What Barack Obama should read. At Washington Monthly, via Steve Benen.

RACHEL MADDOW

The new president should read The Edge of Disaster, by Stephen Flynn, despite its generic Chicken Little title. Flynn has the politics and the strategy exactly right for the two big business-of-government tasks facing the new administration: (1) annulling the previous politics of "homeland security" and getting it right this time; and (2) massively upscaling our investment in infrastructure. It’s hard to be rational and rigorous and constructive when thinking about catastrophe—but that’s exactly what we need.

How you will die, via MetaFilter. The 'Filter link has some good secondary information, including this map of catatrophe-by-region. Enjoy your weekend.

A sober tone is struck at the 40th annual conference on planetary emergencies.

Put aside anthropogenic climate change; human action can trigger any number of natural disasters, including earthquakes.

Tremors in the crust beneath the North Sea have become more frequent since oil drilling operations began there, and mining operations are also known to increase the frequency of tremors.

Both drilling and mining redistribute the normal stresses present in rocks, but they are not the biggest cause of man-made earthquakes.

"Dams are the most dangerous man-made structure likely to cause quake," says David Booth of the British Geological Survey.

By artificially holding a large volume of water in one place, dams increase pressure on fractures beneath the surface of the earth. What's more, water has a lubricating effect, making it easier for the fractures – or faults – to slip.

I have about four months of magazines to catch up on. Let's start now with this month's Atlantic, which is actually pretty replete with interesting articles:

* Ross Douthat worries that the short memory of historians will allow the badness of the Bush years to be too quickly forgotten:

In this sense, it might be said that a too-keen awareness of the American tendency to associate great leadership with world-historical ambition has wrecked the presidency of George W. Bush. But the enthusiasm for Barack Obama and John McCain suggests that the yearning, on the left and right alike, for presidents who will pursue greatness has only been enhanced by the debacle in Iraq. This is good news for Bush, who has to hope that the same propensity that ruined his administration will redeem his reputation. But it’s dangerous news for America. Those who rehabilitate the follies of the past are condemned to repeat them.

* Professor X opens the books on teaching composition at a "college of last resort."

* And Gregg Easterbrook examines the asteroid menace.

The official death toll in the central Chinese earthquake has now exceeded 12,000, with more than 18,000 people believed to be trapped under rubble in a single city alone.

Enviro-Friday! The Nation is running a lot of enviro-political stories this morning:

* "Running on Empty" (Peak Oil)
* Bill McKibben on the need for a 'Green Corps' along the lines of the WPA.
* Still more on the world's food crisis.

In other news, geneticists have proven the existence of a genetic bottleneck in the human genome, suggesting that we almost went extinct around 70,000 years ago. They don't reference it at CNN, but it seems likely to me that this is tied to the Toba catastrophe event.

See? The environment matters.

But is it disaster porn you crave? Pick your flavor:

* Natural: Natural disasters have quadrupled in the last two decades. Lucky this like everything else on planet Earth has nothing whatsoever to do with human behavior. Via ThinkProgress.

* Financial: “Our entire banking system is a complete disaster,” he wrote. “In my opinion, nearly every major bank would be insolvent if they marked their assets to market.” Via Atrios.

* Personal:

* Black holes, baby universes, and loop quantum gravity.

* Creeping environmental stress fueled by volcanic eruptions and global warming was the likely cause of the Great Dying, or Permian-Triassic Extinction, 250 million years ago. (Both science links via Gravity Lens.)

* Ezra Klein takes a look at the way agricultural subsidies determine what we eat.

Consumerism is as American as cherry pie. Plasma TVs, iPods, granite countertops: you name it, we’ll buy it. To finance the national pastime, Americans have been borrowing from abroad on an increasingly stunning scale. In 2006, the infusion of foreign cash required to close the gap between American incomes and consumption reached nearly 7 percent of gross domestic product (GDP), leaving the United States with a deficit in its current account (an annual measure of capital flows to and from the rest of the world) of more than $850 billion. In other words, the quantity of goods and services that Americans consumed last year in excess of what we produced was close to the entire annual output of Brazil. “Brazil is the tenth largest economy on the planet,” points out Laura Alfaro, an associate professor of business administration who teaches a class on the current account deficit at Harvard Business School (HBS). “That is what the U.S. is eating up every year—a Brazil or a Mexico.”

Whether this practice is sustainable—and if not, how it might end—are questions that divide scholars and investors alike. We have borrowed so much from abroad—between half a trillion and a trillion dollars a year for the past six or seven years—that in 2006, our investment balance with the rest of the world (what we pay foreign investors on their U.S. assets versus their payments to us on our investments abroad, historically nearly equal) tipped to became an outflow for the first time in more than 50 years. We are a debtor nation swiftly heading deeper into debt.

