What I've Been Reading, August 2017

Kincardine's Rock Garden

Links

These links appear in the order I read them, rather than any more refined sort of organization. You may find some of the best ones are near the bottom—it varies from month to month.

• Self Insulating in Cold Climates, by RE at the Doomstead Diner
  
• Basic Heating: How to Keep Small Places Warm on a Low Budget , by RE at the Doomstead Diner
  
• Official and Remastered CFPUP SUMMIT Webcast 03/25/17, with John Michael Greer, James Kunstler, Chris Martenson, Frank Morris, Dmitry Orlov.
  This summit brought together an amazing panel to talk about issues ranging from politics, the economy, the food we eat, immigration, labor, poverty, minorities, war, and much more.
• Daniel Dennett’s Science of the Soul, by Joshua Rothman, The New Yorker
  A philosopher’s lifelong quest to understand the making of the mind.
  To me, it is obvious in a crystal clear way that Dennett is right about how consciousness works.
• Riding through the Homeless Camps in Anaheim California on the Santa Ana River Trail, by Jay Skip on You Tube.
  When it comes to homelessness, the story is only beginning.
• We now know how the Trump presidency will end. Let's hope we survive., by Tony Burman, The Toronto Star
  For my readers in the U.S.: this is what a major Canadian newspaper is saying about Trump.
• A World Without Poor People (Sort of), by Ian Welsh, on his eponymus blog.
  Except, of, course, that the mechanism for making people rich only works if you're already rich.
• This Is How Big Oil Will Die, by Seth Miller, New Co Shift.
  Both this link and the one below are about the future of electric cars. This one, optimistically, has electric cars completely taking over by 2025,and the oil companies going down in the process. The one below says electric cars won't be ready to replace gas and diesel cars when the ban on those vehicles takes effect in 2040 (in the UK).
  Both are based on completely different analysis of the promise of battery technology. Both are relying on cherry picked and anecdotal evidence of battery lifetime and driving range. I have to say my experience with batteries leads me to be rather pessimistic, but I'm generally optimistic about electric cars. For most people, who live in cities, driving range isn't going to be a huge issue.
  I don't think autonomous cars are going to be available nearly as soon as Seth Miller would have us believe. And if they are, a rash of accidents will give them a lot of bad publicity when they least need it.
• Electric cars won’t get us very far. Because they can’t, by Ross Clark, The Spectator.
  "If the problems of range and battery cost can be solved, the government’s ban on petrol and diesel cars would not be a problem. But then neither would it be necessary, because motorists would go electric anyway. Mile for mile, running an electric car is already far cheaper than running a petrol car — Nissan suggests less than 2p a mile if the electricity is bought off-peak, compared with over 10p for petrol or diesel. Servicing costs are also markedly lower."
• Derrick Jensen interviews Alice Friedemann, on Resistance Radio
• What is a cult?, by Tara Isabella Burton, Aeon
  Cults are exploitative, weird groups with strange beliefs and practices, right? So what about regular religions then?
• Heat For Tomorrow, by John Weber, Sunspot
  "Many materials used in our industrial world require energy from mining to manufacturing for processing and transportation. The energy for some of these products is in the form of high temperatures, 1100°C–2000°F"
  It's hard to see how renewables (wind and solar) could ever supply such heat.
• Close Calls: Three Times When Humanity Barely Escaped Extinction, by Esther Inglis-Arkell, Gizmodo
  
• Why we fell for clean eating, by Bee Wilson, the Guardian
  The oh-so-Instagrammable food movement has been thoroughly debunked – but it shows no signs of going away. The real question is why we were so desperate to believe it.
• From oilslick to tyranny, by Norman Pagett, Extra News Feed
  A prosperous society is an orderly society. (And vice versa.)
• Farm Babe: The internet’s biggest culprits of fake news in agriculture, by Michelle Miller, Farm Babe, Ag Daily
• Debunking Race Pseudoscience—White Genocide, Eurabia and Other White Supremacist Nonsense, by Debunking Denialism
• Why bullshit is no laughing matter , by Gordon Pennycook, Aeon
• The Dark Side of Resilience, by Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic and Derek Lusk, Harvard Busienss Review
• Here’s my story - how a Texas Republican became a liberal progressive, by Ron Wiseman, Quora
• There Is Life After Civilization Collapse, by Joe Brewer, Extra News Feed
  "Many vital things must be preserved during collapse if we are to avoid another Dark Age. Among them is the need to preserve science itself as a set of institutional practices, communities of expertise and storehouses of knowledge. Yes, that’s right. Science is threatened by the planetary crisis. Science is important because it provides the tool set for discernment in a world where those who know what is going on can navigate change effectively."
  
• Have we finally reached Peak Car? by Lloyd Alter, Treehugger
• An Intimate History of Antifa , by Daniel Penny, The New Yorker
  "You fight them by writing letters and making phone calls so you don’t have to fight them with fists. You fight them with fists so you don’t have to fight them with knives. You fight them with knives so you don’t have to fight them with guns. You fight them with guns so you don’t have to fight them with tanks."
• Apocalypse then—The lessons of violence and inequality through the ages, from the Economist
• Humans can’t tell legitimate science from junk science, by Ethan Siegel, Medium
  "When you’re confronted by some new information, how do you tell whether it’s valid or not?"
  Try looking at the scientific consensus.
• Little Black BOOK of Junk Science, by Alex Berezow, Ph.D.,Senior Fellow of Biomedical Science, American Council on Science and Health
  Full of solid, if somewhat controversial, information.
• Milk and dairy products: good or bad for human health? An assessment of the totality of scientific evidence, by Tanja Kongerslev Thorning, Anne Raben, Tine Tholstrup, Sabita S. Soedamah-Muthu, Ian Givens, and Arne Astrup, NCBI.
  The short answer: good for human health.
• Corporate Tax Cuts Don’t Create Jobs, They Enrich CEOs, by David Dayen, The Nation
  I've been saying this for ages!

Books

Fiction

• The Last Good Man, by Linda Nagata
• The Goliath Stone, by Larry Niven and Matthew Joseph Harrington
  Terrible book which I wouldn't recommend to anyone. NIven should be ashamed to put his name on such drivel.

Non-Fiction

This was a busy month with travel, family events and gardening, so I didn't get much non-fiction read. But here are a selection of books by Richard Heinberg that I've read in the past, and can certainly recommend.

• Our Renewable Future—Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy , by Richard Heinberg and David Fridley,
  Reading between the lines, I would say the authors are far from convinced that it is even possible.
• Snake Oil—How fracking's false promise of plenty imperils our future , by Richard Heinberg An excellent debunking of all that fracking nonsense.
• Blackout—Coal, Climate and the Last Energy Crisis, by Richard Heinberg
  Before you buy into the "there are several hundred years worthof coal left" fallacy, have a look at this book.
• Power Down, by Richard Heinberg
  One of the first Peak Oil books I ever read, back on 2006.
• The End of Growth—Adapting to Our New Economic Reality , by Richard Heinberg