Dust closes the Silo trilogy, and does so with more style than Shift but less than Wool. The action is back with Juliette from Wool, and her quest to connect Silos 18 and 17 and strike back against Silo 1. Simultaneously, we follow a small group of renegades in Silo 1, trying to forestall the suicide pact programmed into the Silo program by its designers.

This collection covers the latter half of 2005-2009, with classic cartoons like "Jesus vs JEEZUS" and "Civil War II." Kreider is as acerbic and irreverent as always, wielding his pen in both cartoons and essays that chronicle the slow implosion of the Bush administration, the Left's affair with Candidate Obama, and the controversy over a Danish cartoonist's picture of Mohammed.

But the real treasure here is the closing essay, where Kreider reflects on how angry he was during the Bush administration, how shrill and irritating his political persona was, but how it was necessary to counter the endless parade of propaganda and baldfaced lies marching from the White House in the service of evil and incompetent policies. Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz and the rest of the gang were low-grade profiteering thugs who looted the American dream and wrecked at least two foreign nations, and that they've escaped any punishment for their crimes will be one of the enduring shames of our times.* Kreider saw himself as the body politic's liver, and like the liver he absorbed a lot of toxins and took a lot of abuse. But because he (and the rest of the commentators on the Left) were paid a pittance, he could put it down and avoid becoming another Rush Limbaugh.

Kreider's political journey through the Bush administration paralleled my own, and while I miss his artistic/political voice today, I'm forever grateful to him for speaking truth to power in dark times, and letting me reminisce with him.

*and yes, President Obama is only slightly better.

The question of a North Korean collapse is not "if" but "when"; after all it has no economy, can barely feed itself, and is run by an insane child/cadre of elderly generals and secret police enforcers who can only agree on not wanting to wind up in front of the Hague or torn apart by a starving mob.

This report lays out what might happen if North Korea collapses, and in brief it isn't pretty. A massive humanitarian crisis emerges in an already marginal region as military commanders factionalize and start trying to come out on top. ROK and US forces fight their way inland to secure hundreds of WMD bunkers before nukes and bioweapons can be sold on the black market. Meanwhile, nobody knows what China might do, ranging from take over half the job of securing North Korea and generally being helpful to declaring one faction the legitimate govt and starting WW3, and after the initial dust settles, South Korea has to figure out how to charge responsible parties with war crimes, allocate state owned property in a way that doens't displace North Koreans or piss off South Koreans sitting on 60 year old deeds.

Basically, it's a clusterfuck combining the worst aspects of East Germany, the 2003 Invasion of Iraq, and the ongoing Syrian Civil War. Bennett lays out the scope of the problem, but the solutions are fragmentary. All we can really do is prepare a psyops campaign on the North Koreans elites to convince them to allow an orderly collapse and transfer of power and predeploy the ground forces needed to secure WMDs and distribute humanitarian aid. From a methodological standpoint, Bennett treats the North Koreans and Chinese as basically inert forces of resistance, with no intentionality of their own. On the one hand, this is the Hermit Kingdom we're talking about, and accurate modelling is very hard. On the other hand, c'mon RAND, I expect better sources and analysis than a bunch of defector's blogs.

War is hard. Peace is harder.

Halberstam was one of the greatest war correspondents and political journalists of the 20th century, and his talents are on display in this massive history of the Korean War. Equally adept at describing the horrors of a battlefield and the political decisions leading up to that battle, Halberstam takes the reader through the major moments and decisions of the Korean War.

His framing device is simple. Douglas MacArthur versus: vs Communists, vs the Truman administration, vs his own soldiers and ultimately, vs reality. MacArthur and his cronies are given little respect. In Halberstam's account, it's his usurpation of political authority in declaring Korea no longer part of America's Pacific perimeter that gives Stalin and Mao permission to let Kim Il Sung attack. It's his arrogance that sends outnumbered and poorly trained GIs into Korea to fight and die. And above all, it is his sycophantic staff and immense ego that allowed UN forces to be sucker-punched not once, but twice in less than a year.

This MacArthur centric-framing is probably not the most historically evenhanded, but it makes for a fun read, and this book needs all fun it can get. There's little to delight in-mostly bloody defeats, political miscalculations, and a paranoia as enveloping as the Manchurian cold. Halberstam does an amazing job bringing the players of the Korean War to life, although Washington DC is the major focus, with the rest of the UN coalition and the South Koreans given short shrift. Still, this is a classic of modern military history, and probably the 'one book' on the Korean War.

