What I've Been Reading, December 2017

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.

• Myths of the 1 Percent: What Puts People at the Top by Jonathan Rothwell, New York Times
• Farm Babe: The sky is not falling on animal antibiotics by Michelle MIller, Ag Daily
• What If Autonomous Cars Just Never Happen? by Raphael Orlove, Jalopnik
• Where's the line between free expression and protecting students from hate speech? with Anna Maria Tremonti on CBC Radio's "Current"
• Google, HuffPo, Greenpeace & the liberal progressive ‘Resistance’ are lying to you, by Nafeez Ahmed, Medium--Insurge Intelligence
  
• I’m Stephan Neidenbach, I run We Love GMOs and Vaccines, and I’m sorry, by Stephan Neidenbach, Medium--The Method
  This fellow is quite sarcastic--I love it!
• Pittsburgh’s Water System Is Why We Shouldn’t Run America Like a Business, by Jordana Rosenfeld, The Nation
  This very much applies to Canada as well.
• U.S. Vastly Overstates Oil Output Forecasts, MIT Study Suggests, by Jim Polson and Tim Loh, Bloomberg
• Monsanto can go to Hell by Stephan Neidenbach, Medium--The Method
• Why a leading political theorist thinks civilization is overrated, by Sean Illing, Vox.
  An interview with James C Scott about his book, "Against the Grain".
• Debunking Canadian health care myths by Rhonda Hackett, The Denver Post.
  Just to set things straight for my American readers.
• Farm Babe: Monsanto vs. organic: the hypocrisy of shill campaigns, by Michelle Miller, Ag Daily
• U.S. population of homeless people exceeds 550,000 — with big spikes in New York City and LA by Greg B. Smith, Daily News
• Water Stress by Country by TheWorld Resurces Institute.
  Interesting map, but I have trouble believing that all those sub-Saharan countries in Africa are really experiencing a low water stress level.
• The gulf between farmers and the people they feed is getting dangerously wide, by Toban Dyck, Financial Post.
  Get to know a farmer today — it just might save the world.
• Me, Myself, and a Hundred Trillion by Katherine Wu, Medium--I Contain Multitudes.
  Dining With Your Gut Microbiome
• Where are the robots? by Tim Watkins, The Consciousness of Sheep
  
• Why self-driving cars may not be in your future by John Pavlus, Scientific American, via Energy Skeptic
  Decades of research have warned about the human attention span in automated cockpits
• Does an inverted yield curve spell trouble for US economy? by Jake Van Der Kamp, South China Morning Post
  A discrepancy in interest rates for short and long-term debt instruments have in the past foretold recession and an impending collapse of the US stock market.
• Renewable energy 'simply won't work': Top Google engineers by Lewis Page, The Register
  Windmills, solar, tidal - all a 'false hope', say Stanford PhDs.
  The article goes on to identify nuclear power as the only hope and blames high costs on un-necessarily high safety standards. As far as they went, I have no problem. But the article is saying we need nuclear power if economic growth is to continue and there's the rub. There simply isn't enough nuclear fuel to sustain exponential growth for any great length of time. And if there was, we'd soon run into one or more of the other limits to growth.
• 30 years after Prozac arrived, we still buy the lie that chemical imbalances cause depression, by Olivia Goodhill, Quartz
• World Bank to end financial support for oil and gas extraction. by Larry Elliot, The Guardian
  Bank announces in Paris it ‘will no longer finance upstream oil and gas’ after 2019 in response to threat posed by climate change.
• 10 Conspiracy Theories About RoundUp in a Single Documentary, by Oystein Heggdal, Food and Farm Discussion Lab

Books

Fiction

• Out in the Open by Jesus Carrasco
• The End of the World Running Club by Adrian J. Walker
  
• Down Station by Simon Morden
• Who's Afraid by Maris Lewis
  I normally don't read books about werewolves, vampires or zombies. I picked this one (which is about werewolves) up in a bookstore, and without the benefit of the kind of description Amazon provides, I didn't know what i was getting into. Not a bad read, but even though it begs for a sequel, if one comes out I won't be reading it.

Non-Fiction

• Trade Off: Financial system supply-chain cross contagion – a study in global systemic collapse by David Korowicz, Feasta, The Foundation for Economic Sustainabilitgy
  I downloaded the pdf and printed it out to read it, so I am counting this as a book. In any case it is required reading for serious collapsniks. And on the page I've linked to there are many links to articles that would appear to be good reading.
• Against the Grain by James C. Scott
  A deep history of the earliest states.

And to round out this month, here are some gems from my bookshelf:

• A Paradise Built in Hell by Rebecca Solnit
  The extraordinary Communities That Arise in Disaster
• Response to Disaster by Henry W. Fischer III
  Fact Versus Fiction and Its Perpetuation--The Sociology of Disaster
  Academic support for Solnit's Paradise Build in Hell
• Creating a Life Together by Diane Leafe Christian
  Practical Tools to Grow Ecovillages and Intentional Communities
• Creating Co-Housing by Kathryn McCamant and Charles Durrett
  Building Sustainable Communities
• The Empowerment Manual by Starhawk
  A Guide for Collaborative Groups