Review: Rule by Secrecy–The Hidden History That Connects the Trilateral Commission, the Freemasons, and the Great Pyramids

7 Star Top 1%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Complexity & Catastrophe, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Amazon Page7 Star Life Transformative insights – Bankers, Politicians, Spies, Patsies, and Secret Societies, October 29, 2006

Jim Marrs

This book is extraordinarily interesting, broad, and paradigm-altering.

The table of contents provided enough detail to be an executive summary. The book is somewhat deficient on sources (heavily reliant on superficial “encyclopedic” references) but the alternative explanation of history and reality is not to be missed.

I bought the book thinking it was about government secrecy. Not so. Much more importantly, this book is about the secret societies used by the 300-500 wealthiest individuals in the world, the ones that own the central banks that can cause financial panics, move inflation or deflation, all to the end of profiting, while “exploding the client,” the individual “patsy” whose hard-earned wages are nothing more than a supermarket shelf from which these elites pluck extra funds to buy another castle. See my review of Mark Lewis's “Liar's Poker” to understand Wall Street use of individuals as *disposable* sources of cash, and my review of John Perkin's “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man” to get a sense of the larger global methods being used to loot the commonwealths. Also relevant is Jeff Faux, “The Global Class War : How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win it Back” and many of my other reviews of books by others on the loss of government legitimacy and credibility with the people, combined with the predatory immorality of corporations that now own government.

Much of what the author attributes to a grand master plan can also be explained by the natural tendency of wealth to create wealth (compound interest) and for wealth to influence politics, but this book is deeper than that.

The author begins with an introduction of the Rothchilds, and gradually builds up a detailed picture of how they funded “barons” around the world, and in America, where the Morgans and the Rockefellers were their chosen instruments. The Bush family is second tier but right up there. Special attention is given to the Federal Reserve, which is NOT controlled by the government and has NEVER been audited in its history, and to the ease with which bankers make money from advance knowledge of changes in domestic and foreign policies that they often simply mandate.

The USA was until around 1837 a “value-based” economy in which real assets–gold, silver, land, labor–paid in full. There was no debt, no interest. From Thomas Jefferson to Andrew Jackson, bankers from Europe were rejected and considered “more dangerous than armies, swindling the future.” Jefferson also believed central banks to be unconstitutional, since the right to create a national currency is reserved to the U.S. Treasury. The author notes that both Lincoln and Kennedy were unique for issuing debt-free currency, and for being assassinated. Reagan was shot by Hinkley, whose relative was dining with a prominent member of the Bush family the night before, and he suggests this was intended to move Bush, a member of the secret society world and leading pawn, into power years sooner.

An extensive discussion is provided of bankers themselves causing financial panics, wars, and other confrontations. The author refers to the Rothschild Formula as being to spawn wars and finance both sides. The book discusses the bank-rolling of Hitler, Trotsky, the US Civil War, the French Revolution, the Boar War, and on and on.

Credible evidence is provided that the terrorism in Italy, as part of a “Strategy of Tension” described in a captured document, was intended to create enough of a perception of leftist terrorism to justify a shift in the government toward fascism. The P2 Lodge behind the terrorism was a secret society on the right, not the left, and is said to have been guided by the Alpine Lodge in Switzerland, the “Gnomes of Zurich.” George Bush senior is alleged to have been an honorary member of this lodge, while Henry Kissinger is said later in the book to be a member of the Alpine Lodge. Most interesting for me is the CIA connection. The “Strategy of Tension” was first devised by James Angleton to prevent a communist take-over in Italy following WWII, and is STRICKINGLY apt in considering the allegations that 9/11 was allowed to happen if not made to happen. See my review of “Crossing the Rubicon,” of “9/11: Synthetic Terror Made in the USA,” among other books (use my lists).

Summing up this book early on, I found it to be 1/3 wealth begets wealth; 1/3 corruption begets wealth, and 1/3 conspiracy begets wealth. However, once I entered the secret society segment of the book, I reverse the above order.

