey out of the collapsing Ottoman Empire was not clean).

Crease's overarching point, as much as there is one, is that scientific reasoning threatens to hollow out the forms of moral reasoning that give weight and meaning to human existence. Science and technology, in their power to amplify the actions of experts at the levers of power, extend out an alienating iron cage of bureaucracy. They enable a small motivated group to commit mass atrocities, murder on continental or planetary scales. I'm not sure if Crease genuinely believes this, but the overall point of this book is that science has drained something undefined and vital out of human life over the past few centuries, and a mass of anti-scientific gibberish has filled the void.

My problem with this book is twofold. First, this book is weak as a history and philosophy of science textbook. It has only the most cursory overview of the historical process by which what we call science became scientific, the break from the scholastic knowledge of the Renaissance to the birth of natural philosophy and then modern scientific specialization. The sole experimentalist on this book's list of thinkers is Galileo. The philosophy portion spends a great deal of time on mathematics and the phenomenological questions of how we can access external reality, while ignoring major work on demarcating science from non-science starting with Karl Popper's falsification criteria and moving on from there. And while the thinkers chosen are grappling seriously with science and its role in society, major contemporary criticisms of science are entirely absent, such as the post-modernist supposition that science is arbitrary semiotic games and that external reality is some kind of collective illusion, the feminist and post-colonial critiques that all knowledge is grounded in a standpoint and that scientific 'objectivity' masks a white male gaze, or the post-normal-science arguments of Funtowicz and Ravetz which posit that claims of fact on controversies cannot be separated from moral judgments.

In short, if I were to consider using this book to teach a intro seminar on what I have a PhD in, I'd have to add about 75% supplementary material to cover the fundamentals of the subject.

Second, this book is a piece of the time, a response to Donald Trump and the tide of anti-scientific nonsense washing over the globe. Crease casts this as a sole force, 'anti-science', but it's at least three separate yet commingled forces. The first is that perfectly described by Oreskes and Conway's Merchants of Doubt, a tactical opposition to specific scientific facts by tycoons who's business depending on those facts not resolving against them, such as the presence of carcinogens in cigarettes or the contribution of fossil fuels to catastrophic global warming. Merchants of doubt abuse the regular mechanisms of scientific debate to keep controversies from resolving. The second is what I'm going to call transcendental mysticism, widespread beliefs in non-scientific concepts like angels, astrology, and the afterlife, to take a few "A"s at random. Mysticism is often harmless, with perhaps the most obvious exception being those who rely on faith healing in various guises when conventional allopathic medicine could have saved their life. These first two forms of anti-scientific thought are dangerous, and should be contested where ever they appear, but they don't describe Donald Trump's attitudes towards knowledge.

Trump's sublime ignorance, his epistemological nihilism that nothing can possibly be true, is best exemplified by the Flat Earth movement. The spherical nature of the Earth has been known fact for thousands of years, since at least 600 B.C, and experiments to demonstrate its roundness are trivial to perform. Yet the Flat Earthers know that They Are Lying To You, and because They (a diffuse mass of the world's scientists, governments, parents, and especially middle school teachers) Are Lying, literally everything is a play in a game of deception. The world is a spider web of conspiracies, and Flat Earthers have done the research by watching endless hours of YouTube videos to pierce through their fantastic truth. This is the conspiracy matryoshka of QAnon; Donald Trump's unshakable belief that very soon COVID-19 will just go away, and it's only Haters bringing him bad news who are preventing that.

There's definitely a way in which decades of weaponized skepticism and magical thinking have lead us into this wilderness, but the current crisis of faith is qualitatively different. I return again and again to Ludwig Fleck, and his aphorism that "A fact is that which resists arbitrary thinking." While scientists and those who live in a scientific world can have intense disagreement about which facts are true and how to verify them, we agree on the fundamental axiom that facts are valuable, that structured thinking is hard but worthwhile. The radical epistemological nihilism of this full blown conspiracy viewpoint thinks that because the wheels are spinning faster, they must be better, yet those wheels spin without any traction whatsoever. Calling it merely 'anti-science' disguises its true nature and absolute personal and public harms.

Public understanding of science work is hard, and I don't know anybody who's actually good at (and I should), but Crease's recommendations are laughably bad. He suggests public figures sign responsibility pledges, that they be barred from hypocritical use of technology based on science, that they be the subject of ridicule, that we use parables to encourage trust in science, and that we turn the power of the State against anti-science forces and prosecute them. This is prima facie absurd. Sartre put it best, writing in the midst of the Second World War, "Never believe that anti-Semites are completely unaware of the absurdity of their replies. They know that their remarks are frivolous, open to challenge. But they are amusing themselves, for it is their adversary who is obliged to use words responsibly, since he believes in words." Dunking on these people may make us feel good, but it just gives them a banner to rally under.

The Workshop and the World has some interesting biographical sketches, but is so flawed in conception, thesis, analysis, and practical advice that I'm giving it the rarely awarded One Star.

The Management of Savagery is a brilliant and thorny book, a bold indictment of American foreign policy let down by shifts between two versions of core thesis, and an emotional commitment to an unconventional wisdom Blumenthal desperately wants you to believe and doesn't have the evidence to prove.

