Review: Veritas: A Harvard Professor, a Con Man and the Gospel of Jesus's Wife by Ariel Sabar

 

Veritas in Latin translates as "truth".  Sabar has written a detailed and fascinating book about how that was achieved in the case of a papyrus fragment that had a series of words that could be interpreted to suggest that Jesus was married (ala DaVinci Code -- a fun book, btw.). Sabar's story contains confirmation bias, hubris, amateur scholars v. professional scholars, and academic jealousies. Truths might take a while to get into the Ivory Tower but they do make it eventually.

 

The temptation to read a concept into something because it matches an agenda we already subscribe to is an overwhelming temptation. Karen King, esteemed professor in the Divinity School at Harvard, fell victim to a forged papyrus that could (! not necessarily) have suggested Jesus had a wife. (That it's much more likely he was gay, given his predilection for hanging out with guys, has been suspected in other quarters.)  Nevertheless, this scrap of papyrus was a dream come true for King who had argued the Church's position on women was all wrong.

 

The story is fascinating.  Two amateur Coptic scholars, one an atheist, when they had a chance to look at the fragment, realized the translation and wording was lifted verbatim from the Gospel of Thomas and the translation of the word for "my" most likely had a different meaning anyway. Other professional scholars also revealed doubts although their argument that the grammar was inappropriate for the time period didn't convince me.  All you have to do is watch television or listen to conversations on the street and you will quickly realize how perverted colloquial grammar can become. Words like notorious, infamous, and famous have all become synonymous, ruining any former subtleties, not to mention confusion of ran and run, nor the infamous "he gave it to you and I" which sends shivers down my Strunk and White. (If you don't know what Strunk and White is, then you're part of the problem.) Not to mention the total destruction of the past tense by the historical present.   End of rant.

 

Sabar had followed the story from the beginning and it was his article in the Atlantic that reopened the furor. He had taken the time to track down the origin of the fragment and doggedly sleuthed out the seller of the fragment, something King most assuredly should have done.

 

Along the way, Sabar discusses the history of our attitudes toward marriage and Augustine's obsession with sex as well as the non-canonical Gospels.  It all provides very appropriate context.  In the end I don't damn King as much as others have in the media. We ALL suffer from confirmation bias and her case is simply confirmation of how powerful it can be. (Puns intended.)

Review: American Oligarchs: The Kushners, the Trumps and the Marriage of Money and Power by Andrea Bernstein

I am no fan of the Trumps.  Nor do I approve of many of the financial shenanigans engaged by him, his company, and his family.  But the problem lies primarily with the loopholes created by legislators at the behest of the rich so they can avoid taxes and get richer all the while sucking at the public teat through government contracts. Trump himself has acknowledged publicly in one of the debates that he used money to purchase influence and garner favor. The Fact is that politicians love power and want to keep it.  To do that they need lots of money and people like Trump were there to fulfill their wishes.  At a price.  

 

"Consultants" hire themselves out to help get politicians elected.  Then get hired to work in the government they helped elect.  Then leave that government and create lobbying firms to sell the influence and connections they now possess thanks to their time in that government.

 

One of the advantages to owning a casino is how easy it is to launder money and get unregistered loans.  His father bailed him out when Trump was close to insolvency and unable to make a bond payment by walking into one of Trump's casinos in Atlantic City and purchasing $3.5 million worth of chips and then just walking out effectively giving his son a free loan. Clearly, following the refusal of American banks to loan him more money following a string of bankruptcies in which they lost millions, the Russian oligarchs stepped in to fill the void.

 

Given what Trump said during the debates, i.e., how he gave money to both parties in order to garner favor and influence, I should not have been surprised with the close political relationships between the Kushner family and the Democrats, especially Bill Clinton, but I certainly was with their connection to Benjamin Netanyahu. Perhaps the Jewish connection and appreciation for Israel stemmed from the horrific experience of their family under the Nazis. (The failure of Trump to denounce the anti-Semitism of his more radical followers is the more surprising given the Kushners' Jewishness and the conversion of Ivanka to Judaism.)

 

Trump benefited from the Bloomberg policy of seeking foreign investment for New York.  Bloomberg actively solicited money from overseas, proclaiming that the city needed them to help pay taxes and fund schools and police. The Trumps took advantage of this policy, and so did the Russians, who invested heavily in Trump projects, often buying condos and apartments in his buildings for millions of dollars in cash.  It was a marvelous way to laundry money and curry favor with the future president. More than 50% of these units were occupied less than two months out of the year. A less beneficial impact was a doubling of rental costs in the city.

