Future – Page 18 – Public Intelligence Blog

Massive Op-Ed, Some Food for Thought, Not a Full Meal,

April 11, 2005

Thomas L. Friedman

Edit of 20 Dec 07 to add links.

I confess to being mildly disappointed whenever I encounter a massive Op-Ed without references, and can see in every page ideas that are undoubtedly the author's own, but have also been very ably explored by others–Kevin Kelly in Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World; Thomas Stewart, The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization; or Howard Rheingold, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution, to name just three of hundreds of bleeding edge sources.

The core idea in this book, that individuals are now empowered and able to practice “C2C” (consumer to consumer or citizen to citizen), is not new. Most of us have been focusing on it since the mid-1990's when we started to tell the Pentagon that top-down command and control based on secret sources and unilateral action was history, being replaced by multilateral bottom up consesus based on open sources.

The heart of the book, the discussion of ten forces that flattened the world (basically, inter-connected the world in a manner unlike any seen before), makes it a solid airplane book, a fine way to spend a few hours.

The following sentence, on page 283, is alone worth the price of the book: “If President Bush made energy independence his moon shot, in one fell sweeop he would dry up revenue for terrorism, force Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Saudi Arabia onto the path of reform–which they will never do with $50-a-barrel oil–strengthen the dollar, and improve his own standing in Europe by doing something huge to reduce global warming.”

The book provides a good overview of the economic and intellectual challenges from China and India, and makes this memorable by jumping from “eat your dinner and think of the starving children in India” to “do your job well, or lose it to smarter more motivated young men and women from India.”

Other more intellectually rigorous books (added 20 Dec 07):
Modern Strategy
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

2005/01/292009/12/04

Review: Civilization and Its Enemies–The Next Stage of History

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Future, History, Information Society

A Rare “Must Read for Liberal and Conservative Alike,

January 29, 2005

Lee Harris

Very few books cause me to question–even reverse–intellectual views that have been 52 years in the making. This book has done so. Although I have been uneasy for many years with America's loss of its warrior ethic and fit society, and the abdication by many Americans of their civic responsibility to understand foreign events and forces that threaten our way of life, this book for the first time in my somewhat extensive reading, has both crystallized the “fire alarm” nature of 9/11 in a unique manner, and caused me to hold the neo-conservative and unilateral militarists in somewhat greater regard. It even caused me to appreciate Zionism is a new light (while still despising corruption, lies, deception of allies, and inherent genocide–but still, a new look)–quite an accomplishment.

This is a difficult book to read–I recommend that it be read quickly, for flavor, rather than slowly, for trying to understand each sentence and each page could result in a loss of interest and quitting on the author before reaching the end. It's easier if you simply plug ahead and mark the high points–the book is full of gems of insight.

It is a very intelligent book, the *opposite* of the blind bible-thumping “there's only one book that matters” true believers that I am accustomed to hearing from, yet this book very elegantly complements the obsessive views of the bible-thumpers. This awesome book comes down to one question: what are you willing to die for? and one challenge: how many of you (us) are willing to die for anything at all?

The most important point that I drew out of this book was its legitimate and here-to-fore unarticulated criticism of intellectuals and liberals for having forgotten that their hard won liberties came at the cost of blood, and that utopian ideals are fantasies that distract one from the harsh truths of the real world. Others will focus on the author's more publicized point, that Al Qaeda is a ruthless enemy that hates us to the point of wanting to simply die while we die with it, and that is a useful point, but the two go together: we cannot be effective against our external enemy unless we also recognize our internal enemy, those mind-sets that prevent us from being effective in defending our values and our liberties.

There are three flaws or missing contexts in this book, and I mention them only to stress that while I hold this book in very high regard and am more accepting or tolerant of the neo-conservative viewpoint as a result, it is a partial view, nothing more. It does not address the corruption within our own society, where elected presidents, corporate CEOS, the churches, the New York Times, charities, and–today–the Boy Scouts–are all found to lack ethics and be frauds; it does not address the external diseconomies imposed by immoral capitalism; and it does not address the stark realities overseas that are going to wipe us out without any help from terrorists: the 59 plagues, the 18 genocides, the 32 failed states, the loss of potable water, etc.

