Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 217 – Public Intelligence Blog

Important Contribution with Some Errors and Omissions, April 27, 2008

Roy Gutman

I cannot second-guess the author's findings based on his extraordinary direct research, but I do question some of what he was told (Madeline Albright, for example, misled this author), and I also have some issues with how the book's findings over-state, under-state, and ignore other credible sources I have reviewed here at Amazon.

Up front, seven excellent insights from this book:

1. The U.S. in the 1990's had no idea that Information Operations (IO) was going to be important, and that the dissemination of deadly knowledge (e.g. from the Afghanistan wars, on how to create Improvised Explosive Devices, etcetera) was going to become a global threat. Tracking “dangerous knowledge” has now become one of my top “indicator & warning” elements. See my review of Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography

2. Small wars cannot be ignored, power vacuums cannot be allowed or they will be filled negatively. Non-state actors can hijack a state and we need to notice when they do. It is at this point I begin to feel the author is over-stating Bin Laden's reach, especially when compared to criminal states around the world. See my review of Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.

3. Successive administrations, from Bush Senior to Clinton to Bush Jr, had no clue about the importance of the “cultural roots” that Bin Laden was spreading with his financing of madrasses across Afghanistan (it is at this point I grow concerned that the author is ignoring the Saudi government's financing of both Bin Laden and the madrasses all over the world and especially in Indonesia). I have scheduled a book on CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: Beliefs, Faiths, Ideologies, and the Five Minds for 2009. This is clearly an area where the US Intelligence Community and the foreign policy/national communities know nothing.

4. If journalists are not on the scene in every clime and place, then it is easier for the US Government to ignore problems that will inevitably ignore borders and come home to America. See A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change. The author ignores the fact that with the exception of The Atlantic Monthly, the New Yorker, and the Boston Globe, virtually every newspaper and journal is a paid huckster for their corporate owners.

5. IMPORTANT: Administration must not only HAVE a grand strategy, but within that strategy must craft BOTH a domestic message for the US public and an inter-agency foreign policy campaign plan for achieving OUTCOMES, not just “messages.” This was the book's strongest point.

6. American indifference reinforces instability enablers and formentors. I know for a fact that Madeline Albright repressed INR reporting on terrorism becoming a real problem. She chose to accept Iran's attack on Khobar Towers and the Al Qaeda attacks on two embassies and the USS Cole as “acceptable losses.” That alone disqualifies her from advising Hillary Clinton on anything.

7. UN and UN negotiated for the Soviet pull-out but not for a stable follow-on regime. Deja vu in Iraq. Over-all the author does an excellent job of depicting a generally blase, sometimes naive, and often inattentive US foreign policy establishment across all three administrations. See my review of Running The World: the Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power for a sense of the clowns our Presidents tend to appoint for lack of a stronger TRANSPARTISAN bench.

Without regard to how the author may have been led by those telling their story as they would have it come out, there are a number of “dots” that I found worthy of note:

+ Bin Laden is reported to have forecast Iraq's attack on Kuwait and eventually on Saudi Arabia.

+ Over-emphasis on Bin Laden's anti-Americanism and I have noted, “a hit job of Clarke and Scheuer.” It was the US keeping bases in Saudi Arabia that set Bin Laden off, together with the Saudi refusal to allow him to attack Hussein directly.

+ US reliance on Pakistan and failing to deal direct with the Afghan regimes and principal tribes was a fatal error

+ Author avoids any mention of the fact that it was the Saudi regime that funded Bin Laden and global spread of virulent Wahabbism from 1988 onwards.

+ Although Cheney appears in the Index several times, the book and the author, rather astonishingly, fail to to report:

– Cheney was given the mandate for terrorism from day one under Bush Junior, and it was Cheney who first, failed to take terrorism seriously, and then allowed it happen in order to justify an invasion of Iraq. See, among MANY other books, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition among many other works.

– Both the Clinton and Bush Junior Administrations were actively negotiating with the Taliban over oil and natural gas pipelines. See Crossing the Rubicon, The Long Emergency, and many other works along these lines.

+ Senator Jesse Helms not only destroyed the US Information Agency, the only US agency with a clue on foreign cultures and belief systems, but he also castrated the Agency for International Development (AID) at precisely the time it was most needed.