 

Ultimately, this is a very depressing book. The clear lesson is that if you have money, you can flaunt the laws;  if you have money you inherited, you can create an image for yourself that may be completely at odds with who you are; that if you have money, the rules that apply to everyone else don't apply to you; and, if you have money, you can buy influence among politicians who then build loopholes for you to drive your trucks through. One wonders what the net effect of the Trump presidency will be. One danger will be, as a reviewer in the Washington Post noted, " cottage industry of Trump biographers and researchers has uncovered so many examples of deceptive, fraudulent and mean-spirited behavior by the president and his family that one succumbs to outrage fatigue."

 

Review: Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup by John Carreyrou

 Listened to this as an audio book and I found all sorts of excuses to do things so I could continue listening (my wife loved it because most of that work involved cleaning.) As almost everyone knows Elizabth Holmes had dropped out of Stanford so she could get rich.  She had an idea for a device that would revolutionize blood testing, a nifty idea.  Unfortunately it never worked but she insisted in public it did and fraudulently manipulated the data behind the scenes to prevent investors from recognizing that.  When VP Biden visited the Theranos lab in 2015 he was presented with rows of machines.  The Problem was they were all fake.

 She persuaded numerous well-known people to sit on the board and invest. As a young, attractive woman, perhaps that influenced the older men who jumped on board. (Henry Kissinger and George Schultz were among them. Ironically, Schultz, who got his grandson a job at Theranos, refused to believe him when the grandson reported the "place was rotten.") I don't know. Then again, I always wondered about John McCain's choice of Sarah Palin who seemed to offer little except a nice face. The media fell for it, too. Adoring profiles appeared in numerous magazines that did not do their homework. CEOs at Safeway and Walgreens were not immune to her spell.

 

I found this quote from the NY Times review particularly apt: "Swathed in her own reality distortion field, she dressed in black turtlenecks to emulate her idol Jobs and preached that the Theranos device was “the most important thing humanity has ever built.” Employees were discouraged from questioning this cultish orthodoxy by her “ruthlessness” and her “culture of fear.” Secrecy was obsessive. Labs and doors were equipped with fingerprint scanners.

 

The media was completely bamboozled and fawned all over her.  All sorts of evidence was there from employees who were quitting in droves, but they were never interviewed. The old geezers on the board had even been warned by relatives who worked at the company to no avail. The old guys were so enamored of this pretty thing with nice legs that they abandoned their fiduciary responsibility and really should have been held responsible for the disaster.  David Boies doesn't escape condemnation either.  The esteemed lawyer who charged $1000 per hour had a stake in the company, violating all sorts of ethical tenets, sued anyone who might say something negative about the company, harassing them with private detectives and threats.*

 

Holmes and her erstwhile boyfriend, ex COO of Theranos, Ramesh Balwani, are now under indictment facing decades of imprisonment if found guilty. As further evidence of her cold manipulative personality, detractors cite her becoming pregnant just before the trial was to begin (resulting in a postponement) as a calculated move to garner sympathy.  The story is not over and several podcasts (The Dropout and Bad Blood: the Final Chapter) are reporting on the trial.

 

Society functions well only when there exists a level of trust. We want (and need) to assume that people are not fooling us. It's OK to be moderately skeptical but actions like Holmes's raise the skepticism bar to an impossible level that will eventually stifle progress.

 

*see https://isb.idaho.gov/blog/theranos-and-the-tale-of-the-disappearing-board-of-directors/ for more.

Review: Under Pressure: Living Life and Avoiding Death on a Nuclear Submarine by Richard Humphreys

 Seeking adventure, Humphreys tried to join the French Foreign Legion, but was turned away because he was too young and couldn't get his parents' permission. When he got a little older the Navy seemed a good alternative and the submarine force, as an elite, even more attractive.  This is a skeptical and clear-eyed look at the process of becoming a submariner and what it was like to live and work in a submarine.

 After some rather harrowing training, he discovered that leaving port in a submarine during rough seas (the best time to remain hidden), leads to rather extreme sea-sickness and given the fetid air the boat soon filled with everyone's previous meal. Life on board was boring, claustrophobic, all-consuming, and nerve-wracking, all at the same time. Amusingly, one of the most frequent questions asked by visitors to the boat, was "Where are the windows? How do you know where you are going?"