This book gave me a completely new perspective on Cheney and Rove as front men rather than the prime movers, intended to take the heat and be “sacrificed” without the public every realizing that it is Citi-Bank (the same bank said to have secretly received Yamashita's Gold from Douglas McArthur, as told in “Gold Warriors” by Sterling and Peggy Seagrave), and Chase Manhattan, the two owned sufficiently by the Morgan and Rockefeller families to be the hubs for their power. The author also discusses the 40,000 tax exempt organizations that serve as fronts for banks and foundations and corporations, all manipulating the individual citizen-voter without paying a cent in taxes.

On page 408 the author says “Whatever the truth may be, we must be wary of leaders who attempt–whether by force, manipulation, or deceit–to move whole populations in directions they may not wish to go and might not be beneficial to all.”

On page 409 the author says “Knowledge is indeed power. It is time for those who desire true freedom to exert themselves–to fight back against the forces who desire domination through fear and disunity [enabled by secrecy.” The author notes that there are more of us than of them (see my review of Jonathan Schell's “Unconquerable World.”)

I have one word for what I plan to work toward: TRANSPARENCY. Collective public intelligence is going to survive and prosper. The times, they are a'changing.

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Review: State of Denial–Bush at War Part III

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Diplomacy, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle
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5.0 out of 5 stars Stake in the Heart of the W Presidency

October 4, 2006

Bob Woodward

Here are the highlights I drew out that make this book extraordinary and worth reading even if it leaves one with a political hang-over:

1) The Federal Government is broken, and was made worse by a President who knew nothing of foreign policy, a Vice President who closed down the inter-agency policy system, and a Secretary of Defense who was both contemptuous of the uniformed military and held in contempt by Bush Senior.

2) My opinion of the Secretary of Defense actually went UP with this book. Rumsfeld has clearly been well-intentioned, has clearly asked the right questions, but he let his arrogance get away from him. Given a choice between Admiral Clark, a truth-telling transformative person, and General Myers, an acquiescent warrior diminished to senior clerk, Rumsfeld made the right choice for his management style, and the wrong choice for the good people in our Armed Forces. I *like* Rumsfeld's Anchor Chain letter as it has been described, and wish it had been included as an Appendix. Rumsfeld got the control he wanted, but he sacrificed honest early warning in so doing.

3) This book also improves my opinion of the Saudis and especially Prince Bandar. While I have no tolerance for Saudi Royalty–the kind of corrupt debauched individuals that make Congressman Foley look like a vestal virgin–the Saudis did understand that Bush's unleashing of Israel was disastrous, and they did an excellent job of shaking up the President. Unfortunately, they could not overcome Dick Cheney, who should resign or be impeached for gross dereliction of duty and usurpation of Presidential authority.

4) Tenet's visit to Rice on 10 July is ably recounted and adds to the picture. It joins others books, notably James Risen's “State of War,” “Hubris,” FASCO” and “The End of Iraq in presenting a compelling picture of a dysfunctional National Security Advisor who is now a dysfunctional Secretary of State–and Rumsfeld still won't return her phone calls…..

5) The author briefly touches on how CIA shined in the early days of the Afghan War (see my reviews of “JAWBREAKER” and “First In” for more details) but uses this to show that Rumsfeld took the impotence of the Pentagon, and the success of CIA, personally.

6) The author also tries to resurrect Tenet somewhat, documenting the grave reservations that Tenet had about Iraq, but Tenet, like Colin Powell, failed to speak truth to power or to the people, and failed the Nation.

7) Rumsfeld recognized the importance of stabilization and reconstruction (and got an excellent report from the Defense Science Board, not mentioned by this book, on Transitions to and From Hostilities) but he vacillated terribly and ultimately failed to be serious on this critical point.

8) This book *destroys* the Defense Intelligence Agency, which some say should be burned to the ground to allow a fresh start. The author is brutal in recounting the struggles of General Marks to get DIA to provide any useful information on the alleged 946 WMD sites in Iraq. DIA comes across as completely derelict bean counters with no clue how to support operators going in harms way, i.e. create actionable intelligence.

