ReMarkable

Here’s Corey Doctorow’s blurb on the front cover: “A hymn to the ‘deep state,’ which is revealed as nothing more than people who know what they’re talking about.” That pretty much sums things up.

As anti-government sentiment has grown unchecked over the decades, especially among conservative circles, the narrative of government being comprised exclusively of bumbling, inept dolts has become the narrative of choice.

Here’s my take on government: I don’t care if my government is big or if my government is small, I just want it to be smart and effective. My sense is that the current right-wing of America just wants their government to be small and doesn’t care how effective it is in dealing with problems that only governments can deal with. This strikes me as short-sighted and self-defeating.

Case in point: on the morning of November 9, 2016 (the day after Trump’s election), the people in charge of running the U.S. Department of Energy showed up to work fully expecting a team from the Trump transition team to arrive and get briefed on the department’s most pressing issues. By the afternoon, there was still no word. Same with all of Day 2.

Two weeks after the election, DOE staffers read in the newspaper that a small “DOE Landing Team” had been created to handle the transition from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration.

A month after the election, one guy (Thomas Pyle, lobbyist for Koch Industries) showed up for a briefing. He stayed for an hour. He took no notes. He asked no questions. He never showed up again.

The DOE is a $30 billion a year operation in charge of a whole bunch of stuff. Important stuff like safeguarding our nuclear arsenal. That alone takes up about half the DOE budget. $2 billion goes to tracking down weapons grade plutonium and uranium that is floating around the world. Between 2010 – 2018, the DOE’s National Nuclear Security Administration collected enough material to construct 160 bombs. Given our deep, unrelenting fear of terrorism, this seems like a worthwhile investment…

By Inauguration Day, the Trump Administration’s primary interaction with the DOE was to clear it of all Obama appointees. While that’s not that surprising, there is a long history of appointees from one administration staying on well into the next to provide continuity and training to the incoming team. The Bush Administration’s DOE CFO stayed on for a year and a half into the Obama administration because he had a detailed understanding of the DOE’s finances that was hard to replace on a whim.

Joe Hezir, the DOE’s CFO at the end of Obama’s term, was widely respected across the political spectrum. He assumed he would be getting a call from the incoming Trump team asking him to stay on. By Inauguration Day, no such call had arrived. Not knowing what else to do, the CFO of a $30 billion organization packed up his office and left. With no replacement in sight.

The underlying thread of the anecdotes like the above are a disdain for the work done by government employees.

There’s the guy who spent his career working for the Coast Guard and developed a model to predict how fast and how far kayaks and lifeboats and capsized sailboats and people in water with life vests and people in water without life vests, etc., etc., would float given various wind and water current patterns in the ocean. His work dramatically improved the success rates of search and rescue efforts at sea. This is the work of government, not private enterprise. Trump’s answer: cut research funding.

There’s the guy who spent his career at NOAA fine-tuning tornado predictions, saving untold lives throughout the Midwest. This is the work of government, not private enterprise. Trump’s answer: appoint the CEO of Accuweather to run (and defund) NOAA so that publicly gathered weather data would only be available to Accuweather’s paying clients.

And so on. And so on.

When people in government have a vested interest in tearing down and denigrating government because it fits a narrative, that narrative can become a self-fulling prophecy. Why didn’t the government protect me from a rogue nuclear attack? Or a coronavirus outbreak? Well… it might be because the people responsible for keeping such events from happening are political hacks who show up to their government jobs with an ideological focus on tearing down those very governmental functions rather than a focus of serving the public.

Grr. Tax dollars at work, indeed.

Looking for a copy? Track it down here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1132234996

Side note: Sorry all, I thought I had posted this several months ago but it was actually just stuck in a draft version. Whoops. Better late than never.

Sometime in the fall of 2019, I was enjoying a round of disc golf with a good friend. This friend — let’s just call him Kevin — also happens to be a history professor at Gonzaga University. After some discussion of the horrors of the day laid out by my federal government, I commented that the history classes that I’ve taken in the past (or the history books I’ve read) tend to lay out the historical record in a very linear, causational manner: A lead to B, which then obviously lead to C, and so on.