 

Circadian rhythms get completely discombobulated with watches on a 4-on, 8-off cycle, no natural light (high intensity lights are on all the time), no sunrise or sunset and never knowing whether it's morning or night except by the clock. That leads to instability and being thrown together with people you may not like, for months at a time, becomes another source of tension.

 

Humphreys finishes the book with a meditation on MAD. As he says earlier on, one misstep and its WW III that no one wins. If you have any interest at all in what it's like to be an ordinary seaman on a nuclear sub, then this is the book for you.  Expect some claustrophobia. 

Review: HHhH by Laurence binnet

 I have always been fascinated and simultaneously repelled by Heydrich and his ilk.  Having read several biographies of the monster, I bought this one. 

The antithesis of a straight narrative biography, I discovered it to be quite appealing and interesting, not just in his reflections on Heydrich, but the literature, culture, and historical milieu surrounding the man. The conceit is an unnamed novelist obsessed with researching Heydrich in hopes of writing about his murder as a thriller. He decides instead to provide a running commentary on what he finds rather than invent scenes and dialogue.

"Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich",  ("Hhhm is literally translated as "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich".)  My background in German would idiomatically translate it differently: "Heydrich was Himmler's brain." The most dangerous man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the "Butcher of Prague." Assassinated by some British trained Czech agents, German vengeance was swift and terrible.  A town was chosen at random (seemingly, but who knows) and its inhabitants killed and the town completely leveled. 

There are trenchant comments and quotes throughout: Daladier, former defense minister of the Popular Front, invokes questions of national defense not to prevent Hitler carving up Czechoslovakia but to backtrack on the forty-hour week—one of the principal gains of the Popular Front. At this level of political stupidity, betrayal becomes almost a work of art....Hitler and Mussolini have already left. Chamberlain yawns ostentatiously, while Daladier tries and fails to hide his agitation behind a façade of embarrassed haughtiness. When the Czechs, crushed, ask if their government is expected to make some kind of declaration in response to this news, it is perhaps shame that removes his ability to speak. (If only it had choked him—him and all the others!) It is therefore left to his colleague to speak, and he does so with such casual arrogance that the Czech foreign minister says afterward, in a laconic remark that all my countrymen should ponder:

As the SD extends its web, Heydrich will discover that he has an unusual gift for bureaucracy, the most important quality for the management of a good spy network. His motto could be: Files! Files! Always more files! In every color. On every subject. Heydrich gets a taste for it very quickly. Information, manipulation, blackmail, and spying become his drugs.

One interesting tidbit I did not know was that Heydrich was a reserve officer in the Luftwaffe. He had hopes of downing an enemy plane, but once, even after becoming head of the SD, he flew his Messerschmidt 109 with a group of German fighters over the eastern front. Sighting a Yak, he assumed it would be an easy kill and swooped down only to discover that while the Yak was slower, it was extremely maneuverable and the Yak pilot led him directly over a Russian anti-aircraft battery.  He was shot down and there were many nervous Germans hoping he was either dead or would make his way back to their lines.  He knew too much. When he did return two days later, he had earned an Iron Cross, but Hitler forbade him from ever flying any combat missions again.

Heydrich was assassinated (it took him a few days to die, of sepsis, not the actual attempt) just a day before he was to leave for Germany to be reassigned France. Whether the assassination accomplished anything other than his death and the deaths of thousands of people in retribution, is for ethicists to ponder.

Review: Checkmate in Berlin: The Cold War Showdown That Shaped the Modern World by Giles Milton

 Flies, flies, and more flies and they were all fat. The city had no cats, dogs, or birds.  They had all been eaten by the starving inhabitants. Such was the way one  British observer described the city upon entering Berlin. It was a scene straight out of Hieronymous Bosch with destruction on a massive scale, dead bodies everywhere, and anything that had survived ripped off, literally, by Soviet troops who had arrived first to cart everything east. Fanatical Nazis, following Hitler's final orders to destroy everything,  had done their work well, too.

The Soviets were a problem from the beginning, never willing to compromise, and dismantling everything they could lay their hands on to be shipped back to Russia.  There was conflict between Lucius Clay, the brilliant logistician who had never experienced combat, but who kept the troops supplied with what they needed, and Frank Hawley, general in charge of the American sector of Berlin who didn't trust the Russians.  Clay knew they had to figure out a way to get along with the Soviets.  He also realized the importance of resurrecting German industry rather than destroying it.  It was the only way to keep people fed, not to mention it was important for U.S. industry as a consumer of U.S. goods.

