Book Review: The Nazi and the Psychiatrist", by Jack El-Hai

 I have another book recommendation, for those who would take on a dark and serious non-fiction work.  The book is “The Nazi and the Psychiatrist”, and I know the author, Jack El-Hai.  Jack is a fellow Carleton alum and an acquaintance from an adjacent class year.  Jack’s book is a masterpiece of scholarship and taut writing.  From the 2nd paragraph, Jack makes it clear that he is writing a book in the non-fiction horror genre.  By the end, I’d say it was more in the vein of a Greek tragedy. 

The book is the story of psychiatrist Douglas Kelley, who was assigned to appraise the Nazi leaders imprisoned for trial at Nuremburg.  Kelley spent months evaluating and getting to know the war criminals, particularly Hermann Göring, de facto leader of Germany after Hitler’s death.   Kelley added a personal goal to the evaluations – to understand the Nazi mind, with the idea of preventing such people from ever holding power again.  Kelley’s conclusion was that although these particular men all showed neuroses and idiosyncrasies, there was no general “Nazi mind”.  Kelley thought that people like the Nuremburg defendants exist in every walk of life, and he concluded that it could all happen again here, in America.  (The term “psychopath” was not coined until after Nuremburg, but Kelley later used the word to describe the Nuremburg defendants.)  
 

A psychologist, Gustave Gilbert, was also assigned to evaluate the prisoners at Nuremburg.  Gilbert, trained in social psychology, not psychiatry, was fluent in German and Jewish.  Gilbert assisted Kelley by providing translation during examinations, and also conducted personality evaluations independently.  Gilbert disagreed with Kelley’s conclusions about the “Nazi mind”, finding that the defendants shared a narrow personality profile, showing pathological self-interest, lack of regard for external standards of behavior, lack of capacity to  feel guilt or concern for the suffering of others.  The dispute with Gilbert continued throughout their professional lives. Modern psychological reviews have concluded that they were both right.  The Nazi defendants were psychopaths, as Gilbert asserted.  And such psychopaths are found today in every walk of life, as Kelley asserted.

Kelley’s story is a Greek tragedy because his arrogance and hubris were the source of his downfall.  Kelley had a monumental ego, and it shaped every facet of his life, before and after Nuremburg.  The rapport that Kelley found with Göring was perhaps founded on the similarity of that aspect of personality.  This is not to say that the men were alike in any other way – Kelley had a well-developed moral sense, and Göring none at all.  But Kelley had a “big man” self-image, not unlike many men of his era.  Kelley imagined himself tougher than other men, which gave him a penchant for exploits and personal experiments that were unquestionably unwise.  Like other egoists, he thought he could “handle it”.  It’s my notion that Kelley’s personal experimentation with a variety of “truth serums” and his decision to undergo a long-period experiment in oxygen deprivation may have contributed to his issues with mental health later in life.  It’s well-known that people who suffer chronic brain trauma or dementia are prone to the kind of behavioral disorders that Kelley exhibited about a decade after the war.  For whatever reason, in the final chapter of his life and the final chapter of Jack’s book, Kelley’s behavior became erratic and aggressive.   Kelley ultimately took his own life, using the same poison as Göring.

A movie, “Nuremburg” was made from Jack’s book, and released in November of last year.
Jack wrote his book in 2013, well before our current political situation developed.  But it’s impossible to read the book without thinking about comparisons between the figures in the Nuremburg cells and some of our political leaders today.  

By the way, if you look to buy the book, be advised there is a copy-cat book published in 2025 with the title “The Psychologist and the Monster”, also about Kelley and Göring.  Make sure you buy the right book.

The cover art represents a Rorschach ink-blot over the photos of Kelley and Göring.

The Havana Syndrome, Venezuela and the Discombobulator

 "Phasers On Stun"
William Shatner as Captain James T. Kirk of the Starship Enterprise, 1966 or 2265

Over the past two weeks, I noticed three news stories that seemed connected, although they were presented separately by the news media. 

1) In an exclusive story, CNN reported that during the final days of the Biden administration, the Homeland Security Investigations agency purchased a working “Havana Syndrome” device from an undisclosed seller for more than ten million dollars.  The device was said to be a pulsed electromagnetic weapon.  The report said that the device was small enough to fit inside of a backpack, and contained Russian components, although it was not Russian in origin.