The problem we face as we live through what will one day be referred to as “history” is that it is hard to see where things are headed. It’s hard to know when to roll my eyes versus pack my bags and get my family the hell out of the country. I’m sure millions of Jews wished for the same clarity and the ability to accurately assess just how bad things were in the early 1930’s.

Stemming from that line of thought, I asked Kevin if he had any book recommendations to help identify and magnify the warning signs of a culture drifting into psychopathic behavior and authoritarian rule. The immediate recommendation was On Tyranny by Tim Snyder.

Snyder, professor of history at Yale University, has a deep background and depth of knowledge in twentieth century European history, specifically German and Russian history. You know, Holocaust stuff. The guy knows his subject when it comes to discussing authoritarian regimes. This base of knowledge allows him to be succinct and to the point with his observations. Clocking in at all of 126 pages, On Tyranny gives twenty warning signs for citizens to pay attention to. Things like believe in truth (if nothing is true then there is no basis on which to criticize those in power), listen for dangerous words (extremism, terrorism, emergency and exception are often followed by demands for curtailed liberties), stand out (it is easy to follow along; it can feel strange to do or say something different but without that unease, there is no freedom). And so on.

Five stars for this one. Well-written, short and important. What else could you want in a book? Go track down a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/990509806

Other than his well-know Lord of the Flies novel, who knew that William Golding won the Nobel Prize for Literature way back in 1983? Huh… not this guy.

At any rate, I came across a mention of this book while reading Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist. It is one of a handful of books that Kingsnorth could think of where the natural world played a leading character role in a work of fiction. Pincher Martin, written two or three years after Lord of the Flies, flows from a pretty similar premise as Lord of the Flies: a guy is stranded on a small crag of an island in the middle of the north Atlantic. The difference is that instead of a group of boys devolving into a cutthroat mob, it’s just one guy alone on a rock.

I won’t give any spoilers about how it all works out for Pincher but I will say that I ended up not really giving a damn about the fate of the guy. He’s kind of an ass. But whether it was intentional or not, the story of a human on a rock floating in space and trying to bend the rock to his will reflects the larger story of all of humanity: we’re stuck on a rock floating in space and the sooner we figure out that there are limits to what the rock can provide, the ending of our tale may be a happier one.

Giving this three-stars only because who wants to spend a couple hundred pages with the inner thoughts of a jerk? But still, worth the read. Go find a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/910928524

 

Let’s say you’re a large, institutional investor in charge of growing the funds of thousands and thousands of retirement accounts. Now let’s say you think that XYZ, Inc. is poised for great growth in the coming years. Acting on that, you place an order with your broker to buy 25,000 shares of XYZ, Inc.

So far, so good. But what can happen next blows my mind.

Your stock broker see that shares of XYZ are available for purchase at $50.00 per share. The order goes in to a stock exchange, of which there a currently 23 scattered around the nation, and then things get weird. High-frequency trading (HFT) firms see the order come in and before your order can be completed, they race ahead to the other exchanges and buy up the available shares of XYZ, driving the price up. Now, instead of paying $50.00 per share, you need to pay $50.01 per share. The HFT firms are happy to sell to their shares back to you at this inflated price after buying up the stock at $50.00 per share. This all happens within a span of milliseconds, or about one one-thousandth of the time it takes to blink your eye.

This is the story of how HFT firms make billions of dollars per year by placing bets they can’t lose. And it’s the story of banks knowingly working against the best interests of their customers as they get kickbacks from the HFT firms as they give them a special vantage point that isn’t available to the general public.

That’s the downside.