9) Despite WMD as the alleged basis for war, the military had no unit trained, equipped, or organized to find and neutralize WMD sites. A 400 person artillery unit was pressed into this fearful service.

10) General Jay Garner is the star of this story. My face lit up as I read of his accomplishments, insights, and good judgments. He and General Abizaid both understood that allowing the Iraqi Army to stay in being with some honor was the key to transitioning to peace, and it is clearly documented that Dick Cheney was the undoing of the peace. It was Dick Cheney that deprived Jay Garner of Tom Warrick from State, the man who has overseen and understood a year of planning on making the peace, and it was Dick Cheney that fired Garner and put Paul Bremer, idiot pro-consult in place. Garner clearly understood a month before the war–while there was still time to call it off–that the peace was un-winable absent major changes, but he could not get traction within the ideological fantasy land of the Vice Presidency.

11) Apart from State, one military officer, Colonel Steve Peterson, clearly foresaw the insurgency strategy, but his prescient warnings were dismissed by the larger group.

12) General Tommy Franks called Doug Feith “the dumbest bastard on the planet,” –Feith deprived Garner of critical information and promoted Chalabi as the man with all the answers.

13) The author covers the 2004 election night very ably, but at this point the book started to turn my stomach. The author appears oblivious to the fact that the Ohio election was stolen through the manipulation of 12 voting districts, loading good machines in the pro-Bush areas, putting too few machines in the pro-Kerry areas, and in some cases, documented by Rolling Stone, actually not counting Kerry votes at all on the tallies. Ohio has yet to pay, as does Florida, for its treasonous betrayal of the Republic.

Today I issued a press release pointing toward the Pakistan treaty creating the Islamic Emirate of Waziristan as a safehaven for the Taliban and Al Qaeda as the definitive end–loss of–the war on terror, which is a tactic, not an enemy. As Colin Gray says in “Modern Strategy,” time is the one strategic variable that cannot be bought nor replaced. As a moderate Republican I dare to suggest that resigning prior to the November elections, in favor of John McCain, Gary Hart, and a Coalition Cabinet, might be the one thing that keeps the moderate Republican incumbents, and the honest Democrats–those that respect the need for a balanced budget–in place to provide for continuity in Congress, which must *be* the first branch of government rather than slaves to the party line.

It's crunch time. This book is the last straw. The American people are now *very* angry.

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Review: The Lucifer Principle–A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History (Paperback)

5 Star, America (Anti-America), Complexity & Catastrophe, History, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

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5.0 out of 5 stars Time to Dust This One Off–Anticipated Radical Islam and Offers Core Ideas for Surviving,

April 9, 2006
Howard Bloom
Buy and read this book if for no other reason than that the author foresaw the global radicalization of Islam against the West in terms much starker than Samuel Huntington's clash of civilizations and much broader than Yossef Bodansky's brilliant tome on “Bin Laden: the Man Who Declared War on America.

Leon Uris is quoted on the cover as saying that this book is “an act of astonishing intellectual courage,” and I will say that the author has pulled together an extraordinary collage of details in an intricately assembled “story” in which he challenges the assumptions of a number of major conventional intellects. There are 58 “parts” to this book, each part between two and six pages long, with an astounding array of multi-disciplinary quotes and footnotes. No scared ox goes ungored.

Some of the history in this book, of the origin of Mohammed as a possible lunatic and then a vengeful warrior using religion to grab real estate, and of the early split between Sunni and Shiite over the issue of the succession, is very useful today.

The author centers the disparate and very broad-ranging pieces of the book on three core ideas: Earth as a superorganism within which a tribe or religion is itself a superorganism; memes as unifying ideas that create us versus them for the sake of changing the pecking order and feeding off weaker tribes, and–in the only optimistic note in the book, at the end, of collaboration and information sharing as the only means to break out of the pattern of dog eat dog.

He specifically slams religion, and especially fundamentalist religion, as a false god that substitutes faith for control, and as a tool of controlling elites who need to keep the impoverished masses from waking up to the raw fact that masses of people can indeed “take over” factories and estates.