The Russians were, then as now, masters of misinformation and sowing mistrust among the allies, deviously spreading lies about each other and other falsities. Those who were surprised by Russian manipulation of American social media during recent elections should not have been.  They have many decades of experience. They revealed their distaste for fair play in one anecdote. All the allied leaders were invited to a boar hunt, an invitation that was accepted by all with pleasure.  They were surprised when the Russians arrived with submachine guns instead of rifles. When the boars came out of the woods, the Russians opened up with a fusillade that had all everyone else hitting the ground to avoid bullets that were flying everywhere. When the shooting stopped a mass of dead boar lay in front of them having been slaughtered by the massive firepower. That was emblematic of Russian tactics. 

That first winter was the coldest on record, and the suffering of Germans and refugees was terrible. Meanwhile, the winners were living in splendor and unimaginable comfort. They requisitioned beautiful mansions, had access to the riches of the PX, and had plenty of servants.  The Black Market made many rich, and virtually anything could be had for a few cigarettes which had become the de facto currency. The disparity between the conquerors and the people was a worry to some as they feared that unless the allies could get German industry and society back on its feet that Communism, which on its face lacked the same disparities, would become more appealing. The Allies won a stunning election victory in the first election as the allies merely posted signs reminding Germans of the vicious reprisals taken by the Russians.  But people can be fickle and tend to follow food rather than politics, so providing sustenance became a priority.

Ironies abound.  The Soviets themselves should have realized how people can come together to survive sieges; they had their own Leningrad and Stalingrad examples before them. Had Stalin not unleashed the fury of Russian troops to wreck havoc on Berliners by Russian troops, they might have been far less fearful of Soviet domination. Traffic between East and West Berlin remained open during the airlift, which was instituted in 1948 ( a magnificent logistical feat) , the catch being that Westerners crossing the checkpoints had to register with the Soviet authorities thus placing them under Soviet control. So even though they could get food on the Eastern side, few people crossed to risk Soviet control. Electricity was a huge problem.  80% of electricity generators were in the Eastern sector, so that was severely rationed in the West.  Since water had to be pumped from deep wells, it had to be rationed as well. 

One high placed U.S. official remarked of the crisis, "One wrong foot now, and it's World War III."  I could write a lot more.  Loved this book. 

Review: I Alone Can Fix It. Donald Trump's Finel Catatrophic Year by Carol Leonnig and Philip Ricker

 I'm sure everyone reading this lived through 2020.  This book lets you relive the events in a nifty chronological package that I could not put down. It was interesting to match my recollection against the book's actual account.

 

No one in the Trump administration connected in any way to COVID-19 fared  well.  Those who tried to warn the president got fired.  Those, like Pence, the "oleaginous sycophant", in George Will's memorable characterization, deferentially who did their master's bidding, got burned.

 

The authors clearly had a lot of these folks as sources; even Trump agreed to be interviewed. But that also means the reader must be careful as many of the comments, made with full hindsight, are clearly attempts to put themselves and their own actions in the best light possible.

 

Even where Trump's policies were popular and would have benefited the country, his administration's incompetence prevented their implementation.  The Supreme Court turned away several petitions because of incompetent presentation;  the proposal to reduce drug costs failed because they ignored the rules, and it was tossed in court; and we all know about the Great Wall.

 

If there is any hero, it has to be General Mark Milley who repeatedly tried to be the adult in the room during meetings and was devoted to the concept of civilian control of the military, which he interpreted as also implying that civilians could not use the military as their own police force. Trump's recurring fantasy was that, as president, all the people and agencies owed personal loyalty to him and him alone, not the Constitution nor its principles.

 

Trump, who had refused to be interviewed for the authors' first book, gladly agreed to two hours for this one. It's recounted in the epilogue and consisted primarily of diatribes against those he had initially lauded but now despised and how he really won the election by the greatest margin in the history of the world. The man doesn't know how to speak in anything but hyperbole and superlatives. Doesn't say much for his ability to judge people.

 

A great read.

