Books read in 2021

Not much blogging going on here still, but here's my annual list of books read for 2021.

• Elizabeth Anderson, Private Government: How Employers Rule Our Lives (and Why We Don't Talk About It) (2017)
• Scott Anderson, The Quiet Americans: Four CIA Spies at the Dawn of the Cold War (2020)
• J. M. Berger, Optimal
• William Dalrymple, The Anarchy: The East India Company, Corporate Violence, and the Pillage of an Empire (2019)
• Philip L. Fradkin, Stagecoach: Wells Fargo and the American West (2002)
• Jonathan Haidt, The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (2012)
• Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (2019)
• David Cay Johnston, The Big Cheat: How Donald Trump Fleeced America and Enriched Himself and His Family
• Daniel Kahneman, Olivier Sibony, and Cass R. Sunstein, Noise: A Flaw in Human Judgment
• Walter LaFeber, Inevitable Revolutions: The United States in Central America (2nd edition, 1993)
• Peter Lamont and Jim Steinmeyer, The Secret History of Magic: The True Story of the Deceptive Art (2018)
• Thomas Levenson, Newton and the Counterfeiter: The Unknown Detective Career of the World's Greatest Scientist (2009)
• Norm MacDonald, Based on a True Story: Not a Memoir (2016)
• Geoff Manaugh and Nicola Twilley, Until Proven Safe: The History and Future of Quarantine
• Casey Michel, American Kleptocracy: How the U.S. Created the World's Greatest Money Laundering Scheme in History
• Cheryl Misak, Frank Ramsey: A Sheer Excess of Powers (2020)
• Anne Nelson, Shadow Network: Media, Money, and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right
• Nicole Perlroth, This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapon Arms Race
• Ethan Persoff and Scott Marshall, Complete Series, John Wilcock, New York Years, 1954-1971 (limited edition via Kickstarter, #52/250)
• Kevin Poulsen, Kingpin: How One Hacker Took Over the Billion-Dollar Cybercrime Underground (2011, re-read)
• Eric Rauchway, Why the New Deal Matters
• Mary Roach, Fuzz: When Nature Breaks the Law
• Scott J. Roberts and Rebekah Brown, Intelligence-Driven Incident Response: Outwitting the Adversary (2017)
• Mike Rothschild, The Storm is Upon Us: How QAnon Became a Movement, Cult, and Conspiracy Theory of Everything
• P.W. Singer and August Cole, Ghost Fleet (2016)
• David Skarbek, The Puzzle of Prison Order: Why Life Behind Bars Varies Around the World (2020)
• Jon Talton, A Brief History of Phoenix (2015)

Top for 2021: Anderson; Dalrymple; Immerwahr; Kahneman, Sibony, and Sunstein; Levenson; Manaugh and Twilley; Michel; Misak; Perlroth.

A few planned reads for 2022 (mostly already started):

Heather Adkins, Betsy Beyer, Paul Blankinship, Piotr Lewandowski, Ana Oprea, and Adam Stubblefield, Building Secure and Reliable Systems: Best Practices for Designing, Implementing, and Maintaining Systems (2020)

G.A. Cohen, Self-Ownership, Freedom, and Equality (1995)

John Ferris, Behind the Enigma: The Authorised History of GCHQ, Britain's Secret Cyber-Intelligence Agency (2020)

Paul Fisher, House of Wits: An Intimate Portrait of the James Family (2008)

Terry Teachout, The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken (2002)

Peter H. Wilson, The Holy Roman Empire: A Thousand Years of Europe's History (2017)

(Previously: 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, 2008, 2007, 2006, 2005.) 

A false prophet for Trump

In the March 21st, 2021 Washington Post story "The rioter next door: How the Dallas suburbs spawned domestic extremists," Annie Gowen writes of a Texas pastor who claimed prophecy that Trump would remain in office:

Shortly before Biden's inauguration, Pastor Brandon Burden of the KingdomLife church — a boxy, largely windowless sanctuary in Frisco — mounted the pulpit and gave a stemwinder of a sermon that went viral.

   Burden spoke in tongues and urged his flock of “warriors” to load their weapons and stock up on food and water as the transfer of power loomed. The emergency broadcast system might be tampered with, so if Trump “took over the country,” he could not tell them what to do, he said.

   “We ain't going silently into the night. We ain't going down. This is Texas,” Burden preached.

   Prophetic voices had decreed Trump would remain in office, he said.

   “We have an executive order — not from Congress or D.C., but from the desk of the CEO of heaven, the boss of the planet,” Burden said. “He said from his desk in heaven, ‘This is my will. Trump will be in office for eight years.’ ”

The Book of Deuteronomy's biblical standard for prophets from Moses, speaking on behalf of God in chapter 18, verse 22, is that "When a prophet speaks in the name of the Lord, if the thing does not come about or come true, that is the thing which the Lord has not spoken. The prophet has spoken it presumptuously; you shall not be afraid of him." In verse 20, he says that "... the prophet who shall speak a word presumptuously in my name which I have not commanded him to speak, or which he shall speak in the name of other gods, that prophet shall die." In other words, any prophecy from God is guaranteed to be accurate, and any prophecy which is not from God but given in his name shall guarantee the death of the prophet.

False Prophet Pastor Burden's response to his failed prophecy was to delete his Twitter account (@KingdomLife_), though it's still linked from his church's website.