In short, this author is absolutely world class on the fundamentals of recognizing that some people, you simply have to hunt down and kill. He does not address what I think of as “track two”: we need to stabilize & reconstruct the rest of the world so as to minimize the number of people we have to hunt down and kill.

He makes a good and excellent case for acting unilaterally, and for ignoring–even being dismissive of–the fraud of “sovereignty” that is represented by the United Nations and all these little “piss-ant” countries that are comprised of an elite that loots the country, and masses of impoverished, illiterate, “peasants” that represent potential hoards of human locusts carrying disease, crime, and instability wherever they migrate to….

He does not, however, satisfy me in addressing the lack of good faith among leaders who correctly choose to defend the nation with unilateral militarism, but also choose to lie to the public and betray the public trust by concocting false claims and by manipulating secret intelligence to their own ends.

On balance I find this book to be extremely important–one that liberals as well as conservative must read. It stresses the role of family as an antidote to gangs (something Lee Kuan Yew of Singapore champions constantly, and the Chinese generally have understood for centuries). The author also criticizes modern education for presenting “finished” or ideal concepts, and not providing the students with the life experience to learn the hard way that life is about compromise, trade-offs, partial satisfaction, etcetera. He ends by celebrating creative destruction and the value of commitment, including blind faith commitment when crunch time comes and one has to be obedient to the leaders we have trusted with our survival.

I value what this author has done. I take from this work three goals for the future:

1) We must reconstitute our society as a fit society with a warrior ethic and an inclination to study the outside world, not simply retreat into drugs/alcohol and sedative soap operas;

2) We must, as a society, agree that ruthlessness and the will to fight to the death matters, when faced by enemies that have no thought of compromise and have demonstrated by suicide that they are more than willing to do so themselves; and

3) We must–this is the part the author does not cover (see my lists for books that do)–formulate a grand strategy, a sustainable grand strategy, for addressing the 20 global problems that J.F. Rischard has identified, so as to prevent those problems from spawning more terrorists and sending our way more plagues, more illegal immigrants, more criminals.

This book is easily one of 25 books that I would recommend to every American and to most foreigners.

2004/01/172009/12/04

Review: An End to Evil–How to Win the War on Terror

5 Star, Future, Politics, Terrorism & Jihad

Has Some Real Gems, Documents Authors' Bad Points as Well,

January 17, 2004

David Frum

There are some real gems in this book. The authors:1) Document the split between the hard-line neo-conservatives who have captured the mind of 43, and their growing (and increasingly public) disrespect for 41 and for General Brent Scowcroft and Secretary of State and former General Colin Powell.

2) Are correct in their condemnation of the Clinton national security team for being weak and incompetent. Any Democratic candidate foolish enough to appoint such individuals as their advisors is not smart enough to beat 43.

3) Make it clear that the top priority for neo-conservatives in the war on terrorism is not overseas action, but the implementation of a national identification card system here at home.

4) Are correct in their condemnation of US-based Muslim charities and clerics (and FBI agents of the Muslim faith) unwilling to speak out against Islamic radicalization and those who recommend jihad in America, abusing our freedom of speech. They are also correct when they propose to end all tax exemptions and breaks for those that fail to condemn terrorism and fatwas against Americans.

5) Are correct when they point out that the trillions of dollars we have spent on national intelligence have resulted in a vacuum on both Iraq and weapons of mass destruction, and a lack of knowledge about terrorist financing.

6) They are correct when they emphasize the importance of funding the education and elevation of women into power within Islamic societies.

7) Are correct when they point out that with the exception of Jordan, no Arab country has been willing to give Palestinians a break–no access to schools, ownership of land, or passports. Lebanon, they say, forbids Palestinians from 72 professions.

8) Are correct when they point out that we are “fighting the war on terror with the same people and the same bureaucracies that so conspicuously failed us on 9/11.” They are especially powerful when they criticize the CIA for failing to collect, read, translate, or understand the openly published writings of Khomeini during the Carter years–CIA is operating on perhaps 2% of the available global knowledge because it obsesses on spying and disrespects open sources of information in 29 languages–something Herb Meyer understood when he was Special Assistant to then DCI Bill Casey.