The upside is that — gasp! — there are ethical people on Wall Street, one of them being Brad Katsuyama. After spending years working at the Royal Bank of Canada trying to figure out why his trades routinely cost him more than he thought they should, he figured out that if he could get his orders to land on each exchange at the exact same time, he could buy and sell at the prices he anticipated. If the order only went to one exchange or landed at different times (again, measured in fractions of seconds) the HFT traders would outrace him to the better deal. Katsuyama pulled together a rogue team of Wall Street traders, coders, tech geeks and created an entirely new stock exchange — Investors Exchange (IEX) — expressly built to level the playing field and negate systematic advantages conferred upon any particular group of traders.

So while there is hope for transparency and fairness in the trading world, IEX currently controls only about 3% of the market share. Oof.

Well worth the read. 4 stars. Go find a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/965121985

If you’re looking to get straight to the meat of what Snowden has to share, feel free to jump to Part 2 (page 105) of the book. All the preceding stuff is just that, preceding stuff: family history going back to Colonial times, genetic propensity toward serving his country, 9/11, and so on.

But the system, that’s what is of importance here. Snowden had a front row seat to the construction of an unconstitutional, all-seeing U.S. government collection of every digital transaction made by every American citizen since, roughly, 2011. Being a systems admin with both CIA and NSA clearance, Snowden was presented with facts forcing him to choose between continuing to collect a paycheck and shrugging his shoulders to the readily apparent abuses or… or he could blow up his life, his relationships and risk a lifetime of imprisonment. I’m glad he made the choice he did and I applaud him for his sacrifice. And I’m also sorry that I haven’t paid more attention to this story.

Here’s the boiled down version: the attacks of 9/11 — for which the blame was laid at the feet of a communication breakdown within the intelligence community — just happened to correspond with exponential increases in computing power, computer storage and the percentages of our lives that were being conducted online. The U.S. government capitalized on this confluence of events. Beyond flatly lying about the existence of such a system to capture data without warrants, the government changed the very definitions of “searching” and “seizing.” Nothing would be searched without a warrant but every bit of communication that happened in the digital realm would be stored. Not seized. Oh, no. Heavens no. That would be unconstitutional! Just stored. And searched when needed.

Right.

And there you have an authoritarian regime’s dream.

I guess it’s time to figure out how to configure an anonymous Tor server.

This is worth a read. Go track down a copy at your nearest library here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1121593585

 

As a middle-class white guy, here’s my takeaway from D’Angelo’s effort: the way we talk about racism in the United States is deeply flawed. We are taught to think of racism as something that is done in a discrete act by a bad person. We don’t talk about racism as a system. The outcome of framing racism as only something that degenerates do/benefit from inevitably sets up an us vs. them split. When someone who isn’t overtly racist in their actions or beliefs stumbles into a situation where they are rightly questioned about their unintentional racist behavior, they immediately point to the neo-Nazis, the skinheads, and the KKK members and say I’m not that! I’m not racist! Defensiveness sets in, people dig in their heels and the conversation can never move forward. What is needed is for racism to be discussed just as we discuss any other “-ism”: socialism, communism, environmentalism, capitalism, Catholicism, etc. These systems can all be talked about in terms of their historical origins, the current winners and losers within each structure, how the systems are propagated and supported across time, and so on.

To have the vast majority of white Americans say “I’m not racist!” [and have that be true, according to our own self-defined meaning of the term] and expect the “race” conversation to end there is a position of privilege. Any subsequent conversation or line of questioning can then be cast as “playing the race card,” which, as we all know, is grounds for immediate dismissal of concerns. And so the world continues to spin. Pretty much exactly how it was before.

A very readable and engaging book. Five stars. Go track down a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/1103800510

 

It’s about time for my family to purchase a new car. With our daughter being a senior in high school and our son a freshman, we are firmly beyond the sport team carpooling years. We currently have two cars, a 2010 Toyota Corolla and a 2013 Toyota Sienna minivan. The minivan must go.

The Corolla has, or will have within the next week, 100,000 miles and the van is pushing 60,000 miles. The Corolla, having now gone five times around the fattest part of our globe, still has a good long life ahead of it, Gawd willing. I’ve long thought that internal combustion engine cars are a piece of shit technology and I’ve ached for the day when I could buy something that could move me around in a manner that is less damaging to the world. A worthy wish.