2) During the Trump administration’s Venezuela raid and abduction of Nicolas Maduro, a Venezuelan soldier reported experiencing sudden, debilitating symptoms during the attack without an apparent cause.  The soldier’s account indicated that hundreds of Venezuelan soldiers had been affected, including the 20 soldiers tasked with protecting Maduro.  Reported symptoms included concussion-like head pain, mass paralysis, bleeding from the nose and vomiting blood.  The Venezuelan soldier believed that US forces had used a sonic energy weapon. 

3) In an interview following the Venezuelan raid, President Trump bragged about using a new, secret weapon.  Trump said, “They won’t let me talk about it”, but he talked about it nonetheless.  Trump called it “The Discombobulator”, and said it prevented the Venezuelan military from mounting a significant defense during the raid.  One interpretation of the president’s rambling statement would be that the US weapon prevented equipment from functioning, but the term “Discombobulator” suggests that it is an anti-personnel weapon. 

Havana Syndrome
The Havana Syndrome is a collection of milder symptoms than reported in the Venezuelan raid. Incidents were reported in over a dozen international locations from 2016 to the present, centering on embassies and nearby hotels.  Victims were generally U.S. and Canadian diplomats and their families, although White House employees also reported similar symptoms.  In all, over 1000 people in a dozen international locations reported experiencing dizziness, balance problems, head pain, cognitive problems and insomnia, often (but not always) accompanied by a loud buzzing sound.  Symptoms sometimes persisted for months.  The reality of the syndrome was widely debated, and U.S. intelligence services published a report in 2023 discrediting the idea that the syndrome resulted from a weapon.

Existing Anti-Personnel Energy Weapons
The U.S. has conducted research and made modest progress in developing anti-personnel energy weapons.  Existing weapons include an electromagnetic weapon which produces heating and skin pain, and a low-frequency sonic weapon of dubious effectiveness.  The reported symptoms would be a step-change in the effectiveness of an energy weapon, putting it into the class of a Star Trek phaser on the stun setting. 

Reliability of Reporting
Both the report from Venezuela and the CNN report on the device acquisition are single-source reports, though they have been widely disseminated.  There is a possibility that the entire story is disinformation.  But the effectiveness of the Venezuelan raid cannot be denied, and the president’s braggadocio seems characteristic of a real thing.

Implications
The idea that the U.S. possesses a broad-beam anti-personnel energy weapon that can potentially strike targets inside buildings has profound implications. Depending on range, such a weapon would be decisive in a trench-warfare situation such as the war in Ukraine; it would allow U.S. forces to conduct leadership abductions in almost any country; it would allow terrorists to access almost any site with normal security, including banks, museums, gold repositories, military installations, and conventional or nuclear power sites.  Such a weapon would give authorities the absolute ability to quell popular uprisings through crowd control. 

Government employees whose claims of harm from the Havana syndrome are now pressing for their claims to be reconsidered. 

If there is any credibility to these reports, I suspect every military in the world is abruptly pouring millions into new research, and every intelligence agency in the world is scouring the world to buy another device.  I’m sure that it would be possible to create shielding for an electromagnetic weapon, but researchers must first know how the device works.  And deploying shielding widely might prove impractical.

Another piece of the science fiction future may have arrived.
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The image of Captain Kirk with a phaser was generated by AI without permission and not for profit.  
The image will be removed upon request. 
References
Device Acquisition
https://www.cnn.com/2026/01/13/politics/havana-syndrome-device-pentagon-hsi
https://futurism.com/robots-and-machines/havana-syndrome-device-government

Venezuelan Impact
https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2026/01/13/epic-win-us-secret-weapon-may-have-incapacitated-maduros-guards/
https://www-wionews-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/www.wionews.com/world/-bleeding-noses-blood-vomiting-mass-paralysis-did-us-deploy-sonic-weapons-in-venezuela-operation-to-extract-maduro-havana-syndrome-lawyer-says-1768296794658/amp

White House Reporting
https://thehill-com.cdn.ampproject.org/v/s/thehill.com/policy/defense/5706502-trump-discombobulator-weapon-venezuela/amp/

"Abundance" Book Review

There is a widespread feeling that the American economy is broken.  Data shows that the percentage of families living paycheck to paycheck has risen from around 30% in the late 1990s to 50% to 60% today.  Rising costs and stagnant wages have lowered the standard of living for working families, even as per-capita GDP has reached new records in a linear ascent.  In many aspects of society, we are acting as if we are impoverished instead of wealthy.  Both federal and state government agencies have laid off workers, services are impaired, maintenance of infrastructure is declining, homelessness is rising, etc.  What is wrong?

Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson recently wrote the book “Abundance”, published in 2025 to address issues with the broken economy.  The book expresses the core ideas of supply-side progressivism, a movement originating in about 2010 and building momentum until today.  There's a Wikipedia Page for supply-side progressivism; check it out.

The term “Abundance” is now being widely used by Democratic candidates for Congress, though I suspect few of them have actually read the book.  “Abundance” may become the main campaign theme for the 2026 mid-term elections, particularly for centrist Democrats.  Abundance seems an odd choice as the unifying rallying cry for Democrats – because the main message is a confession that Republicans were right when they said that government regulations were strangling the economy.  

The central thesis of Abundance is that limitations in the supply of goods and services have driven prices higher and impaired American prosperity.  Klein and Thompson lay out the argument that excessive government regulation has been the root cause of those shortages.  Specific examples include goods and services which have increased in price more than the rate of inflation – housing, health care, higher education, and other key necessities, including energy, food and transportation.  For me, there’s an uncomfortable echo of Reagan-era supply side economics, which proposed that lower tax rates, in combination with reduced regulation, would bring prosperity to consumers and higher government revenue.  The theory is largely discredited by current day economists.  

Klein and Thompson title their chapters Beyond Scarcity, Grow, Build, Invent, and Deploy.  The first chapters examine the impact of regulatory over-reach on particular aspects of the American economy.  The final chapter, “Deploy”, emphasizes the role that government should play in encouraging the development and commercialization of new technologies, after invention.  

Klein and Thompson give short shrift to the societal benefits of the last 60 years of government regulations.  We now have cleaner air and water; fatalities per air-travel passenger-mile have fallen by a staggering 99%; fatalities per vehicle-travel passenger-mile have fallen by about 66%; worker safety is greatly improved across many industries; food and medical safety is far better in the United States than in other nations; etc.   But they are correct that there is a cost to regulations, and those costs have not always been weighed accurately against the benefits.

To use a Millennial idiom, one could say that Klein and Thompson are *not wrong*, damning them with faint praise.  I believe the book is correct that policy choices about some regulations have led to scarcity, which then led to rising costs.  Housing and medical treatment are the best examples.  On the other hand, abundance theory is woefully incomplete in describing or remedying the problems with the economy.  

The primary problem with the economy is demonstrably not on the supply side.  Adjusted for inflation, personal earnings (wages and salaries) have increased by only about 12% since 1980, while per capita GDP has more than doubled, according to data from the Federal Reserve Database.  Wage stagnation is the primary reason that working-class Americans are being left behind, not limited supplies of needed goods and services.

The reason for wage stagnation is also pretty clear.  Over the course of my career (1980 – 2026), I saw computer automation eliminate many good-paying jobs.  Managers were issued PCs to do correspondence and clerical work, and secretaries were re-assigned or fired.  A geologist with a workstation could do the work of three to five geologists working with pencils and drafting tables, so 2/3rds of the geologists were fired.  Workstations produced high-quality graphics, so the entire drafting and reprographics departments were fired.  Enterprise-wide accounting software reduced the number of accountants in my department from 28 to 1; the other 27 were fired.  The Internet and internal information archives eliminated the need for information specialists.  In the 1980s, management set a goal of reducing professional headcount from 3000 to 1000, and achieved that goal; also in 1980, there was an aspirational goal to reduce the headcount to 300.  The company has now been sold, so it appears that they achieved that goal as well.  As Thomas Piketty wrote, technology and capital replace labor.  

There is a belief, often cited in articles about economics and technology, that new technologies *always* produce new jobs.  I saw another article citing that dogma two days ago, in an article about the Davos conference and AI.  The argument is empirical, and to my mind, began to break down with the introduction of the PC in 1980.  It may be true that the introduction of the automobile created more jobs for buggy-whip manufacturers, but that will not necessarily be true about the replacement of lawyers by AI.  Empiricism is the weakest scientific argument, because it provides no fundamental explanation for why it is true, and it provides no predictive power for situations outside of the envelope of prior experience.  And the future is always outside of the envelope of prior experience. 

The goal of many Democratic policies of the past 60 years has been to address the symptoms, rather than the cause, of economic dysfunction.  Higher minimum wage, pro-union regulations, food assistance, rental assistance, child-care tax credits, health insurance subsidies, etc., are all band-aids, not solutions to our economic problems.  Neither party has been able to develop policies that improve the fundamental productivity of all individual workers, and the power of those workers to demand greater compensation for their work.  

My employer’s view is that employees were a cost, not an asset.  For 45 years, the pathway to improve corporate profitability has been to employ fewer people.  That put relentless pressure on employee compensation.  

