The Death and Life of Great American Cities - Jane Jacobs

Erosion of Cities or Attrition of Automobiles - We went awry by replacing, in effect, each horse on the crowded city streets with half a dozen or so mechanized vehicles, instead of using each mechanized vehicle to replace half a dozen or so horses. [p. 447]

Subsidized Dwellings - Jacobs describes a radically different vision for public housing integrated into private residential areas based on guaranteed rents as subsidy combined with guaranteed financing for landlords providing the subsidized housing. 

[50th Anniversary Edition] (C) 2011, Modern Library (New York)

The Social Conquest of Earth

by Edward O Wilson

Well written lay science book that argues that socialization was a major driving force of evolution that resulted in human intelligence growing rapidly. Wilson is an expert on social insects and uses that basis to extrapolate how humans are uniquely eusocial among the primates.

Some choice quotes:

• After the decline of logical positivism in the middle of the twentieth century, and the attempt of this movement to blend science and logic into a closed system, professional philosophers dispersed in an intellectual diaspora. They emigrated into the more tractable disciplines not yet colonized by science -- intellectual history, semantics, logic, foundational mathematics, ethics, theology, and most lucratively, problems of personal life adjustment. [p.9]
• We [humans] are an evolutionary chimera, living on intelligence steered by the demands of animal instinct. This is the reason we are mindlessly dismantling the biosphere and, with it, our own prospects for permanent existence. [p.13]
• The origin of eusociality, in which organisms behave in the opposite manner, has been rare in the history of life because group selection must be exceptionally powerful to relax the grip of individual selection. [p.55]
• Surely all will agree: [I don't agree!] a clear definition of human nature is the key to understanding the human condition as a whole. [p.191]
• [67 social behaviors from Human Relations Area Files by George P. Murdock (1945)]
• age grading
• athletic sports
• bodily adornment
• calendar
• cleanliness training
• community organization
• cooking
• cooperative labor
• cosmology
• courtship
• dancing
• decorative art
• divination
• division of labor
• dream interpretation
• education
• eschatology
• ethics
• ethnobotany
• etiquette
• faith healing
• family feasting
• fire making
• folklore
• food taboos
• funeral rites
• games
• gestures
• gift giving
• government
• greetings
• hair styles
• hospitality
• housing
• hygiene
• incest taboos
• inheritance rules
• joking
• kin groups
• kinship nomenclature
• language
• law
• luck supertitions
• magic
• marriage
• mealtimes
• medicine
• obstetrics
• penal sanctions
• personal names
• population policy
• postnatal care
• pregnancy usages
• property rights
• propitiation of supernatural beings
• puberty customs
• religious ritual
• residence rules
• sexual restrictions
• soul concepts
• status differentiation
• surgery
• tool making
• trade
• visiting
• weather control
• weaving

The final chapter on the future disappoints, devolving into what I would say are unsupportable personal opinions of the author. Wilson claims (as "justified by scientific evidence") that humans will never emigrate from Earth into space. While it might be so that it isn't rational to do so, my opinion is there are plenty of people driven to try so it will happen - and science will have little to do with the decision. Early attempts might prove futile, but people will keep trying and I would think eventually succeed (with technology we can't even imagine today). Wilson also deems it (without basis in my view) unlikely we are the first life form to venture off planet - based on why no signs of "ET" have been found - instead suggesting that other advanced lifeforms "just grew up" and decided not to explore distant regions of the galaxy.

#

The Age of Entanglement

http://jods.mitpress.mit.edu/pub/enlightenment-to-entanglement

Capitalism vs Aloha

http://www.bloomberg.com/features/2016-hawaii-millionaire-fight/

"Unfortunately, we had to make some priorities. And you may not take that as aloha"

So we have a choice in Hawaii - capitalism with it's priorities built around making money, or aloha which is not concerned with profit/loss considerations. People tend to severely cherry pick one way or the other depending on how they are personally impacted, but of course ultimately the two are deeply conflicting mindsets that cannot coexist, and there is no clear compromise third alternative.

Aloha

Paranoia as rational response

'Trust no one': Modernization, paranoia and conspiracy culture 

Stef Aupers, Erasmus University, The Netherlands

[p26] "Another prominent example is conspiracy theories, and the Internet plays a crucial role in their proliferation. " ---> The internet simply allows anyone to cheaply and easily publish to the world.

 

[p30] "conspiracy culture, too, is a response to existential insecurity in a disenchanted world" ---> Faced with the overwhelming complexity of the many problems in the world, it's tempting to identify one thing as "The Problem" behind everything else and then focus on that (ignoring all the real problems with no easy answers). 

Ronald Inglehart in The Silent Revolution: Changing Values and Political Styles Among Western Publics (1977)

This theory of intergenerational value change has two key hypotheses: (1) that an individual's priorities reflect the socioeconomic environment, with individuals placing the greatest subjective value on those things that are in relatively short supply, and (2) that the relationship between socioeconomic environment and value priorities involves a substantial time lag because one's basic values reflect the conditions that prevailed during one's preadult years.

April Fools

The only day people critically evaluate news articles.

http://imgur.com/dUF6nyJ

The Philosopher's Beard: What Terrorists Want - and How to Stop Them Getting It

http://www.philosophersbeard.org/2016/03/what-terrorists-want-and-how-to-stop.html?m=1

Good article on terrorism as a strategy acknowledging is rationality.

Lincoln, on mobs

https://medium.com/swlh/lincoln-on-mobs-99009fe97533#.hfoitvv6c

"Passion has helped us, but can do so no more. It will in future be our enemy. Reason — cold, calculating, unimpassioned reason — must furnish all the materials for our future support and defense. "

Growth Management in Hawaii legal analysis

http://www.hastingsconlawquarterly.org/archives/V5/I3/Selinger.pdf

"A state can freely regulate driving and parking, as long as an alternative is provided."

Bowling Alone by Robert D Putnam

Bowling Alone by Robert D Putnam is about the decline of civic engagement in the USA.
It's an important topic and has some useful data but is not very well written.
There are lots of statistics showing how people are less involved with communities and civic groups.
The reasons for this are never easily identified but a reasonable summary would be partially due to the move to suburbs and greater use of the auto and the rise of TV and now the internet as easy solitary entertainment, but mostly it seems to be a generational shift beginning with the baby boomers: young people just are less interested in local communities. (Correlations are found but of course cause/effect is unknown here.)
The author likens civic involvement with social capital and deems it an obvious good that should be restored.
A concluding chapter about what to the decline is disappointing, with no real ideas other than a nostalgic wish that the clock could be turned back somehow.

The Road to Ruin - umair haque

Interesting take on what the American right is toying with now.
https://medium.com/bad-words/the-demagogue-s-price-15b071e2e8c9

"Peaceful prosperity is one of humanity's most recent accomplishments: only in the last century have we truly understood it, nurtured it, protected it, and built a global political order for it."

Decline of civilization pattern theorized as:

1. demagogues turn stagnation turn into depression. 
2. harm to the most vulnerable.
3. unpersoning. 
4. demagogues upend the foundational civilizational principle of prosperity through peace with plunder through war.
5. we become the predators we once detested.