Review: Shadow Strike: Inside Israel's Secret Mission to Eliminate Syrian Nuclear Power Kindle Edition by Yaakov Katz

 

A common definition of insanity is to do the same thing over and over while expecting different results each time. That is a good definition of Israeli-Arab relations.  Katz, enamored of the Israeli armed forces, writes hagiographically about the Israeli strike on the Syrian nuclear plant in 2007.  Justification for this act of war was the assumption that a nuclear power plant -- Israel has several in addition to nuclear weapons -- could only be used to create the material for nuclear weapons, the presence of which Israel assumed could only be an existential threat to their country. **

 

There is an assumption that some countries act responsibly when it comes to nuclear weapons and others are not. Israel, while never admitting publicly it has nuclear weapons, clearly does, yet cannot seem to understand why that knowledge would not encourage hostile neighbors to want the same. Another assumption is that democracies will always act more sensibly than authoritarian governments. Recent events in the United States reveal just how fragile that assumption is. It's an assumption Plato warned about a millennia ago when he foresaw the seeds of its own destruction built into democratic governments.

 

Israel has determined (at least the more recent governments) that countries in the Middle East will not (except for itself) be permitted to have nuclear weapons nor nuclear power plants that might be used to create the seeds of a nuclear weapons program. They see it as an existential threat. Then again, they see almost everything they don't like as an existential threat.

 

From his extensive interviews with the decision-makers, advisers and planners — American and Israeli — Katz, the editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, has written a gripping story of the Sept. 6, 2007 destruction of a secret, nearly completed al-Kabar nuclear reactor in Syria. knowledge of which was confirmed only in March of 2018. The Syrian strike at al-Kabar was not the first time the Israelis felt compelled to act. On June 7, 1981, the IAF destroyed a nuclear reactor in Osirak, Iraq, which was, at the time, a nation ruled by Saddam Hussein, another dictator willing to use chemical weapons.

 

A fascinating portion of the book is devoted to the discussions within the Bush administration on the proper response to the intelligence that had been shared by Israel about the construction of a reactor in Syria. It was the hawks (Cheney et al) v diplomats (Rice eta al.) each with valid concerns and suspecting different outcomes. What was the possibility of a wider war? What would be the reaction of the Russians? Would this help or hurt the Iranians? Was the intelligence legitimate. It was an example of how government should work, but often doesn't.

 

Cheney, ever the hawk and advocate of preemptive strikes, whatever the issue, was alone in thinking the U.S. should bomb the site. Everyone else in the Cabinet thought otherwise.  The Iraq war, begun on faulty intelligence, was not going well and the feeling was that each administration gets just one war; trying to conduct two would lead to disaster. A more nuanced role proposed by a few was that the facility should be destroyed, but better that Israel should do the bombing.  It would reinforce the view that Israel had rebounded from the Lebanese debacle and help issue a warning that Israel could handle its own affairs and protection and was not the minor stepchild of the U.S.

 

The author claims at the end of the book that it was less about the strike than decision-making. That's certainly true.  But what a messy process, indeed, influenced less by reality than perceptions, ideology, religion, and politics.

 

**It was just learned that Syria fired a missile that landed perilously close to an Israeli nuclear plant in April 2021.  Israeli responded with a retaliatory strike.  Agence France has reported that Israel is suspected to have between 100 and 200 nuclear weapons.

[https://www.france24.com/en/middle-east/20210422-israel-strikes-targets-in-syria-after-missile-lands-near-nuclear-reactor]

Review: This Is How They Tell Me the World Ends: The Cyberweapons Arms Race by Nicole Perlroth

 Putin loves his hackers, comparing them to artists who feel great in the morning and immediately start work on some new masterpiece. He told them, feel free to hack away, just anywhere except the homeland, and if your hacks coincide with Russian goals, well so much the better.

 They went at it with a vengeance in 2014 and Ukraine became a testing ground for election interference, disinformation campaigns, interference and destruction of infrastructure, and cast doubt on the election process.  There was little Ukraine could do to retaliate, given it history and geographic dependence on Russia. The hackers were wildly successful and our 2016 campaign reflected many of their techniques. The Mueller report has laid out exactly how they went about it.

 

One interesting chapter examines the market for zero-day exploits, how it works and how it has changed from companies suing hackers who find bugs, to actively soliciting and paying for bugs and especially the zero-day exploits. ( A zero-day exploit is a vulnerability that has yet to be discovered and patched, making it extremely valuable for anyone with malicious intent. The Stuxnet worm created by the U.S. and Israel to destroy the Iranian centrifuges used several.) Paying for the bugs meant a rise in prices, from mere hundreds of dollars to many thousands and countries found themselves competing against bad actors, other countries, and companies for the zero-day exploits.

