The Iran Wars

Posted on October 3, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East
© 2016 Jay Solomon
352 pages

When the young people of Iran hit the streets in protest about suspicious election returns in 2009, the United States was unexpectedly quiet. For years DC’s establishment had voiced ominous desires to effect regime change in Iran, and now an opportunity had presented itself.  All that was needed was a little stoking of the fires, passing of intelligence and funds to the right people. And yet..nothing happened, and soon the leaders of the “Green Movement” were in jail.  What no one realized then was that the Obama administration had already begun its efforts to move toward some kind of concordance with Iran, and that this silence was a show of  good faith, an indication that the administration was serious about its efforts to establish a working relationship with the Islamic Republic. Much of DC’s foreign policy in the middle east from 2001 to 2016 was conducted with an eye towards Iran,  including the American response to Syria, and The Iran Wars follows two presidents’ attempts to find a solution to the Iranian problem, through war,  finance, and diplomacy.

The middle east is a complicated place, to say the least,  with active ethnic, religious, and political conflicts. Iran’s role in all this is poorly understood by many Americans;  in addition to Persians and Arabs being two  separate  ethnic groups with a competitive history, the version of Islam which is the state religion in Iran is a minority everywhere else, and viewed with contempt by Saudi-held Arabia, al-Queda and its would-be successor, ISIS.  Iran’s sole ally in the Arab world, Syria,  is an important support for it, and a  source of continuing conflict between Iran and the west.

The events of September 11, 2001, as tragic as they were, presented an opportunity for American-Iranian relations to begin anew, with a common enemy in al-Queda and its drug trade. What opportunity there may have been, never developed by skeptical aides,  was dead by the time DC chose to invade Iraq,  with the intent of weakening Iran’s influence in the region by freeing its Shiite majority from Saddam’s rule and giving them the opportunity to protest against the ayatollahs. Instead, that Shiite majority aligned with Iran more closely as sectarian war erupted in the region, That  conflict was promoted by both Syria and Iran to prevent American power from growing in Iraq, as Assad promoted Sunni militias in the north and Iran promoted Shiia power in the south. Their role in promoting Iraqi instability made both enemies in DC and abroad.  Still worse,  Iran counted itself the implacable foe of Israel and pursued nuclear capabilities, with the possibility of militarization.

Although some in DC ominously hinted that military options were fully on the table for addressing Iran,  with so many resources mired in two civil wars, few actually proposed it.  Bush chose instead to develop a third option: disrupting Iran’s nuclear program through cyber warfare. (See Countdown to Zero Day for a comprehensive history of that.) Solomon only barely mentions this, but moves quickly on to Obama’s two-track attempt to reach some kind of concordance with Iran.  Obama moved to isolate Iran financially by working with China and the powers of Europe to effect heavy sanctions and remove Iran from the global economy, while at the same time reaching out to the Iranian people through public speeches, and Iranian leadership through an Omani intermediary who saw his vocation as being a broker of peace between DC and Iran.

Both tracks meant compromise, as DC had to give more than it would like to prove to both its international partners and Iran that it was serious about effecting a deal. It also meant  that Obama felt compelled to intervene in Libya to indicate to Iran that he was serious about enforcing red lines, but had to walk back his threats against Assad so as not to drive the Syrian ruler’s allies from the negotiating table. Although the deal itself was hailed as a triumph, with one historian optimistically chronicling it in a volume called Losing an Enemy,  Jay Solomon concludes this history with a warning.  If DC and Iran do truly establish a lasting peace, there will be disruption to contend with. The Saudi family in particular  may aggressively court other alliances, and whatever influence DC has over its codependent partner will lessen. The Iran wars are not over, writes Solomon; this deal, as promising as it sounds, is only the start of a new chapter.

Solomon was quickly proven correct, and in 2018  it is sad to read about the years of dogged labor Kerry, Obama, Mohammad Zarif, and Sultan Qaboos  poured into making the deal, including the long labors with Europe and China, now squandered, and US diplomatic credibility seriously reduced.  For me, this was a valuable book to read,  illustrating why Obama reacted toward Syria as he did, and why Syria is such an obsessive target for the west in the first place.

Related:

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Oktoberfest and Octoberfright

Posted on October 2, 2018 by smellincoffee

Well, dear readers, it’s October again.  I’ll be opening with a nod to German history, this time with a WW2 emphasis as I’m trying to address my TBR pile of doom.  I’m sure it will go down smoothly  with a Bavarian beverage or two. Then I’ll be shifting into mystery and horror as we approach Halloween, with the hope — fingers crossed — of finishing Frankenstein.  