+ Karzai flagged the Taliban as a group worthy of supporting.

+ US Intelligence had astronomical sums for “getting” Bin Laden but almost nothing for fostering stabilization and reconstruction in Afghanistan, including support to nationalists like Moussaud.

+ In 1999 Pakistan and Iran cut a deal–THAT IS THE SECOND STORY WE MISSED. [We know have a great deal of reporting in the open on Iranian funding of Pakistani nuclear program, and in my view, likelihood that the quid pro quo was an Islamic nuclear warhead for the Russian Sunburn missiles (carrier killers, 3.0 mach straight, 2.2 mach zig-zag).

+ The author is naive or poorly informed or duplicitous in his stating that Bin Laden was outraged at the illegitimate Arab rules, stating it in such as way as to question Bin Laden's sanity. Michael Scheur and I are agreed on this point: Bin Laden has had good cause to condemn US presence in the Middle East. See my review of Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 as well as Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror.

+ He reminds us that Ambassador Bill Richardson accomplished nothing in his mission to Afghanistan.

+ He reminds us that Khalizad, the darling of Bush Juniors regime, was part of the problem within the Clinton Administration.

+ He tells a very good story over-all of how conflicted the Department of State was in on the one hand, considering the Taliban not bad over all (what does not come out is the oil and gas deals in the background) and their record on human rights, which included mass murders and atrocities against women and children.

+ The THIRD BIG STORY WE MISSED was the Arabization of the Taliban, to include their changing to the Arabic calendar, the Arabization of libraries (which is to say the burning of most books), and the destruction of Hindu and other religious antiquities, something Pakistan tried to stop. This is new to me, I have not seen reference to it before, and I consider Bin Laden's influence over the Taliban to be seriously over-stated, but I accept this as useful perspective and certainly a good example of how the US simply does not “do” cultural intelligence.

The book ends with a focused chronology (focused instead of incomplete–the author did not set out to do a global review on this missed story, one is still needed) and a generally good index.

I put this book down thinking once again how desperately we need a private sector or public ABLE DANGER able to connect all the dots across all the books. I have tried for years to get Jeff Bezos to realize he can monetize micro-text for micro-cash and also sense-making across literatures, but he is in denial on World Brain possibilities, at least for now.

This is a solid four-star book, certainly worthy of buying and reading if you are responsible for South Asia, Central Asia, terrorism, or understanding why US foreign and national security policy continue to be managed by cronies with little deep knowledge of the real world and no holistic strategic model for addressing threats, policies, and state and non-state partners in a coherent sustainable manner.

My final three links:
Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century
Security Studies for the 21st Century
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century

2008/04/252010/01/05

Review: State of the World 2008–Toward a Sustainable Global Economy

4 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Security (Including Immigration), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Superb Primer for Any Level, Needs Two Missing Pieces, April 25, 2008

Worldwatch Institute

This a superb edited work that melds chapters (with notes at the end) from world-class authors on a broad range of topics.

I kept this at five stars until the end and then I could not stand it anymore. There are at least five reasons to reduce it to four. Here are the first two.

1. As someone who grew up with Banks & Textor and have created four analytic models in my lifetime, I am growing increasing impatient with the continued fragmentation of research and writing. There is a model available: ten threats (from the UN High Level Threat Panel), twelve policies, eight challengers. We need to start fusing, analyzing, visualizing and discussing all ten threats in relation to all ten policies. I am no longer content to read about water in one chapter, meat in another, and so on. Stop putzing around and create the EarthGame with all information, all languages, all the time–geospatially grounded of course–and let's get on with the task of identifying with precision the global range of gifts table down to the household level, from $1 to $100 million.

2. I am increasingly irritated by the little cabals that strive to cite only themselves, and furthermore, have their own language to distinguish them. “Get the price right” instead of “true cost”? Get over it. Enough already. I am also increasingly of the view that the Notes must be indexed. The notes are good, but when the lead chapter talks about “Adjust Economic Scale” and fails to cite Small Is Beautiful, 25th Anniversary Edition: Economics As If People Mattered: 25 Years Later . . . With Commentaries or Human Scale I growl.

Together with Plan 3.0 and Vital Signs, both linked by another reviewer, this book represents a fine stand-alone study set if you want to limit yourself to the WorldWatch oracles and dismiss all others.