On page 94 the following quote struck me as applying equally to George Bush and Osama Bin Laden: “Leaders like Orville Faubus and Fidel Castro have skillfully manipulated a few basic rules of human nature: that every tribe regards outsiders as fair game; that every society gives permission to hate; that each culture dresses the demon of hatred in the garb of righteousness; and that the man who channels this hatred can rouse the superorganism and lead it around by the nose.”

There are numerous gifted phrases throughout this book, and I can understand the frustration of some in absorbing this dizzying array of data points, but it is surely worth making the effort.

He makes much of the evolution of the brain from reptile (survival) to mammalian (social) to primate (individual) and emphasizes that even the most advanced humans still have all three brains in some form, with the lower forms subject to arousal.

Overall I rate this book one of the ten most useful books relevant to understanding and defeating radical Islam, which the author says is “a meme growing ravenous,” a sleeping giant that has been awakened. He goes back in time to look at how the US, in forcing the French and English to give up the Suez Canal, actually helped inspire Arabia to plan for a day when the West might be sent packing. Similar, the first Gulf War, when the Coalition defeated Iraq, undermined secular Moslem regimes, and further inspired Islamic fundamentalists.

In the author's view we erred gravely in not understanding the asymmetric scope of the threat of Bin Laden and post-Taliban Afghanistan, and we appear to have erred in a truly gigantic way in not seeing that the second Gulf War was in fact doing Iran's bidding and accomplishing something Iran could never have done on its own. The author views Bin Laden as having replaced Russia as a “friend” to the Third World, and anticipates both a rapid spread of Islam among the poor, and a plague of animosity toward to the USA specifically.

The book includes a fascination discussion of psycho-social aspects of nations and tribes and other social groups including religions. While some have been derisive of his discussion of “pecking orders” I believe–having lived overseas most of my life–that he nails it. Not only does instability cause the accepted pecking order to go out the window, but prosperity actually destabilizes established pecking orders. When we eventually implement the grand vision of Jeffrey Sachs (see my review of “The End of Poverty” we will need to be very mindful of the animal force that will be unleashed at the same time, and not make the mistake we made in Iraq, of failing to plan for stabilization and reconstruction.

The last two ideas in this book that really grabbed me are from page 292, on how America began a perceptual shut-down and decline from 1973 onwards, culminating in the cheating culture and lazy obese children and parents that are the bane of most teachers' lives today. America is in “slow” mode and has lost its competitive drive.

The book was hugely ambitious, and it is easy to be snide, as some reviewers are, but I for one found this as close to genius and as close to breath-taking intellectual derring-do as any book I have read in a while. If America is to survive the multiple threats to the Republic, it will take leaders capable of reading and understanding this book, and implementing a 100 year strategy for winning the six front war, beginning on the home front with a draconian reform of our educational and information sharing and distance learning environment.

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Review: The Party’s Over–Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies (Paperback)

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Environment (Problems), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

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5.0 out of 5 stars Historical, Contextual, Critical Reference,

December 12, 2005
Richard Heinberg
There are other books that I consider to be better at the over-all challenge of “connecting the dots” among cheap oil, drugs and drug money gladly laundered by U.S. banks, and war profiteering, but this book must be considered one of the finest underlying reference works that support the more speculative conclusions of others.

This book provides both a solid history of how we got to where we are and why we continually dismiss the known future consequences of not providing for energy conservation and alternative energy; and it also provides a very finely presented review of what the author calls the “banquet of consequences” across transporation, food and agriculture, heating and cooling, the environment, public health, information storage and transmission, and the over-all geopolitics of oil.

Had we all read this book, The Long Emergency, and Crossing the Rubicon prior to Dick Cheney's taking us to war in Afghanistan and Iraq, we would have realized that invading and occupying those two countries is about the oil catastrophe and Wall Street's need for drug money to provide liquidity (a point made in Rubicon, not in this book).

Cheap Oil has been the Fool's Gold of this era. Unhappily, the fools (We the People) have ended up with our pocket's picked, and Wall Street and a few very large immoral organizations have ended up with the Gold.