Previous “Octoberfest” reads:
A Mighty Fortress: A New History of the German People,  Steven Ozment
German Resistance to Hitler, Peter Hoffman
The Lady from Zagreb, Philip Kerr (Fiction)
They Thought They Were Free: The Germans, 1933 – 1945, Milton Mayer
If the Dead Rise Not,  Philip Kerr (Fiction)
Germany: Unraveling an Enigma, Paul Nees

Previous “Octoberfright” reads, all fiction:
Dracula, Bram Stoker
World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, Max Brooks
Night of the Living Trekkies,  Kevin David Anderson
Carrie, Stephen King
Christine, Stephen King

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Within Arm’s Reach

Posted on October 1, 2018 by smellincoffee

Within Arm’s Length: The Extraordinary Life and Career of a Special Agent in the United States Secret Service
© 2014, 2018 Dan Emmett
320 pages

Dan Emmett was a kid when he witnessed President Kennedy’s assassination on television, but instead of being shaken by the abrupt loss, he was intrigued by another person shown on the tape – -a man who, as the shots hit Kennedy, was climbing over the seats in an effort to shield the president with his own body.  After a tour of duty with the Marines, Emmett applied to join the service that he thought so admirable as a child, and served in it for over ten years, protecting three presidents as well as numerous other..  Although not all agents protect the president, he was one of those who did, and in this memoir he tells a little bit about the training and the job.  Readers interested in learning more about the men under protection should not expect to find much of interest here; Emmett considers tell-alls not only unprofessional, but vulgar.  Instead, he writes about the training and some of the practices of the secret service, like having a tail car with a camera for the express purpose of capturing a president’s death on camera if it does happen. Secret service agents are expected to be extraordinarily competent, proficient in both combat and triage, and those who work with the presidential detail also have to be diplomats, especially if they’re charged with the initial site inspection and preparation for a presidential visits and have to convince local officials to make adjustments in their practices.  Although service agents are regarded as brave, Emmett writes that the intensive training makes responses like jumping in front of the president reflexive. Even so, their choice of occupation is courageous. The presidential detail itself is physically brutal, as agents sometimes forgo meals and sleep in an effort to keep up with a traveling president’s schedule. Most burn out within five years, and — like Emmett — retire to join another government service.  In Emmett’s case, that was the CIA, but of course he says even less about it.

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Build Your Own PC for Dummies

Posted on September 29, 2018 by smellincoffee

Build Your Pwn PC For Dummies
© 2009 Mark Chambers
336 pages

Both my increasing interest in learning how to work with computer hardware, and my nephew’s desire to build a gaming computer,  have led to me watching hours of build videos on YouTube, and scrounging around the internet for helpful resources. Although this book was published in 2009, it has a long history of solid reviews, and I was able to find a used copy which included a working DVD.     This beginner’s guide to building a PC first assures reader that it’s not nearly as difficult process as they imagine, and requires minimal tools — usually, just a Phillips-head screwdriver.   Because building a PC is an inherently sequential process —  beginning with the case and motherboard, and building from there —  the book’s organization follows that process.  The initial chapters cover the first steps:   deciding on what kind of machine to build,  finding a case and motherboard that will meet the need, and installing essentials like the power supply,  processor, and RAM.  Once the hard drive is installed, the author shifts to optional-but-likely add-ins like DVD drives, graphics and sounds cards, and other accessories.  The video is divided into similar stages.

Obviously, a book on computer hardware from 2009 is going to be dated at this point, and arguably it was dated upon release given that it includes a chapter on floppy disks, when retail PC builds had stopped carrying  units with floppy disk drives at least three years before. (My family purchased a PC in 2004/2005 that had no floppy disk reader, just USB ports and a never-used reader for zip cards. ) Still,  storage and data transfer (SATA cables were still nosing into the market here)  are the only real age-related weaknesses. The book is designed to be read independent of any other sections, so each starts with the same advice about grounding yourself to prevent any static electricity discharges. The author always uses a joke to introduces these, which gets old quickly if you’re reading it through.  The jokes are not as pervasive on the video, but they’re there. 

Although certain elements of this are badly dated, the basic process remains current, and I think it would be helpful to someone introducing themselves to the idea of building a PC.  Fixing Your Computer: Absolute Beginner’s Guide has more more information on the actual components and what their advertised specs mean, though. 