Here is what grabbed me about this book:

+ Opens with utterly sensational four pages of “timeline” for 2007 with little blocks that are priceless. I really like this.

+ Chapter 1 does a fine job of listing:

– Four flawed economic assumptions:

– 1. Independence of economic activity from “infinite” nature

– 2. Growth should be the primary economic objective

– 3. Markets are always superior to governments at allocating resources

– 4. Humans are economic maximizers and place no value on community

This may sound simple but I admire it.

– The seven big ideas for economic reform:

– 1. Adjust economic scale

– 2. Shift from growth to development

– 3. Make prices tell the ecological truth [note: for World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility–WISER–to not be in index irritates me so much I almost take the fifth star again).

– 4. Account for nature's contributions [I am infuriated by a second hand citation. I am not familiar with more than a couple of books, but to not mention Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications or The Future of Life moves this book, as very good as it is–toward Classic Comics book shallowness.

– 5. Apply the precautionary principle. [Cites a San Francisco Chronicle opinion piece, what happened to the real books on this subject, such as Protecting Public Health and the Environment: Implementing The Precautionary Principle

– 6. Revitalize commons management

– 7. Value women [here I am irritated by the isolation of these authors and their citations from a broader understanding of why we should value women: because it is a proven fact that there is no better investment, dollar for development dollar, than a dollar spend educating women. That ripples through society and impacts on the men big time.]

The second chapter has a prices Figure showing that computer diffusion is growing arithmetically while cell phone diffusion is growing logrithmically plus. My comment: Nokia is slowing beginning to grasp what I told their Chairman a year ago: give the cell phones to the poor free, sell the call, not the phone (and my other idea, educate the poor one cell call at a time, starting with call centers in India and China, and then monetize the transactions. Having six farmers call in asking about the same animal disease is PRICELESS! How governments cannot understand this simple logic is beyond my comprehension.

Across the book the tables and figures are powerful but they are not integrated into a total model (e.g. you should not grow grain with water you cannot afford to create fuel instead of feeding a family when you could run 35 million cars a year on Cuban sugar cane sap).

I was pleasantly surprised to see meat and seafood in its own chapter, but as an avid admirer of everything by Francis Moore Lappe
, see for example Diet for a Small Planet and her most recentDemocracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life.

Toward the end are two very important chapters, one on the financial implications of sustainability (i.e. what alternative vehicles can be used to push back on predatory lending, absentee ownership, and wasteful food practices) and on harnessing human energy (e.g. to plant trees).

I put the book down with irritation–Open Money, Collective Intelligence, even the word Citizen are not in this book–and I again harken to the need for an EarthGame in which all knowledge, all budgets, all citizens, can come together to game, understand, dialog, and decide.

I've come to the conclusion that the fragmentation of the “academy” is now just as dangerous as the desperate failure of our political system in America (see Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It for the simple reason that if the academy would get its act together and “make sense” to the public, the public will take care of the political fix.

We knew most of this stuff in the 1970's, 1980's, and 1990's–at the academic level–but the politicians were able to ignore us because a) the people were unwitting and b) low gas prices and high Exxon bribes were great for the smokey room crowd. That's over. It's time for the academy to start producing explicit recommendations and budgets, at the zip code level, that we can use to beat politicians into submission or out of office.

Please have it online by 4 July 2008, and thank you for all the wonderful work up to this point. Time to bring this program home.

Two more links that are action oriented:
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2008/04/222011/10/22

Review DVD: American Drug War: The Last White Hope

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Reviews (DVD Only), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

This is a very serious movie and I volunteered to appear in it, April 22, 2008

Tommy Chong

I must disclose that I came into this movie at the very end when the brilliant producer realized I could provide a few bits that would bring it all together. I volunteered my time because I felt then–and I feel now–that this film was totally righteous. So I am listed as one of the “actors” but unlike some of them for whom file clips were used, I was taped speaking about this specific situation for this specific movie.

Our government is BROKEN. The civil servants and uniformed personnel are good people trapped in a bad system–a cesspool. Standing above them, hoarding the wealth, the power, and the personal privilege, are “elected” officials and their appointed cronies that have no business at all governing this great nation. They are inept and should be dismissed. We need a Constitutional Convention, an end to the Elctoral College, and deep Electoral, Financial, and National Security Reforms.