 

The Stuxnet exploit  is discussed in more detail than I had read before. Of particular interest were the policy determinations and the effect of the Iraq war on those decisions. Deaths of American soldiers in Iraq ere at their highest level when the Israelis, wanting to repeat their successful attack on the Syrian nuclear reactor strike (see ShadowStrike) insisted they wanted the U.S. to bomb the Iranian facility. Bush couldn't afford such a provocative action, one the military's war games revealed would result in WW III.  So he authorized the unique and first-ever cyber strike to result in physical destruction of an opponent's infrastructure.  It used an unheard-of seven zero-day exploits, and the preparation was boosted by an Iranian intelligence error of Trumpian proportions when the Iranian leader bragged to the press about the facility and gave them a tour, allowing pictures, of their centrifuges.  This gave the Stuxnet planners all the information they needed about the brand and type of centrifuges being used allowing them to target those directly with the Stuxnet malware. The Israelis were kept informed and must have assisted because Bush could not have them operating unilaterally.

Stuxnet showed the world the power and destructiveness of the cyber-world,  and soon the value of zero-day exploits exploded as smaller countries and those without a large military realized that with little expense they could equal the United States and China in offensive capability. The attack on Saudi Arabia's oil network** that destroyed thousands of their computers and disrupted oil networks, used some of the same code the U.S. had utilized in an attack a few months prior and was clearly retaliation for that attack. The hackers got in through an email someone in ARAMCO had opened.

 

One of the mantras I try to inculcate in my students is to NEVER click on a link in an email.  If you have reason to believe it might be valid, go to the web site and investigate there, never via a link in an email. The Russian hack of the DNC email resulted in a typo error. Podesta got an email purportedly from gmail claiming he needed to reset his password.  He ran it by their IT guy who meant to write back that the link was IL-legitimate but left off the initial IL.  What the IT guy should have insisted on besides noting it was illegitimate was to hammer away at the danger of clicking on email links. So Podesta, thinking it was legit, click on it and gave the Russian hackers instant access to the DNC's emails.

 

The chapter on how the WannaCry ransomware was unleashed on the world and its origin is alone worth the price of the book. The role of the NSA in hiding its zero-day exploits rather than alerting Microsoft so they could be patched was highlighted by Brad Smith, Microsoft's CEO, in an essay. "We have seen vulnerabilities stored by the CIA show up on Wikileaks, and now this vulnerability stolen from the NSA has affected customers around the world. Repeatedly, exploits in the hands of governments have leaked into the public domain and caused widespread damage."  Ironically, the ransomware, garnered little in the way of financial rewards for the North Korean malefactors, but it caused billions in damage to computers around the world, especially because the originators had not built in a workable way to pay the ransom. In another travesty, the teenager who discovered a built-in kill switch to the malware, was arrested by the FBI for hacking! (see the Wikipaedia article for more information.)

 

An important book.  I recommend reading it along with Cyberspies by Gordon Corera.

Interesting analysis of electric cars and energy use.

 

From your Digest

Ryan Carlyle

BSChE, engineer at an oil companyUpdated May 7, 2014

If all cars in the US suddenly become electric, how much more electricity do we need to produce (in percentage)?

Let's do the math.

The US burned 133 billion gallons gasoline in 2012. I'm going to ignore diesel vehicles because the majority of diesel burned in the US is in heavy vehicles where battery-electric drivetrains are not a practical option.
How much gasoline does the United States consume?

The average thermal energy content in gasoline is 33.41 KWh/gallon.
Gasoline gallon equivalent

This gives 4,443 TWh of thermal power going to gasoline road vehicles in the US per year. If we assume electric vehicles use energy with 4x the efficiency of gasoline vehicles (a reasonable round number) then it would take 1,111 TWh of electrical energy to replace that gasoline energy.

US electricity consumption in 2011 was 3882 TWh.
International Energy Statistics

So the increase in yearly electricity demand would be ~29%.

Now let's look at what this does to CO2 emissions.

Each gallon of gasoline contains 8,887 grams of CO2.
Calculations and References

So the CO2 reduction from avoided gasoline consumption (assuming demand does not rise elsewhere to compensate) would be 1182 million tonnes CO2 per year. But this is the gross figure before increased electricity use is considered.