8) Are correct when they characterize the US Army specifically, and the entire US military generally, as “forces of the past, built to counter threats that no longer exist.”

9) Are correct to emphasize how the U.S. Government as a whole is completely fragmented and lacking in an inter-agency management and coordination structure that both Kissinger and Rubin have suggested is urgently required to keep pace with the threats and demands of the modern world.

10) Are correct to slam the FBI for being incompetent at counter-intelligence, and to call for a new national homeland security agency reporting to the secretary for homeland security. They do however overlook the equal importance of funding state and local intelligence centers and counterintelligence personnel.

11) Are correct to emphasize that US free trade agreements with various nations should demand that the nations sign the same agreement with one another (e.g. in South Asia).

12) Are correct to point out that the United Nations and its focus on “armed attack” is completely out-dated, and that America should increase and sustain its support to the UN only on condition that the UN modernize both its by-laws and its operating procedures.

13) Are correct to propose that national security funding should rise to 5% of the national budget, up from 3%, but they fail to understand that modern warfare requires co-equal funding for non-military sources of power including massive preventive *peace* operations.

There is, then, a great deal of good in this book. It is, however, also full of a great deal of crap. It has no footnotes, no bibliography, no index, and a great deal of either badly researched material or plain disinformation. They misrepresent or ignore a number of very important facts. On page 24, for example, they discuss the debriefing of Hussein's son-in-law, defector Hussein Kamel, and fail to mention that he told us all the stocks had been destroyed, and only the cookbooks remained. Throughout the book, while lambasting CIA for not knowing (half true), they decline to discuss the unethical and unprofessional manner in which the neo-cons not only shut out the professionals from the Iraq war deliberations, but cherry-picked and fabricated information to mislead the president as well as the American people. On page 32 and again on page 35 they lie when they say that Iraq was “one of the leading sponsors of terrorism in the region.” On various pages they gloss over the fact that Chalabi was both a thief and a liar, fired by CIA for stealing millions from covert funds, and ultimately found by CIA to be fabricating translations to deceive the US military intelligence people. On pages 45-46 they repeat the long proven lie about Mohammed Atta meeting an Iraqi intelligence officer in Prague. Not only has the FBI determined that Atta was in Florida at the time, but Vaclav Havel, former President of Czechoslovakia, recently honored by President Bush, has repeatedly stated this did not happen. On page 155, they deliberately avoid mentioning that it was Rumsfeld who allowed 3000 Taliban and Al Qaeda leaders to escape by approving a Pakistani air evacuation operation that went on all night. Rumsfeld's naiveté and ignorance cost us the chance to nail Bin Laden early on. There are many other points where the facts differ from their representations.

The book does *not* offer a true strategy for the future of American security or even the near-term war on terrorism. It is largely a baloney justification for the war on Iraq. It fails to acknowledge that unilateralist American behavior is spawning more terrorists than we are catching. On balance, this book is worth reading to understand both the good and the bad of the neo-conservative viewpoint.

2003/10/092009/12/04

Review: Beyond Baghdad–Postmodern War and Peace

4 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Complexity & Catastrophe, Force Structure (Military), Future, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), War & Face of Battle

Iraq a Mistake, Muslim Outlands More Important,

October 9, 2003

Ralph Peters

Edited 2003 review to add links and respond to comment.

I normally rave over Ralph Peter's books. He is America's Lawrence of Arabia and a brilliant intelligence analyst, especially on non-conventional threats. In this book (actually, a collection of clippings, most from the New York Post, which says something right off), he goes a bridge too far–on the one hand, he and his mentor, General McCaffrey) go several bridges too far in their praise for the “courageous” strategy of the Bush Administration (it's not a strategy, it's a mindless vendetta bought and paid for by Zionists), and on the other, he applies his superb mind to the realities of our global conflict with radicalized Islam.

The book is full of gems. I've said he is a soldier-poet before, and this book continues that tradition. The flashes of brilliance demand the purchase and reading of this book.

His most important point, one that merits its own book, is that America has misplaced its priorities in attacking radical Islam through Iraq (and passivity toward Saudi Arabia's sponsorship of terrorism, a neglect that will cost vastly more than the Iraq misadventure), and that it is the Muslim “outlands” from Central Asia to Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, and India (with the second largest Muslim population in the world after Indonesia) where America would be elevating women, nurturing secular states, and spreading the gospel of peace and prosperity.

