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.