If we assume the extra electricity comes from the existing mix of non-base-load sources (as nighttime charging likely would), the CO2 emission per KWh of electricity is 689 grams of CO2.
Calculations and References

Electric Vehicles: Myths vs. Reality

So the total increase in CO2 emissions from increased electricity consumption would be 765 million tonnes Co2 per year. Thus the net CO2 emission reduction would be 417 million tonnes.

Total US CO2 emitted in 2012 was 6,526 million tonnes.
U.S. Greenhouse Gas Inventory Report

So the net decrease in national CO2 emissions would be ~6.4%.

[Update: Graham Katz pointed out that I've neglected the CO2 emissions from refining, which is a valid point. Gasoline's share of US refinery emissions is ~130 million tonnes, which increases the CO2 reduction from ~6.4% to ~8.4%. There are many other factors which can be included in the analysis that will increase or decrease both cost and emissions, and for the sake of brevity, I'm ignoring those. A full accounting would take hundreds of pages.]

Now let's look at cost.

The average US car costs $25,000.
Passenger vehicles in the United States

Electric cars -- pre-subsidy -- are running around $40,000. Now, this will come down with scale. But the "average" $25k car price today also includes many heavy vehicles and diesel-burners that skew up the average price. Small gasoline vehicles that are good candidates for replacement with EVs are cheaper -- perhaps $20k average. So at today's costs, EVs cost $20k more than equivalent gasoline vehicles. But let's be conservative and call it $30k for an economy-of-scale electric vehicle. This means $10k marginal cost over gasoline for a good round number.

So there's two cost cases to consider here. Switching all cars instantly, versus merely replacing all old vehicles with electric cars.

• For the extreme "instant" switch, around 150,000,000 vehicles have to be replaced immediately, and gasoline cars lose all value. That would cost $4.5 trillion.
• For the "gradual" switch, where gasoline vehicles are run until the end of their useful life, you only need to consider the marginal increase in cost over a business-as-usual case. So the cost would be $1.5 trillion.

I think these are fairly conservative numbers. Reality would probably be somewhere between the two.

Taking the $1.5 trillion figure, that gives us an effective cost of CO2 reduction of ~$3600 per tonne CO2 per year. Amortized over 30 year vehicle life (which I think is extremely optimistic in the US) that gives $120/tonne CO2 avoided. This is quite expensive.

To be fair, EVs also have long-term savings in fuel cost but the rest of the math is very conservative so I don't feel bad about neglecting this. Decrease the expected vehicle life to a more realistic number (considering battery longevity), or retire gasoline vehicles more aggressively, and the net $/tonne CO2 number will come out about the same.

I'm sticking with $120/tonne -- I think it is a reasonable estimate. You're welcome to disagree in the comments if you have a better number.

Current industry estimates put the cost of coal power plant carbon capture & sequestration (CCS) at ~$80/tonne CO2 captured. Then that CO2 has an economic value of ~$40/tonne for enhanced oil recovery. So the net economic cost of CCS is ~$40/tonne. (These numbers may not scale linearly, but neither do the marginal electricity and CCS costs. It arguably washes out.)
Journal of Petroleum Technology February 2014 Page 46

Which means electric vehicles are a pretty crummy way to reduce CO2 emissions, given the current US power mix. You can do three times as much good per dollar by fitting coal plants with carbon capture systems. Not to mention even better alternatives like replacing coal plants altogether with nuclear, wind, or combined-cycle gas plants. Mass rollout of electric vehicles is only worthwhile in tandem with massive increases in renewables generation. Perhaps in the future we'll get there. But today's generation market trends do not support that assumption for the next several decades.
U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA)

Review: Cyberspies by Gordon Corera

 One of the most overlooked parts of the Muller report is the detailed information the FBI, et al., collected on Russian interference in the 2016 election. They determined the names and location of the GRU officers and cyberspies who conducted the operation, what they did and how they did it. It was an extraordinary piece of sleuthing. (See Sandworm by Andy Greenberg for more details.)  Cyberspies places all this in historical context.
 
This book has something for everyone: history, spying, and interesting characters. While he argues that "hacking" using technology has a long history dating back millennia, he chose to begin with the cutting of German cables on the ocean floor during WW I. Leaping-frogging rather quickly he then begins with the use of computers (people, those who computed) and especially Flowers and Turing who respectively understood the larger picture and how "valves" (vacuum tubes in American) could be used binarily to process data. Along the way, he tries to answer questions of what cyber spying is, how such developed and its impact in today’s world politically, economically, and in the intelligence communities. An ambitious goal indeed.i.e.
 