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The Looming Tower

Posted on September 28, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Looming Tower: Al-Queda and the Road to 9/11
© 2006 Lawrence Wright
480 pages

“[…] we’re told that they were zealots, fueled by religious fervor…religious fervor. And if you live to be a thousand years old, will that make any sense to you? Will that make any  ******* sense? ” – David Letterman,  first show post-attack. 9/17/2001

Despite the efforts of Sunday School teachers who wanted to convey the fact that the end of the world was imminent, I didn’t pay a great deal of attention to foreign affairs in middle school. One of those teachers dedicated a wall in her classroom not to Bible verses and theology, but to ominous news stories hinting at the imminent coming of the Endtimes.  Most prominent on the board and in my memory was a large article on the USS Cole bombing in 2000, organized by the same people who would later attack New York. After that 9/11, that seemingly random attack made more sense in context, and in Lawrence Wright’s Looming Tower, the Cole bombing has a prominent place. Looming Tower is a history of al-Quaeda, of the ideological background of bin laden and his followers, as well as a chronicle of their activities. Although bin Laden did not create the jihadist fervor popularly known as Islamism, Wright contends that bin  Laden was the indispensable figure behind the movement, organizing smaller groups into an international force and financing it with his dead father’s fortunes.

Westerners may find it easy to dismiss terrorists as the dregs of society, casting blame on their woes and failures on the easy target of the west. Far from being uneducated rubes, however, many of the key members of al-Queda and its related organizations were members of their society’s elite: they were born into wealth and privilege, and (excepting bin Laden) spent considerable time in the west.  The intellectual progenitor of Islamism, as we might term the virulently anti-western ideology rooted in fundamentalist Islam which  has been sweeping the middle east in increasingly strong waves since the mid-20th century,  actually lived in small-town America during the 1950s. There,  after being initially impressed by its wealth, he (Sayyid Qutb) grew contemptuous of America, regarding it as decadent and materialist.Qutb’s writings, made more attractive by his death as a prisoner back im Egypt,  remain relevant for consideration today — for while many jihadists are directly motivated by contempt of the West’s creation of Israel, and DC’s continuing support of it,    they also have a fundamental contempt for western ideals — Christianity included, which one describes as too idealistic.  These jihadists were fundamentally opposed to western thought — capitalism, communism, etc — because of its materialistic basis, and despite their backgrounds in medicine or engineering rejected the scientific worldview as inadequate. Bin Laden never traveled westward, but rather east; it was in Afghanistan that the pious business prince grew to think of himself as a leader of men and after he was repelled from the Sudan he would retreat to the very same cave-structure he carved out during the Afghan war. It was in Afghanistan that bin Laden met men who would be his future allies in destruction, and it was there that he establish training camps for his plans of violence on his targets.

The Looming Tower is not a history of 9/11; itself : coverage of the day  is largely limited here to the death of John O’Neill, a colorful agent-in-charge of the FBI who had been doggedly hunting al-Queda operatives before his retirement in 2001. He chose to steer into his golden years by taking a post as chief of security for the World Trade Center, and a month later he perished there while leading people to safety.  Despite the fact that the CIA was also tracking al-Quaeda operatives,  internal security measures and concerns over jurisdiction stymied the information-sharing that might have led to O’Neill realizing  there were targets constituting an active threat within the US. Most of the subject material covers leading Egyptian and Arabian figures who would build jihadist movements in their countries, attempting to achieve takeovers in Egypt and the Sudan, and fighting abroad in Afghanistan.  The history indicates that Osama’s war on the United States despite its status as an ally of the anti-Soviet jihadist, was not caused by DC’s later support of secular dictators against more religious populaces.. Instead, Osama’s attitude toward the US had already hardened, and he wanted to take the fight to the United States as soon as the USSR had withdrawn: having defeated one demonic superpower through prayer (and American-made Stinger missiles), he wanted to destroy the other.   Then, a new caliphate could sring into being and regain its medieval might –and more.

DC is now seventeen years into a war that Osama bin laden wanted it to fight.  That war has led to a succession of others, multiplying  with now grim predictability, creating other threats like ISIS. While that gangster-state  has now been reduced to a brand name for murder,  it is a safe bet that some other  threat will arise from the region.  Today DC is currently supplying al-quaeda in Syria, recalling the days when DC armed jihadists fighting the Soviets, only to find their “allies” were only weapon to turn said weapons against DC when the Soviet threat was passed. DC is also funding and supplying the Saudi enterprise of systematically destroying Yemen, in full knowledge of the fact that the Saudis are a leading sponsor of terrorism and its subjects constituted the majority of the 9/11 hijackers.  DC has learned nothing, it seems,  and is seemingly content to waste lives and resources until the heath death of the universe. (Sources linked above include The New York Times, The American Conservative,  The Huffington Post,  and the Cato Institute. Reality is not partisan.)