How America's addiction to consumerism has left us debt-ridden, on the level of both citizen and nation, with all signs pointing to things getting worse.

“Part of the reason people are spending beyond their means,” says Rawi Abdelal, an associate professor of business administration at HBS, “is because they are—in a way—witnessing the end of the American dream.” Between 2000 and 2005, even as the U.S. economy grew 14 percent in real terms, and worker productivity increased a remarkable 16.6 percent, workers’ average hourly wages were stagnant. The median family income fell 2.9 percent.

Lenin's Tomb has a fantastic post on the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki today, taking as his starting point this unfortunate but telling historical-cultural truth:

I think it's telling that on this, as on a number of issues (Israel/Palestine for example), public opinion is kept so far in the dark for so long by historical mythology that is only belatedly undermined by revisionism and declassification that it results in such a massive gulf between what is academically known and what is generally understood. It is particularly the case on matters where historical events matter most for contemporary understanding.

But it's the sheer raw data that makes this post so important, necessary and good.

The main findings of revisionist scholarship coincide with those of the United States Strategic Bombing Survey of 1946, which concluded (in a widely quoted statement) that: "certainly prior to 31 December 1945, and in all probability prior to 1 November 1945, Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped, even if Russia had not entered the war, and even if no invasion had been planned or contemplated." Now, since there is no doubt that Russia would have entered the war on 15th August 1945, it would seem probable on the basis of that conclusion that a surrender could have been achieved even more quickly than this. And since the planned invasion by ground would not have occurred before 1 November 1945 (it was scheduled for the Spring of 1946), the claim that the bomb saved 500,000 lives that would have been lost in such an invasion doesn't seem to be supportable. A second document, declassified in the Seventies, is a War Department study on the 'Use of Atomic Bomb on Japan' written in 1946. It found that "the Japanese leaders had decided to surrender and were merely looking for sufficient pretext to convince the die-hard Army Group that Japan had lost the war and must capitulate to the Allies." Even an early landinglanding on the southern Japanese island of Kyushu would have been only a 'remote' possibility, while the full invasion of Japan in the spring of 1946 would not have occurred. In fact, the belief that it was totally unnecessary to use the atomic bomb on Japan's cities was shared by Eisenhower, who records telling Stimson that "Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bombs was completely unnecessary" and by Admiral William D Leahy, who opined that "the use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender."

There's a lot here, and for many people out there it isn't new—but it's still important.

If you finish there and you still want more, I'm happy to re-recommend Sven Lindqvist's A History of Bombing, the best book on the subject of aerial warfare I've ever read—"Airplanes and imperialism, genocide and global thermonuclear war: if you want to know the history of the twentieth century, this is the only book you need"—or else John Harvey's Hiroshima, the classic on the subject, which I finally read earlier this summer and was quite impressed by.

"I don't know this America anymore. I don't recognize it," he said. "There's an empty space where America used to be."

Maybe it's because I don't read Don DeLillo novels hoping to connect with the characters, or maybe I was just born to be a contrarian, but I liked Falling Man quite a bit more than the reviewers seemed to. I thought it was probably his best book since Underworld, and maybe earlier. As is often the case with DeLillo, the characters are not real people, and barely even qualify as simulacra of real people—but for this book, at least, about the psychic aftermath of 9/11, that emptiness and stilted disconnectedness made a great deal of sense. It's interesting that once again, as in Libra, DeLillo's best character work is in representing those consciousnesses that might popularly be considered unrepresentable: here, the minds of the terrorists.

I'm not sure what 9/11 novel people were hoping DeLillo might write, but a novel about PTSD was more or less what I was expecting. Honestly I think it's probably the only sort of 9/11 novel that is capable of being either written or widely published, at least for a couple decades—which is just one of the reasons why DeLillo has thus far been the only exception to my rigorous personal ban on all 9/11 novels.

You have to look for them a bit—and I think the fact of that looking was one of the things the reviewers didn't care for—but DeLillo still manages to get in a few nice DeLilloesque grand pronouncements, though he's careful always to put them into the mouths of his characters rather than in untagged text, almost as if even six years later he still needs the protection of a proxy to talk about these things:

"But that's why you built the towers, isn't it? Weren't the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It's a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down."

and

He said,"It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I'm standing here thinking it's an accident."

"Because it has to be."

"It has to be," she said.

"The way the camera sort of shows surprise."

"But only the first one."

"Only the first," she said.

"The second plane, by the time the second plane appears," he said, "we're all a bit older and wiser."

I like to think I'm fairly well-read on the development of human civilization, but I had a lot to learn from this Flash timeline about prehistoric human migration. For instance, I hadn't remembered that the South Pacific was actually populated by Homo sapiens before Europe was, and for all my fascination with castraophe I'd somehow completely missed the supereruption of Mt. Toba. Via MeFi.