A small colonial war is an under-appreciated gem of military scifi. In a genre characterized by right-wing rhetoric and planet destroying super-weapons, this is a story about an under-equipped light infantry battalion on the ass edge of space trying to eke out victory against an entire continent of Afrikaner through intelligence, the surgical application of brutality, and Clausewitz's adage that "war is fought by human beings."

That said, this book felt cramped, too many characters not enough characterization. The colonial economy and Japanese Empire that rules the backdrop is plausible-ish, but the part of me that wanted a straight digression on the strategy of space-based counterinsurgency forces was disappointed by how thin it was.

I feel bad giving this book 3 stars, but unless you really love David Drake, A Small Colonial War can probably be skipped.

Nadesan has read *all* of the literature on Foucault's concept of governmentality, and does a worthy job of organizing it into more-or-less coherent chunks on the workings of contemporary states and organizations. Biopower represents the means by which modern centers of authority organize subjects to maximize their vital forces, productive potential, and capacity for self-governance; the rationalities which define the only appropriate problem-solution spaces for the modern age. This book chronicles the mechanisms of biopower and the continual expansion of modes of surveillance and control.

That said, this is not a book for the beginning. Some familiarity with Foucault and biopower is highly recommended. It's also already a little dated, with too much of a focus on American politics of the period 2000-2008, particularly the neoconservative movement. There's a little too much slagging off everything bad in the world as the fault of neoliberal looter-capitalists. But for, say, a junior academic wondering how Foucault might be added to their work, this is a great resource.

There secret to writing is that there isn't one. To write, you need to sit down, make time, and do it.

The difference between Silva and Sgt. Slaughter (the imaginary Marine DI who lurks around my dissertation) is that Silva backs up this statement with practical, peer reviewed advice on how to turn writing into a habit. I'm not sure if this blessed short book is the magic bullet, but hell, it seems reasonable enough. The first thing to conquer is fear, then laziness, then the writing itself...

This is a fascinating little interdisciplinary volume on narrative and bioethics which grew out of 1996 meeting of the Society for Health and Human Values. The many chapters cover a variety of approaches to narrative, from critiques of purely principlist deliberation, to the use of narrative in the clinic and consultation, to literary criticism of particularly powerful works. I could see assigning several of the chapters in a class on bioethics, particularly Nelson's introduction, Arras's piece on the limits of narrative, Montello's chapter on narrative competence, and Hunter's chapter on mediating opposing maxims.

I read this book because a couple of scholars wrote about using it to teach an engineering ethics course on nanotech. From that angle, it's pretty good, presenting multiple views of a radically transformative technology from the lab to the street. It lacks the arc light brilliance of The Diamond Age, tends toward expositors rather than fully-fleshed characters, but it does fairly present many positions on emerging tech, although it is ultimately biased towards technolibertarianism against a kind of Green Theology.

DeForest has a unique take on the Vietnam War, having run a very successful interrogation center for about five years. Coming in to the country after the Tet offensive, DeForest found an intelligence operation in shamble, with no spies, a minimal list of suspects, worthless methods, and no intelligence. This story chronicles how he worked against incompetence and resistance all around him to fix that.

In his time in country, DeForest used the timetested principles of police work to penetrate the Vietcong and generate operational intelligence. Starting with friendly interrogations of defectors, he developed a massive databank of rumors and background information about the Vietcong, which allowed him to target 'legal' cadres living under a civilian cover, and then press on their family obligations to get them to turn against the Vietcong. From this base, he was able to develop a handful of top level spies who provided precise intelligence for airstrikes and countering future attacks.

DeForest clearly thinks that the war was justified, and that he should've been on the right side of history. But he is also unstinting in criticizing the South Vietnamese government as corrupt and incompetent, the worst enemy of their own people. And he is rightfully bitter about the nearly 600 people he was forced to leave behind in the chaotic fall of Saigon, as his plan for an orderly evacuation was scuttled by high command. This was perhaps one of the supreme injustices of the war, as people who stood by the Americans were abandoned to the worst of communist re-education.

Overall, this is a fascinating and readable look into the proper role of intelligence and interrogation in a warzone, and the human dramas of being a CIA officer.