There are two key components to the world of spies: attribution, i.e. can you trace back a decision or instruction to its source; and integrity, the accuracy of the data, for getting just one component of a message wrong could mean sending a missile to the wrong target. Scrambling a message so it can't be read by the unauthorized is an inherent part of spycraft and technology has made all of that both easier and more difficult at the same time.   “Few outside the intelligence world understand the extent to which spies in the US and Britain perceive technology as an existential threat to their work,” Corera writes. “An arms race is on between spy services to exploit technology. Only those who adapt will survive.”
 
Spying has more than just military significance. The Russians and others have taken economic espionage to a new level. Collecting information peripherally is important.  The author provides an example of Russian trolling for information about a particular executive whom the intelligence services had determined was gay but not out of the closet. “The hackers then sent him an email from a gay rights organization which they suspected he would open since it looked as if it was sent to him, but in fact held malware,” Corera writes. “They then counted on the fact that, even if the executive did suspect it was malware, he would not be willing to go to his company’s IT department or security team for fear it would reveal his sexuality. This is classic, high level, targeted Russian espionage.”
 
There's intelligence and then there's information.  Spying in common parlance conjures up images of dangerous men with guns in tuxedos in scary situations who can leap tall buildings in a single jump. Or the silent bureaucratic types of Le Carre. The author has a wonderful metaphor for the difference in how spying is done by different countries. Let's say you want to find out what kind of sand is on a particular beach in some foreign country.  The UK would send a submarine with divers in wet suits (bow ties and suits underneath) to surreptitiously retrieve a sample of sand from the beach. The Americans would use technology to and fly satellites, drones, and planes over the area to take lots of pictures.  The Chinese would send tourists to the country to have a good time, visit the beaches, and then shake out their towels when they got home.
It's a comprehensive look at how spying developed, including the misconceptions about what spying is and its development over time into not just  military purposes uses but economic, as well.  Corera includes a detailed history and an examination of how cyber spying was affected by the revelations of the collection of data by government agencies by Snowden, and suggestions on what the future of cyber spying and offensive actions may hold for us. It's organized in a logical chronological way and intricate cyber threats and attacks are explained clearly.

The scale of cyber espionage has evolved way beyond the wildest dreams of a former Stasi officer who noted their maximum capability was to tap forty lines at once. Now, given that almost all of the world’s internet traffic flows at some time or another through the United States, the NSA, with its sweeping authority and collection devices, has access to everything. Worried about public encryption keys, they sweep up and store ALL of the telephone traffic in the U.S. and many other places arguing they don’t listen to the content but merely search the metadata attached to digital traffic. And since even analog conversations get converted to digital at some point, that’s everything. Metadata is easy to search and often more revealing than content.

In their search to build an even larger haystack (you can’t find the needle without the haystack) they even resorted to techniques even aside from the famous clipper chip debacle. In one instance, discovered by Kaspersky Labs, they arranged to have malware hidden into DVDs that were given to participants of hacker and security conferences attended by analysts from all around the world that contained records and presentations of the conference. This gave them worldwide access to computers run by the most sensitive personnel.

Snowden’s revelations of the NSA’s spying capabilities had less affect on national security than it did on business. It’s hard to maintain a global outreach and increase your revenue if it becomes widely known that anything you do using the company’s products will become NSA fodder. Zuckerberg, in particular, was furious after the revelations, complaining to Obama that his business model was being hurt. Screw national security; you’re hurting our business, was the message.

1984 doesn’t even remotely compare to today’s capabilities.
 
Some reviewers have complained that a weakness of the book is its specialization and detail; that's what I liked.  Unfortunately, the world changes so fast that more recent events are obviously not included.  Sandworm by Andy Greenberg fills that gap and should also be read. Overall a fascinating glimpse at the evolution of the new cyber world.

 

N.B. Years ago I read Clifford Stoll's The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage    (1990) (how the author tracked down a spy ring because he wanted to know how and why 75 cents of computer time was unaccounted for.) Stoll is highlighted for his work in this book.  Stoll also wrote (in 1996) a prescient view of the problems inherent in the Internet:  Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway  .  For a truly prescient view of the problems with interconnectivity written in 1955, see a SF masterpiece by Thomas Ryan, The Adolescence of P-1