For roughly $50,000 I could order up, tonight, an all-wheel drive Tesla. And yes, for less than $40,000 I could get a model without the all-wheel drive but, for the time being and until climate change kicks in in earnest, I live in a location that tends to get significant amounts of snow in the winter and all-wheel drive is a necessary luxury for myself and my family. Considering that I could sell the Sienna for something close to $20,000, I’d be looking at a car payment smaller than what I had when I purchased the Sienna brand new six years ago. The Sienna (our all-wheel drive vehicle at the moment) gets crappy gas milage so again, the Sienna must go. Side note: I know it’s silly to buy a brand new car but there were extenuating circumstances at the time with the van. Financial planners of the world, please forgive my sins. Also, I’ve searched for used Teslas and they are rare birds. So I think we’d have to go new.

So here we are. I need a new car. There’s a reasonable alternative out there that does less damage to the world. The cost isn’t prohibitive. It’s a poorly timed cost, yes, but not prohibitive. So why am I feeling this hesitation to make the leap into the electric vehicle world?

Paul Kingsnorth is the answer.

Kingsnorth, in Confessions, has penned a set of essays that is equal parts saddening, maddening, and liberating. Kingsnorth is a year older than I am and nearly as handsome as I am, but while I was spending my early adult years logging and cutting down trees in NE Washington, Kingsnorth devoted that time, and more, to the front lines of the environmental movement. Greenpeace. EarthAction. Editor of The Ecologist. Real, heavy, hard-hitting work. And after a couple decades in the trenches, here’s his conclusion: if the Earth is going to be saved (or at least a rough approximation of Earth as humans have known it since we started toddling around), it will need to be saved from those who say it can be saved.

[Insert awkward pause here]

Kingsnorth devoted a good chunk of his life to the protection of wild places. There really is no place left on the globe that hasn’t felt some impact from humans but still, he worked hard to protect those spaces that hadn’t already been paved over, tilled under, cut down, developed, mined, dammed, sprayed, logged, irrigated, what have you. Kingsnorth’s efforts, and the efforts of legions of other lovely humans have produced some wins. Some areas have been preserved. Some habitat for something other than humans has been set aside. And yet, Kingsnorth has watched the environmental movement shift from one of “protection” to one of “sustainable development.”

And that kills him.

Sustainable development, for all its promise, really comes down to this: we need to sacrifice the wild in order to keep humans alive. If you’re driving on I-84 through the Columbia River gorge, and if you’re of a certain age or older, you’ll realize what used to be untouched (aka non-arable) lands on the bluffs soaring above the river are now blanketed with wind-powered electricity generation.

That is sustainable development.

On one hand, I think it’s awesome. There’s a massive source of energy that is now being tapped that doesn’t have a carbon cost associated with it. And when I say there’s no carbon cost, I mean there’s no cost once we get beyond the manufacturing of the turbines, mining the materials needed to make them, shipping them around the globe, constructing them, etc.

But on the other hand… we’ve now taken thousands of acres of previously undeveloped land and plunked down hundreds of wind turbines. To save the world. To save the environment. And this is the environmental movement today. As my son would say, Eef.

So here I am, looking a buying an electric car. Is it a better choice than a gas powered car? Yes, I firmly believe that it is. On an individual scale, at least. But what happens if my entire state, or even county, or even city, decided to switch over to electric cars en masse? We’d need to start producing a whole lot more electricity, that’s what. And where will that power come from? I certainly hope it won’t be coal or natural gas, but if it’s a renewable it’s going to have to occupy a sizable chunk of the Earth. Can we say that we’re saving the Earth if we’re covering it with solar panels in the name of saving it? Kingsnorth would argue we can’t.

This is probably the most important book I’ve read in a very, very long time. Five stars. Go track down a copy here: http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/999308029