The weak version of the the book's thesis is simply: 9/11 was the direct result of American blowback, the end result of Zbigniew Brzezinski's ploy to cripple the USSR in Afghanistan by supplying and training proxy militias of Salafi extremists, which would eventually grow into Al Qaeda. We all know the consequences: 9/11, the invasion of Iraq, a never ending imperial quagmire. Worse, "giving Muslim extremists guns and money and hoping for the best" has become the bipartisan foreign policy establishment's go to plan despite the fact that it never ever works, leaving shattered countries, a maze of atrocities on all sides, seas of refugees, and right-wing populist backlashes to the refugees.

The weak version of the thesis is well worth attending to, especially claims of contacts between Al Qaeda and Western intelligence agencies in the period leading up to 9/11. There's also hints of a very important book about the nature of American governance in the early part of the 21st century, a kind of nightmare hydra of self-proclaimed 'counter-terrorism experts' laundering credibility through a revolving series of government, academic, thinktank, and media posts to justify imperial expeditions no matter who sits in the White House. That Project for a New American Century ghouls (remember PNAC?) and humanitarian interventionists like Hillary Clinton and Samantha Powers could come to the same means and ends is worth considering in full.

The problem is the strong version of the thesis. If this bipartisan foreign policy has been one of the major contributors to human misery in the 21st century, it is evil, and therefore anybody who opposes it is... well good might be too far, but righteous perhaps? It's the same kind of blinkered thinking that leads to the CIA handing weapons to Salafi extremists, and it puts Blumenthal in the same corner as Assad, Putin, and Trump, and renders his analysis crude and conspiratorial.

And this is a goddamn shame. Because we need to be reminded of this legacy of absolute failure, and the way that the parasitic counter-terrorism security state is choking the life out of our democracy (he says, as clouds of teargas drift through Seattle and Portland). And there is a very solid realpolitik analysis to be made here, about which factions have power within states, be they intelligence agencies or extremist cells or the people, and the balance of power between the Gulf Monarchies, Iran, Israel, Saddam Hussein's Iraq, America, Turkey, NATO, Russia, China etc..., and how this is leading us all down a bloody road, but Blumenthal isn't quite objective enough to make the case. And I sympathize, Blumenthal is an ADL designated anti-Semite (for the record, the ADL needs to chillax on officially designating people anti-Semites), and he's been writing stories the Israel government would rather not have published his entire career. But the web of treachery is too big to be adequately explained in this short book.

Reread in 2020. Still an absolutely perfect military history of one of the greatest underdog victories in naval history.


****

There are moments in history of transcendence, of courage and duty that lifts men and material out of this world and into another. The Battle off Samar was one such moment, when the men of Taffy 3 faced a Japanese fleet containing the super-battleship Yamato with nothing more than a handful of destroyers, destroyer-escorts, and escort carriers, and through gumption, gunnery, and the grace of god, won. Hornfischer chronicles every minute of the battle in this tale, writing a grand tale of heroism and sacrifice. Something of the true character of men can be seen when their backs are against the wall, and for the men of the navy in 1944, on ships designed for economy and production rather than fighting power, that character is an unhesitating courage in the attack, unstinting in duty, and willing to spend their lives dearly to defend their comrades in arms. Simply a fantastic work of military history.

World War II didn't end cleanly in 1945. The defeat of the Nazis occurred piecemeal in liberated territories from 1943 onwards, and stuttered forwards in civil war and internal purges for years after Hitler's death. While the Allied armies settled the key political question that fascism would not rule Europe, everything else was up in the air. So of course, after the war Europe came together as a community to ensure human rights and equality for all.

LOL, Nope. Europe faced massive challenges of rebuilding its shattered infrastructure, healing a traumatized population, and re-homing millions of displaced people. The refugee crisis was perhaps the first and largest problem. Most European cities had been wrecked by a combination of the combined bomber offensive and the Red Army. Millions of foreigners had been taken to Germany as forced laborers, and millions had fled their homes to escape the worst of war. Holocaust survivors found that they had no home to return to. Ethnic Germans had to flee areas where they had lived for centuries in Poland and Czechoslovakia. With agriculture and transit destroyed, famine ran rampant. In particularly grim comedy, gangs of orphans played with disused munitions, firing panzerfausts to see the bang. With millions on the move, and the economy and political system smashed, crime was omnipresent. Theft, sexual assault, and murder were so common as to be entirely unremarkable.

Occupied territory had to deal with a legacy of collaboration, and no one managed both a comprehensive and legally valid de-Nazification program. Nazi race laws had made Europeans newly aware of their mixed ethnicities, and particularly in Poland, Ukraine, and Yugoslavia, ethnic militias embarked on new programs of ethnic cleansing. Civil wars between Communists and rightist groups broke out in Greece and Italy, while Stalinist repression crushed Eastern Europe, particularly Romania and the Baltic states.

Lowe's thesis is that pretty much everybody was victim and perpetrator, often simultaneously. National mythmaking has served to cover up the ugly truths that most people collaborated, that ardent resistance fighters carried out crude and often deadly attacks on collaborators after the war, with women who slept with Germans suffering special abuse, and that these resistance fighters were then punished by the new governments as threats to resurgent state power. An accurate count of the dead is impossible, and revisionists on all sides have created outlandish figures of the dead, with right-wing parties who have uneasy ties to 1930s and 1940s fascist movements being at the forefront.

This is a heavy book, and as a continent-wide survey Lowe can't afford to dive too deeply in any moment. But he has a strong analytical frame, and manages to keep the grim material moving quickly.