There are a few obvious possibilities.  Nationalized health care would remove the burden on businesses of providing health insurance for employees.  Higher minimum wage might help, but also provides an incentive for businesses to automate low-paying jobs.  It might be possible to tax companies based on the number of good-paying jobs they provide, relative to profits.  But this might put American companies at a disadvantage in global trade.  

Government policies have long been tolerant of the gimmicks that employers (even government employers) use to avoid paying benefits to employees, such as restricting weekly hours, or periodically laying off worked, only to hire them again shortly afterwards.  But as well as ensuring that workers are paid benefits that they deserve, government should help to improve their productivity and value to employers.

In my opinion, there are no clear policy fixes for the problems plaguing the 21st century economy.  Abundance, as a book and as a policy goal, is a good start.  But after 2028, Democrats must not fail to deliver on the idea that Americans deserve prosperity, or we will face a return to the populist politics of grievance and blame which characterizes the Trump administration. 

Climate Change and Atlantic Hurricanes

Hurricane Melissa struck western Jamaica on October 28th, 2025 with maximum sustained winds of 185 mph.  Melissa tied for the third strongest Atlantic hurricane on record, and tied for the strongest Atlantic hurricane at landfall.  Melissa was also the third category 5 hurricane of the 2025 season, out of five hurricanes and thirteen named tropical storms.  At least 96 deaths were attributed to Melissa, with an additional 29 people missing.  The storm caused an estimated ten billion US dollars of damage on Jamaica, with additional major damage to Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic.

Warm water fuels tropical storms and hurricanes by providing energy for convection and humidity for massive rainfall.  Statistical studies show that warmer water is associated with more storms and stronger storms.  A sea-surface temperature of 27 degrees seems to be an approximate threshold for storm development, and more than 80% of tropical cyclones develop above that threshold.  In September of 2025, the waters of the Caribbean were 28.8 degrees C.  about 1.5 degrees C warmer than the historical norm (1951 – 1980 average).  

Globally, sea-surface temperatures have risen 1.0 degrees C in the past century.  (Some sources indicate warming as high as 1.4 degrees C.)  Most of that increase has occurred in the past 30 years, and is well-documented by monitoring buoys and satellite measurements.  The sea surface in the Northern Hemisphere has warmed about 1.2 degrees C. 

The annual number of tropical storms, hurricanes, major hurricanes and category 5 hurricanes have all increased over the past century.  Warmer water is causing more rapid intensification of storms, and a higher percentage of storms are reaching the highest level of intensity. In the century from 1916 to 2015, 6% of tropical storms became category 5 hurricanes. In the past decade, that percentage rose to 16%, and in the past four years, 23% of tropical storms became category 5 hurricanes.  


Similarly, the number of tropical storms strengthening to category 5 hurricanes has increased dramatically.  In the century from 1916 to 2015, 3% of tropical storms strengthened to category 5.  In the past decade, 7% of tropical storms became category 5 hurricanes, and in the past four years, 11% of tropical storms became category 5 hurricanes.

In the 1990s and 2000s, modeling results were unclear whether global warming would produce more or stronger hurricanes.  With the experience of the past quarter-century, and the understanding that warmer water produces both more storms and stronger storms, it seems likely that future warming will produce more frequent and powerful hurricanes.

The situation today is not the endpoint of climate change.  Global sea surface temperatures are now 1.0 degrees above historical averages, but by 2100, sea surface temperatures will probably have risen by an additional 2.7 degrees.  The expected range of future temperature rise is between about 1 degree C and 4.5 degrees C.  The 1 degree C scenario would require almost immediate cessation of fossil fuel use, which is an unlikely scenario.   

References:
First National Climate Assessment, 2001:
“While it is not yet clear how the numbers and tracks of hurricanes will change, projections are that peak windspeed and rainfall intensity are likely to rise significantly.”
“Studies suggest that the rate of precipitation during tropical storms could increase due to the warmer conditions and the increased amount of water vapor in the atmosphere. Other studies confirm these results.”
“Potential changes in the intensity and frequency of hurricanes are a major concern.”

https://www.stmweather.com/blog/climate/north-atlantic-hurricane-season-historical-stats-and-seasonal-outlook

https://www.reddit.com/r/hurricane/comments/1lhuxxr/a_line_graph_of_all_atlantic_hurricane_seasons/

https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/sea-surface-temperature

https://www.nhc.noaa.gov/climo/images/AtlanticStormTotalsTable.pdf

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Category_5_Atlantic_hurricanes