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Digital Filmmaking for Kids

Posted on September 27, 2018 by smellincoffee

Digital Filmmaking for Kids
© 2015 Nick Willoughby
304 pages

I am not, readers may spot, a kid.  However, when I WAS a kid, I was one given to wandering around the woods with a massive camcorder in my shoulders, attempting to make nature documentaries — or endlessly playing around with home audio equipment to make “radio shows”  or Calvin and Hobbes audiobooks.  (None of these tapes survived the nineties to my knowledge.)     Computers renewed that old interest in  mucking around with audio and video, hence my reading this.   The title is well organized and generously illustrated, but approximately a third of the content is useful only to Apple users. These are the chapters on digital editing, which only utilize iMovie. The only obvious indicator of this book being written for kids is the fact that all of the actors in the example stills are children; there’s no overt “Boys and girls, today we’ll be learning about 3-point lighting! Isn’t that COOOOL?” tone.   Most of the content covers the basic concepts of filmmaking, a review of equipment from a basic cameraphone to more elaborate setups including mic booms, mobile camera tripods,  and lighting systems, and film production organization, and techniques.  I think a book like this would have definitely fed my imagination as a kid and helped me an even more pretentious little David Attenborough imitator.

Related:
Making YouTube Videos, Nick Willoughby.

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A Nation Challenged

Posted on September 23, 2018 by smellincoffee

A Nation Challenged: A Visual History of 9/11 and Its Aftermath
© 2002 The New York Times
240 pages

The first few anniversaries of 9/11 had a weight as they approached — not only for what memories they evoked, but for the speculation that another attack might be attempted on the day itself.  But as the years passed, that salience eroded.  This past anniversary, in 2018, was different — different because it was a Tuesday, an echo of the day itself.  I couldn’t help but remember the shock and fear of that day, and especially of the early morning when things kept happening and we didn’t know when it would stop or what might happen next. This past week, for the first time, I sat and watched extensive videos relating to 9/11 — not  news footage, but video shot on the ground itself, after the attack or even before it,  seeing the towers both in their prime and in their demise.  In this mood I couldn’t help but reading through one of the books I put on display at the library, A Nation Challenged.

In the days that followed the obscene attack on New York City in 2001, the New York Times began publishing coverage of the aftermath and its investigation in a special feature called “A Nation Challenged”. This feature, an insert inside the paper,   ran until the end of the year. A Nation Challenged collects many of the photographs and articles from that run into a single collection to document the day itself,  stories of the people involved, and review the consequences of America’s grief as it began a war in Afghanistan which, like a mythical hydra, spawns more conflicts the more we persist in flailing away at it.  The information included, however, is not merely text and photos; instead, there are other visual aides. A two-page spread reveals the interior of both towers,  and includes analysis of how each fell.  Another two-page spread provides a transcript of communications chatter as aviation authorities and other pilots realized that something was wrong.  Coverage of the day itself is only a part of the book, as subsequent sections review the clean-up process and the treatment of debris as a mass crime scene. Also included is information Osama bin Laden’s background, and the political/ethnographic breakdown of Afghanistan.

While I’ve never read any other 9/11 books, this particular volume recommends itself as a remembrance.  Also, if you have time,   in late August a video was posted containing 30 minutes of restored footage shot on the day itself,  near the WTC site immediately following the collapse of tower two.  The photojournalist responsible, Mark LaGanga, spoke with people fleeing the scene, toured WTC-7 (empty save a few LEOs confirming the building was clear), and captured the collapse of WTC-1 on film.  It is unlike anything I have ever seen.

Edit, because CBS are unpatriotic scumbags:

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The TBR of Doom

Posted on September 21, 2018 by smellincoffee

I recently realized that I’ve bought ten nonfiction books in the last few months and haven’t yet read them, and so began drafting another TBR challenge.  Both in 2014 and 2016 I imposed a challenge on myself: no more book buys until I’d  finished reading what I had.   Things are much, much worse now.   “How bad could it be?”