The author takes the long-view, at least a 50-year view, and this is in sharp contrast to the “quick win at any cost (to the future)” of the current Administration. Indeed, when the author describes bin Laden as “ultimately a blasphemer against his own religion, having appointed himself God's instrument upon earth, assuming the license to kill by the tens or tens of thousands those who do not share his vision, to purge, to punish, to sanctify,” the author is in fact describing George W. Bush, not just bin Laden.

The author overcomes the limitation of New York Post hyperbole in many of his pieces. Among the most interesting is one on the five socio-psychological pools from which terrorists draw their membership: underclass, “course of conflict” joiners, opportunists, hardcore believers, and mercenaries. Also helpful is his coverage of monotheist cultures, including a subtle reference to neo-conservatism aligned with Zionism as a rising monotheist culture potentially capable of undermining American democracy and religious tolerance.

Deep in the middle of the book we find his discussion of a world divided into three strategic zones, apart from North America: the monotheist zone centered in the eastern Mediterranean; the Sino-Verdic(Indian) zone; and the postcolonial zone of Africa and Latin America. His discussion cannot be summarized and contains many brilliant insights, including a conclusion that China is not a regional threat, and China's greatest variable is not its external ambition but rather its potential for internal implosion. He is provocative in envisioning a huge “Afro-Latino-American” triangle of power emerging, with Brazil, South Africa, and the USA as the potential engines for this renaissance of the Southern Hemisphere.

The author joins Robert Baer, whose book Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude in calling for a complete withdrawal of US support for the despotic and sleazy Saudi regime that blatantly continues to support global terrorism and the radicalization of Muslim youth.

Where Ralph Peters falls short, I believe, and I say this with the utmost respect for this warrior-scholar who has placed his life on the line more than once, is in allowing his ultra-patriotism to shut out the discordant and sometimes dissenting view of other patriots who are perhaps more willing than he to acknowledge that we ourselves are part of the problem. This book is a one-man opinion piece with no reference to other works, such as those by Jonathan Schell The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People, Mark Hertsgaard The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, or Michael Hirsh At War with Ourselves: Why America Is Squandering Its Chance to Build a Better World, among the many other national security books I have reviewed here at Amazon. It falls prey, therefore, to the over-powering tuba effect, and loses some of its gloss in being so strident and so unabashedly “grind the bastards down, we are the light”–but then, we acknowledge that he was writing originally for the New York Post.

The author gets some big things right: Bill Clinton, Madeline Albright, and Sandy Berger have much to answer for in their deliberate avoidance of the reality of terrorism and their failure to go to a war-footing as both Dick Clarke and George Tenet, among others, advised. He also gets some things wrong. He is wrong, for example, when he speaks on page 166 of Islam's failure to generate a single healthy state, to that we answer: Malaysia. He is half-right when he half-bakes the French, who welcome different dictators to their bosoms for different reasons, while opposing American unilateralism, and he is half-right when he dismisses all of the anti-war voices as ill-considered and cowardly. He is largely wrong in dismissing “Old Europe” as a voice of reason, and he is mostly wrong in assuming that all is right with U.S. intelligence and that everything U.S. intelligence produces is reliable. I realize he is writing hyperbole for the public and knows better, but the book must be judged on its substance.

To end on a most positive note, Ralph Peters is completely utterly correct when he points out that America has, in the past 20 years, surrendered the battlefield to our non-state enemies in advance, for lack of attention and insight and will. Ralph is one of perhaps ten people I listen to with rapt attention–his voice, when integrated with the voices of others with different perspectives, is a lifeline to reality, a voice we ignore at our peril.

2003/09/242009/12/04

Review: The Two Percent Solution–Fixing America’s Problems in Ways Liberals and Conservatives Can Love

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Congress (Failure, Reform), Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Future, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Survival & Sustainment

Re-Opens the Door to a Bright Future for America,

September 24, 2003

Matthew Miller

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links.