The party is indeed over. The only question that remains is: can we repossess the Commonwealth from those that have stolen it using profits from cheap oil?

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Review: Collapse–How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed

4 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe

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4.0 out of 5 stars Not the Best, Does Offer Some Contributions,

February 18, 2005
Jared Diamond
Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

The book does not live up to the title, and one wonders if the book was inspired by the edited work Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series) whose basic point is that disasters turn into catastrophe when societies fail to plan and adjust.

On balance, I do not recommend the book to anyone that reads widely, and especially in the ecological economics literature from Herman Daly back through E.O. Wilson The Future of Life, Martin Rees OUR FINAL HOUR: A Scientist's warning : How Terror, Error, and Environmental Disaster Threaten Humankind's Future in This Century–On Earth and Beyond, J. F. Rischard High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them, or the more obvious Club of Rome and that Brown guy. Indeed, for the general audience, J. F. Rischard remains the best overview and the best value.

Having said that, I do not discourage the purchase and absorption of this book. Much of it can be skipped through if you have read other books that do a better job on any individual item (to his credit, the author provides an excellent bibliographic review in his expanded notes section). It is largely a kludge of the ideas and investigations of many others, but does–and this is why it gets four stars from me–pull together in one place, in a very interesting manner, a broad variety of investigations and conclusions.

Here are the highlights that I found worthy of reflection:

1) Gives useful emphasis to the word “ecocide” while bringing forward excellent reviews of how “creeping normalcy” and “landscape amnesia” can undermine any perception of danger or urgency.

2) Summarizes, but not as elegantly as J. F. Rischard, 12 problems and a 5-point framework of contributing factors.

3) Focuses on big business as the core player that must reform, but also emphasizes that big business will not reform until the public lives up to its responsibility for changing the rules of the game and making green business profitable.

4) Provides an impressive, nuanced, and helpful view of China and non-traditional threats coming out of China, including invasive plant and animal species, and noxious gases leaving China with the winds.

5) Alarms regarding Australia, the English-speaking outpost in Asia, which appears much more fragile and vulnerable to collapse than generally appreciated.

6) Explores the destructive nature of religious values that cause deforestation or over-population or other ills that impact on the commons.

7) Bluntly relates environmental instability to political instability. Max Manwaring does it better in his edited work “Environmental Security,” but for the general audience, these few pages are important.

8) Provides a concise and helpful thrashing of the 12 or so most common objections to being prudent about our environment.

Deep inside this book, and finally summarized by the author, is a focus on the failure of decision making at all levels of society. A failure to anticipate, a failure to perceive, a failure to attempt remediation, or even if attempted, a failure to achieve remediation, are all failures of each group and its leadership.

The author ends thoughtfully by noting that resolution of our imbalances will come one way or the other. The only choice we have is between peaceful planned sustainable changes, and catastrophic imposed “natural” corrections through war, famine, pestilence, and genocide.

I am very glad to have purchased this book, and would note that it did not make the cut via online browsing, but when examined in an airport bookstore, was found, once in hand and on direct inspection, to be worth the price of purchase and the time to absorb.

Edit of 20 Dec 07. In a larger s trategic context, what I do not see in this book is an emphasis on strategic culture or getting a grip on global reality. The USA has been living on the backs of everyone else, and only now is it starting to sink in that we are part of an The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People where everyone is is accutely conscious of The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World and our The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project).

The USA is today (20 Dec 07) a “failed state,” and while it is not officially classified as one, it is relevant to note that in 2007 there are 177 failed states, up from 75 in 2005. Bush-Cheney have been terrible to America, and to the rest of the world. Absent a miraculous turning out of a true majority in 2008, America is headed for a depression.

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Review: The Outlaw Sea–A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime

4 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Crime (Organized, Transnational), Environment (Problems), Geography & Mapping, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

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4.0 out of 5 stars Threat From the Sea–75% of the Planet,

July 28, 2004
William Langewiesche
This is not the book I was expecting. Normally it would only have gotten three stars, for recycling three articles, only one of which was really of interest to me (on piracy), but the author is gifted, and his articulation of detail lifts the book to four stars and caused me to appreciate his final story on the poisonous deadly exportation of ship “break-up” by hand. It is a double-spaced book, stretched a bit, and not a research book per se.