Well…

PHYSICAL BOOKS
The Oil Kings: How the US, Iran, and Saudi Arabia Changed the Balance of Power in the Middle East, Andrew Scott Cooper
The Iran Wars: Spy Games, Bank Battles, and the Secret Deals that Reshaped the Middle East, Jay Solomon
Church of Spies: The Pope’s Secret War Against Hitler, Mark Riebling
An Iron Wind: Europe Under Hitler, Peter Fritzsche
The Return of the Primitive: The Anti-Industrial Revolution, Ayn Rand
The Architecture of Happiness, Alain de Botton
Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton
The Moral Animal, Robert Wright
To Rule the Waves: How the British Navy Shaped the Modern World, Arthur Herman
Taking to the Ground: One Family’s Journey on Horseback Across the Sacred Land of the Navajo, Douglas Preston (Purchased in Flagstaff, AZ)
The Essential Russell Kirk, Russell Kirk
Honor: A History, James Bowman
The German War: A Nation Under Arms, Nicholas Stargardt
The Enemy at the Gate: Habsburgs, Ottomans, and the Battle for Europe, Andrew Wheatcroft
The Shahnameh: The Persian Book of Kings, Abolqasem Ferdowsi
The Persian Puzzle: The Conflict Between Iran and the United States, Kenneth Pollack (Purchased in St. Augustine, FL)
The Founding Fathers Guide to the Constitution, Brion McClanahan
Who Killed the Constitution?, ed. Thomas E. Woods
The Church and  the Market: A Catholic Defense of the Free Economy, Thomas E. Woods
Constitutional Chaos | The Constitution in Exile | A Nation of Sheep, Andrew Napolitano
The Ends of the Earth: The Polar Regions of the World, Isaac Asimov (Purchased in Las Cruces, NM)
Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?, Galal Amin
The Winter Pascha: Readings for the Christmas-Epiphany Season, Thomas Hopko
Ironies of Faith: The Laughter at the Heart of Christian Literature, Anthony Esolen
On the Good Life, Marcus Tullius Cicero
Go Directly to Jail: The Criminializaton of Almost Everything, ed. Gene Healy
Trucking Country: The Road to America’s Walmart Economy, Shane Hamilton
Tradition in a Rootless World: Women Turn to  Orthodox Judaism, Lynn Davidman

E-BOOKS
Conquerors: How Portugal Forged the First Global Empire, Roger Crowley
Virolution, Frank Ryan
The Scarlet Thief, Paul Fraser Collard
ST Vanguard: What Judgments Come, Dayton Ward and Kevin Dilmore
ST Vanguard: Storming Heaven, David Mack
ST Vanguard: In Tempest’s Wake, Dayton Ward
How Dante Can Save Your Life,  Rod Dreher
Love in the Ruins, Walker Percy
How Alexander Hamilton Screwed Up America, Brion McClanahan
ST ENT: Live by the Code, Christopher L. Bennett
ST ENT:  Tower of Babel, Christopher L. Bennett
The Afghan Campaign, Steven Pressfield
American Contempt for Liberty, Walter Williams
Defeat in the West, Milton Shulman and Ian Jacob
The Network: The Battle for the Airwaves, Scott Woolley
The Sea Wolves: A History of the Vikings, Lars Brownsworth
The Letters of John and Abigail Adams, ed. Frank Shuffelton
Our Only World, Wendell Berry
The Memory of Old Jack, Wendell Berry
A Place in Time, Wendell Berry
Sword and Serpent, Taylor Marshall
Democracy: An American Novel, Henry Adams
The Return of George Washington, Edward J. Larson
The Well and the Shallows, GK Chesterton
Survival of the Sickest: The Suprising Connections Between Disease and Longevity, Sharon Moalem, Jonathan Prince
Atomic Awakening: The History and Future of Nuclear Power, James Mahaffrey
The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, Frank Dikotter
The Damnation of Theron Ware, Harold Frederic

Obviously barring myself from buying books until I’d taken care of all these would be futile, but I am pondering allowing myself to buy new books only as I read these — for every book taken from the list, another could be purchased.

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Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom

Posted on September 21, 2018 by smellincoffee

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom
© 2003 Cory Doctorow
202 pages

In the not-very-distant future,  death is an inconvenience, and material goods are no longer scarce. Instead, the currency of society is reputation,  and Jules needs all of his reserves to get through the next year of his life.  The trouble began when he was shot dead at Disney World.  A brain backup was soon downloaded into a freshly-grown clone, and soon he was back in business keeping the old Disney World — an artifact from the distant past,  run by volunteers who loved  the primitive animatronics  –in working order.  Something had changed in the brief blip of time he spent unconscious, however: a group of fellow “adhocs” running Disney World decided to inflict change on the Hall of Presidents,  and they could only be after the Haunted Mansion next.  Jules is desperate to hold back the tide, but in the months to come he will be alienated from his closest friends and find himself strapped to a medical gurney, unable to speak.

Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom was Cory Doctorow’s first novel, and I read it purely for the author. DisneyWorld has no attraction for me, and that disinterest meant that I didn’t actually care what happened in the novel.  Most interesting for me were elements of Doctorow’s worldbuilding.  In his future, mental states can be downloaded into computers, and people make backups of themselves frequently. This is not just a precaution against death;  people can effectively erase negative periods of their lives by reverting to an earlier version of themselves.  Bioengineering extends to custom clones, as  teenage girls sport trendy faces, and musicians use augmented bodies (pianists with long fingers) that help them in their craft.  There’s also a neural interface that allows people to interact with society’s digital layer merely with their heads; one of the first things people do when encountering friends or strangers is to glance  at their “Whuffie”,  the reputation system that functions as society’s currency. (“Whuffie” is like reddit karma, but you can buy stuff with it.  The Orrville had an episode where the crew visits a planet with this kind of currency. Brief clip here.)

Fans of DisneyWorld may find this far more appealing than I did. His later novels have captivated me in a way that this one didn’t even begin to.

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The Water Will Come

Posted on September 20, 2018 by smellincoffee

The Water Will Come: Rising Seas, Sinking Cities, and the Remaking of the Civilized World
© 2017 Jeff Goodell
332 pages

Complex problems of enormous scale rarely have a patent solution. There are, however, rational responses. In The Water Will Come, Jeff Goodell reviews the way a few cities across the globe are moving to address the growing problem of rising sea levels, from flat denial  to grandiose plans to raise entire city centers. Goodell visits Miami, New York,  Venice, and communities in the Arctic circle, Nigeria, and the Marshall Islands.  Although Goodwell is hopeful that action can be taken, he’s left with the grim conclusion that many communities may simply be abandoned and their people removed to higher ground.

Goodell reviews both the various ways rising water will threaten communities near seaboards, as well as their responses. Rising waters will lead to widespread property forfeiture, of course, but floods and storm surges will become worse.   Invasive waters are not simply the ocean with a bigger footprint:   waters sweeping through urban areas become toxic soups of offal and waste fluids,  providing a perfect vector for health crises  While it’s easy for most people alive today not to worry about 2100, and easier still to shrug and say that those clever people of 2099 will no doubt have extraordinary technology to solve these problems,  rising floods today are an immediate risk.  Hurricane Sandy added particular impetus to New York City’s own risk assessment goals: they intend to build floodwalls around some of the most vulnerable areas.    Venice, Italy, has been fighting its own reclamation by the sea for centuries, but tidal flooding has grown worse and the city now finds itself struggling to complete a controversial tidal barrier.   While Miami is wealthy enough that it can conceivably plow money into infrastructure to help it adapt to the future, places like the Marshall Islands can only look abroad for help.  If the Marshalls are reclaimed by the ocean, their population will have to find new homes abroad — and as the migrant crisis provoked by the ISIS gang-state indicates, that won’t be pretty.

Goodell’s survey involved interviews with policymakers and scientists alike, and helps readers understand why more actions aren’t being taken.  Many Miami developers don’t care about sea level changes because they’re short-term investors: once they sell the development, they move on.  The future peril of the development is for its owners and subletters to worry about.  There’s also the fact that climate response  has to be mediated through society and governments that are not only unwieldy, but beset with other considerations as well. President Obama may have believed strongly in the threat posed by change, but when he’s badgered by the author as to why he allowed the Alaskan oil pipeline to continue, the president patiently explained that no president is truly free to do what he wants; he enters office with wheels already in motion, and  he has to not only work through Congress but take into account politics and economics. If Goodell succeeds in promoting the need to plan for rising sea levels, it will owe to the threat itself and not his delivery; he appears to see only this problem, and dismisses any opposition. He refers to multiple people as “[cityname]’s Trump”, or “the [country-adjective] Trump”,  but that’s confusing to say the least. Are they trumplike because they’re developers? Populists? Overenthusiastic twitter-ers? 

This is an important matter for concerned citizens to consider, especially in seaboard communities like Miami which are already fighting “sunny day flooding” because increases in sealevels have submerged their seaside drain outlets. 

Posted in Politics and Civic Interest, Reviews | Tagged , , , | 3 Comments