This book is politically and economically *explosive*. It joins The Radical Center: The Future of American Politics (Halstead & Lind) and The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World (Ray & Anderson) as one of my “top three” in domestic US political economics, and it *also* joins The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy (William Greider) and Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions (Clyde Prestowitz) is my “top three” for international political economics.

This is a cross-over, transformative book that should be meaningful to everyone in the world, but especially to those Americans who wish to break out of the vicious downward spiral caused by partisan politics and voodoo economics–by elected politicians corrupted by special interests and consistently selecting short-term fraudulent “solutions” at the expense of long-term *sustainable” solutions.

By “2% solution” the author means 2 cents of every dollar in the national budget, or roughly what we have already wasted or committed to waste on the misbegotten Iraq invasion and occupation. The author crafts a viable proposition for thinking really big and coming to grips, in time to avert the looming disaster of the baby boomer pensions and the collapse of health care and education, with the four biggest issues threatening the national security and prosperity of the United States of America: universal health care; equal education for all, a living wage for all, and sustainable reliable pensions for all.

He sums it up in a gripping fashion: if we don't fund smart well-educated kids across the entire country, then we will not have the productivity we need to expand our pension funds and care for the boomers when they hit retirement. Smart kids now, safe retirement for today's adults. Any questions?

He is candidly (but politely) blunt when he states, and then documents, that both the Republican and Democratic party leaders (less Howard Dean) are lying to us about the answers that are possible (Prologue, page xiii). His book is an earnest–and in my judgement, hugely successful–attempt to create what the author calls an “ideologically androgynous” agenda for achieving social and economic justice in America with a commitment of just two cents on the tax-revenue dollar.

On the issue of teaching, he documents the “teacher gap” as one of the primary reasons for varying levels of performance–a gap that is more important than genetics or environment, and that is also resolvable by sound educational policy and funding. He brutally undresses both the Bush Administration, which is leaving every child behind, and the Democrats, who are “more symbol than cure.” Republican hypocrisy and Democratic timidity receive an equal thrashing.

On living wages, he documents the 25 million that are not covered; on pensions he documents the coming collapse of Social Security and other “off budget” and unprotected funds.

He provides four reasons why we have a dysfunctional debate (and one can surmise: why we need to change the Presidential election process in order to achieve truly open and substantive debates): 1) paralysis from political party parity; 2) old mind-sets and habits shared by *both* Republican and Democratic leaders (less Governor Dean); 3) the failure of the national press to be serious and critical and to contribute to the debates; and 4) the tyranny of charades funded by political contributions.

The book includes an excellent and understandable review of both economic and social justice theory. Of special interest is the author's discussion of the Rawls Rule for social justice, which is to imagine everyone in an “original position” behind a veil of ignorance where no one knows what their luck will be in the future–the design of the social safety net should provide for the amelioration of any injustice that might befall anyone, and a social promotion system that prevents wealth concentrations that are not beneficial to the larger society–to wit, we must “set some limits on the power of luck to deform human lives.”

The author concludes the book by suggesting that the public is ready for a revolution in U.S. political economic affairs, and in so doing points out how ill-served the U.S. public is by surveys that confuse myopia with honesty–surveys that ask generic questions without revealing the scope of the problem (40 million affected, etc.) with the result that the public is not informed of the depth of the problem–or, as the author suggests–they would *want to do something about it.”

This is a sensible, heartening book. It is a book that gives hope for the future and that displays a proper respect for the good intentions and ability to think of the average citizen. It is a book that, if adopted by any Presidential candidate–or by all of them–could radically alter the public debates that lie before the public in the period leading up to the 2004 election. Every American should read this book and the four books cited above. If Thomas Jefferson was correct when he said, “A Nation's best defense is an educated citizenry,” then Matthew Miller just became the first tutor to the new Nation.

New Comment: Between a Tobin tax on every Federal Reserve transaction, an end of income taxes on individuals, and this author's idea, I am quite certain that we can find and apply a trillion a year against global and domestic high-level threats from poverty to transnational crime, while winding down the military, secret intelligence, prison, and hospital complexes. This is one of the books I would recommend the next President read sooner than later.