Two high points for came early on. The author does a superb job of describing the vast expanse of the ungovernable ocean, three quarters of the globes surface, carrying 40,000 wandering merchant ships on any given day, and completely beyond the reach of sovereign states. The author does a fine job of demonstrating how most regulations and documentation are a complete facade, to the point of being both authentic, and irrelevant.

The author's second big point for me came early on as he explored the utility of the large ocean to both pirates and terrorists seeking to rest within its bosom, and I am quite convinced, based on this book, that one of the next several 9-11's will be a large merchant ship exploding toxically in a close in port situation–on page 43 he describes a French munitions ship colliding with a Norwegian freighter in Halifax. “Witnesses say that the sky erupted in a cubic mile of flame, and for the blink of an eye the harbor bottom went dry. More than 1,630 buildings were completely destroyed, another 12,000 were damaged, and more than 1,900 people died.”

There is no question but that the maritime industry is much more threatening to Western ports than is the aviation industry in the aftermath of 9-11, and we appear to be substituting paperwork instead of profound changes in how we track ships–instead of another secret satellite, for example, we should redirect funds to a maritime security satellite, and demand that ships have both transponders and an easy to understand chain of ownership. There is no question that we are caught in a trap: on the one hand, a major maritime disaster will make 9-11 look like a tea party; on the other the costs–in all forms–of actually securing the oceans is formidable.

Having previously written about the urgent need for a 450-ship Navy that includes brown water and deep water intercept ships (at the Defense Daily site, under Reports, GONAVY), I secure the fourth star for the author, despite my disappointment over the middle of the book, by giving him credit for doing a tremendous job of defining the challenges that we face in the combination of a vast sea and ruthless individual stateless terrorists, pirates, and crime gangs collaborating without regard to any sovereign state.

I do have to say, as a reader of Atlantic Monthly, I am getting a little tired of finding their stuff recycled into books without any warning as to the origin. Certainly I am happy to buy Jim Fallows and Robert Kaplan, to name just two that I admire, but it may be that books which consist of articles thrown together, without any additional research or cohesive elements added (such as a bibliography or index), should come with a warning. I for one will be more alert to this prospect in the future.

Having said that, I will end with the third reason I went up to four stars: the third and final story, on the poisonous manner in which we export our dead ships to be taken apart by hand in South Asia, with hundreds of deaths and truly gruesome working conditions for all concerned, is not one of the stories I have seen in article form before, it is a very valuable story, and for this unanticipated benefit, I put the book down a happy reader, well satisfied with the over-all afternoon.

See also, with reviews:
Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy
Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America's Ocean Wilderness

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Review: Human Security and the New Diplomacy–Protecting People, Promoting Peace

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Civil Society, Complexity & Catastrophe, Diplomacy, Disaster Relief, Environment (Problems), Humanitarian Assistance, Stabilization & Reconstruction

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5.0 out of 5 stars Evolution of Man Demands Attention to Global Human Security,

January 14, 2004
Robert Grant McRae
In the mid-1990's the United Nations (learn to respect them, they stink at the details but work at the strategic level) declared human security to be a just cause for intervention. Since then a number of extremely thoughtful works have documented the links between failed states (where human security is non-existent) and direct threats to the homelands of the advanced Western states. See my various lists, especially the list on Stategy & Force Structure.This book, by an extraordinary duo including the man who may well be Canada's foremost authority in this arena, provides the first and as best I can tell only comprehensive discussion of why human security in every clime and place matters locally, that is, to the future of your children.

It places special emphasis on the importance of multi-cultural (i.e. not bully boy unilateral “we are the light and might makes right) approaches and large investments (commensurate with what we waste now on B2 bombers and nuclear carriers) in peacekeeping and stabilization operations which provide a vastly greater return on investment than funds wasted lining the pockets of military-industrial complex managers.

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