One of my favorite non-fiction genres: the journalistic reporting at book length. Nick Kotz reports on the history of the B-1 bomber, from precursor concepts in the 1950s up to 1988, shortly after it entered production. Essentially, the B-1 bomber is designed to blow up the Soviet Union, a mission which is now obsolete and for which the B-1 was never a good choice. And politics is mostly to blame.

Most interesting for me, from a hard news standpoint, were the well-footnoted descriptions of how the Air Force and other services play politics. They maintain voting scorecards on all members of Congress, use strategic military decisions as bargaining decisions such as trading base locations for funding votes, and generally place narrow service-specific goals above the national defense and the national welfare. (Some of this behavior is illegal, but the only prosecution I can remember is the Boeing tanker case, which was about the revolving door between industry and the Air Force, but not about illegal lobbying of Congress.) Manipulation is also standard in presidential politics; in 1960 Eisenhower restored a bomber development program, against his own military judgment, solely to put money into California to help his VP, Nixon, against Kennedy. That's only the first example; each president since has shameful decisions to answer for.

Kotz goes overboard ascribing positive motives to the guilty parties, and asserts repeatedly that they are surely all very concerned to make sure that America remains well defended. I think that's almost completely BS. The evidence shows that even well-meaning individuals are quickly forced to adopt the party line. The basic political system we use to fund military procurement inevitably leads the services to ask for impossible things, the companies to promise to provide them, and everybody involved to cover up the inevitable failures and cost overruns and pretend that everything's perfect.

Kotz doesn't offer any solutions, but it seems to me that the root of the problem is peacetime procurement. The maintenance of fully staffed, war-ready standing armies with continuously upgraded equipment is a Cold War innovation, and it's a bad idea. Wartime profiteering, ugly as it is, may be less egregious than what people are getting away with in peacetime. Especially at a time when the United States faces no significant military threat, maintaining arms spending equal to the sum of the rest of the world combined clearly shows a confusion of problem and solution. Even if you believe that terrorism wants a military solution, surely the B-1 bomber, Crusader Artillery, and other machismo-oriented weapons systems are not part of it. But because these projects offer prestige and promotion to military officers, money to contractors, and re-election credits for politicians, we're going to pay for them for the forseeable future.

The Great Unraveling, Paul Krugman

Audio book, read by the author.

Of course the catalog of self-serving Administration lies is upsetting, and going back even four years reveals that the predictions continue to underestimate the will of the Bush partisans. But that's practically background noise by now. The new upset I got from listening to this collection of Krugman columns is that he keeps straying away from the economic issues that he illustrates so well. Instead, he reports and analyzes political misdeeds, and here he's adequate but not markedly better than any of the myriad sources for same. Please focus on the economics, Mr Krugman; it's where your real value-add lies.

The Holocaust Industry, Norman Finkelstein.

A classic example of how to lose an argument even while proving your points. Finkelstein's thesis is that there exists a Holocaust Industry of Jews who profit financially and morally from exploitation of the Nazi Holocaust, and in doing so live up to the the most revolting anti-Semitic stereotypes. Although Finkelstein presents strong evidence and I believe the basics of his argument, his perpetual venom and contempt, and the way his prose assumes you share these feelings, even before he has started making his case, are very off-putting.

The bulk of the book illustrates how several international Jewish agencies collaborated with American politicians to blackmail the Swiss banks, who had profited from Jews fleeing the Nazis. Under international and American pressure, the Swiss Banks agreed to pay for a US$500 million external audit and $1.25 billion non-refundable advance payment to Holocaust survivors. The audit has since turned up only a few tens of millions of dollars, and additional audits, even with extremely lenient parameters, are unlikely to uncover substantially more accounts.

Finkelstein charges that the Holocaust Industry estimates of numbers of survivors go up when it is expedient to get money, and go down when it comes time to disburse money to the survivors themselves. Another charge is that the Holocaust Industry professionals, the officials of these organizations and museums and the like, frequently offer themselves high six-figure salaries, hire friends and family, take junkets, and generally live high on the hog on money that was theoretically earmarked for survivors.

Finkelstein points out that the United States had at least as bad a record in refusing refugees and confiscating bank accounts as Switerland, but that the Holocaust Industry has not pursuing these claims with any vigor because that would be a harder political fight.

Finkelstein also makes the intriguing argument that, by insisting on the uniqueness of the Jewish holocaust and marginalizing all other Nazi victims, as well as other victims of genocide,

Perhaps the strongest argument in support of Finkelstein's attacks is simply this: if "never again" is the justification for the Holocaust Industry, where is their leadership in intervening in possible or real genocides around the world, such as Rwanda and now Sudan?