2003/09/132019/09/06

Review: The Unconquerable World–Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People

7 Star Top 1%, America (Anti-America), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Future, History, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Public), Military & Pentagon Power, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Public Administration, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

7 Star Life Transformative Restores Faith, Non-Violent Restoration of People Power,

September 13, 2003

Jonathan Schell

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add links

This book, together with William Geider's The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and Mark Hertsgaard's The Eagle's Shadow: Why America Fascinates and Infuriates the World, in one of three that I believe every American needs to read between now and November 2004.

Across 13 chapters in four parts, the author provides a balanced overview of historical philosophy and practice at both the national level “relations among nations” and the local level (“relations among beings”). His bottom line: that the separation of church and state, and the divorce of social responsibility from both state and corporate actions, have so corrupted the political and economic governance architectures as to make them pathologically dangerous.

His entire book discusses how people can come together, non-violently, to restore both their power over capital and over circumstances, and the social meaning and values that have been abandoned by “objective” corporations and governments.

The book has applicability to Iraq, Afghanistan, and other places where the US is foolishly confusing military power with political power. As he says early on, it is the public *will* that must be gained, the public *consent* to a new order–in the absence of this, which certainly does not exist in either Iraq or Afghanistan, no amount of military power will be effective (to which I would add: and the cumulative effect of the financial and social cost of these military interventions without end will have a reverse political, economic, and social cost on the invader that may make the military action a self-inflicted wound of great proportions).

Across the book, the author examines three prevailing models for global relations: the universal empire model, the balance of power model, and the collective security model. He comes down overwhelmingly on the side of the latter as the only viable approach to current and future global stability and prosperity.

A quote from the middle of the book captures its thesis perfectly: “Violence is a method by which the ruthless few can subdue the passive many. Nonviolence is a means by which the active many can overcome the ruthless few.”

Taking off from the above, the author elaborates on three sub-themes:

First, that cooperative power is much greater, less expensive, and more lasting that coercive power.

Second, that capitalism today is a scourge on humanity, inflicting far greater damage–deaths, disease, poverty, etcetera–that military power, even the “shock and awe” power unleashed against Afghanistan and Iraq without public debate.

Third, and he draws heavily on Hannah Arendt, here a quote that should shame the current US Administration because it is so contradictory to their belief in “noble lies”–lies that Hitler and Goering would have admired. She says, “Power is actualized only where word and deed have not parted company, where words are not empty and deeds not brutal, where words are not used to veil intentions but to disclose realities, and deeds are not used to violate and destroy but to establish relations and create new realities.”

Toward the end of the book the author addresses the dysfunctionality of the current “absolute sovereignty” model and concludes that in an era of globalization, not only must the US respect regional and international sovereignty as an over-lapping authority, but that we must (as Richard Falk recommended in the 1970's) begin to recognize people's or nations as distinct entities with culturally-sovereign rights that over-lap the states within which the people's reside–this would certainly apply to the Kurds, spread across several states, and it should also apply to the Jews and to the Palestinians, among many others.

On the last page, he says that we have a choice between survival and annihilation. We can carry on with unilateral violence, or we the people can take back the power, change direction, and elect a government that believes in cooperative non-violence, the only path to survival that appears to the author, and to this reviewer, as viable.

This is a *very* important book, and it merits careful reading by every adult who wishes to leave their children a world of peace and prosperity. We can do better. What we are doing now is destructive in every sense of the word.

2003/09/082009/12/04

Review: Out of the Blue–How to Anticipate Big Future Surprises

5 Star, Future, Strategy

Out of the Box Thinking, Well-Structured,

September 8, 2003

John L. Petersen

Edit of 21 Dec 07 to add link.

I recommend this book, updated from the 1997 version, very highly. It is a well-structured look at all sorts of “jokers” or “wild cards”, and I particularly like the methodology for calculating impact across nine factors (rate of change, reach, vulnerability, outcome, timing, opposition, power factor, foresight factor, and quality), all combining to create the tenth “impact index”. After a short introduction, each major “earth-shaking” wild card is covered with two pages of clear graphics that are easy to absorb.

See the 2007 book, Seeing the Invisible: National Security Intelligence in an Uncertain Age

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Category: Future

Review: The World Is Flat–A Brief History of the Twenty-first Century (Hardcover)