I have tagged this DVD with the word treason, because that is what CIA, DEA, the FBI, and the White House are guilty of when they protect drug wholesalers and allow entire neighborhoods to go down the crack drain, not because of Ricky Ross, but because of high crimes and misdemeanors all the way up the chain above him.

In my world, accountability is supposed to start and be enforced from the top down, not the bottom up. I hold John Deutch and later George Tenet accountable for failing to manage all five of the CIAs (the Wall Street CIA, the White House CIA, the front CIA, the paramilitary CIA, and the sodomy Safari Club CIA). I can only imagine the counterparts in DEA and the FBI and other elements of the government with the power to commit treason and get away with it while making a personal profit from the power We the People have assigned to them.

2008/04/222010/01/05

Review: The Thirteen American Arguments–Enduring Debates That Define and Inspire Our Country

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Democracy, Philosophy

Alexis de Tocqueville 2.0–Extraordinary Analytic Review, April 22, 2008

Howard Fineman

The publisher should have done a better job of loading information, such as the complete table of contents, using the Amazon Advantage features that I myself use when offering a book on Amazon.

Introduction: For the Sake of Argument
1. Who Is a Person?
2. Who is an American?
3. The Role of Faith
4. The Limits of Individualism
5. What Can We Know and Say?
6. Who Judges the Law?
7. Debt and Dollar
8. Local versus National Authority
9. Presidential Power
10. The Terms of Trade
11. War and Diplomacy
12. The Environment
13. A Fair, “More Perfect” Union
Conclusion

Some strategic reactions:

+ Conceived in 2005, executed since then, an incredible labor of love

+ As I went through I kept thinking “wow, what a mix of historical unraveling and comparison, current trials & tribulation, and philosophical commentary.” This is Tocqueville 2.0, nothing less.

+ I read a lot, so my admiration for the chapters was mostly a reflection of how skillfully I thought this master author and thinker had mined and then hammered into elegant shape a plentitude of sources and perspectives.

The message of the book is revealed on page 243, and I quote:

“We need to calm down, get engaged, and look for leadership. We have been here before: the seeming gridlock; the sudden, uncharacteristic loss of faith in the future; the sense that we cannot produce leaders capable of dealing with real problems. Facing despair and danger, we have always found in our storehouse of conflicting paradoxical traditions a way forward.”

The author's bottom line from earlier in the book: never-ending argument is who we are, how we are. It defines us, this never-ending back and forth. His idealistic view is that we cannot afford to NOT be part of the argument, but this does deny the reality that prior to this election cycle, fully half the eligible population refused to engage.

Frequently throughout the book I am struck by the currency of the author's citations and reflections–this is not a book written two years ago and a year in the editing. The author clearly reads and thinks broadly, and it shows.

Some nuggets that grabbed me:

+ New England (revere nature), Virginia (exploit nature), and the Middle Colonies (live within nature) existed as three completely distinct models for 180 years before the convention in Philadelphia. These three models play through each of the arguments.

+ The author irks me slightly when he says early on that the system for choosing presidents is not be best because we have turned it over to primacy voters. Later in the book he recovers with reference to The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)

+ NAFTA hollowed out the midwest and many other locations across the USA, and Bill Clinton is as much to blame as anyone. It's led to Mexico importing half what they export to us.

+ Gore could have lost from any of 100 factors, not just Ralph Nader, but the author's favorite is the photo of Gore drinking champagne at 11 in the morning with the Chinese promoting free trade. The UAW acted on that.

+ Somewhere in the middle I have the note, great paper, great spacing, great font. This is an elegantly structured book and it honors the Tocqueville 2.0 status that I for one accord to this author's historical and current reflections.

+ On page 197 he cites Bush as reluctant to answer the question about who his advisors are, but then Bush mentions Wolfowitz, and raises his eyebrows to add significance. THAT was our early warning. See Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate for a similar warning on Zbigniew Brzezinski's last chance to be Dr. Strangelove on Russia.

+ Interestingly, although Dick Cheney appears in the index sufficient times, it is mostly with reference to undermining the environment and capturing energy at any cost [for every three dollars we pay at the pump, Exxon externalizes $12 in costs to us and all future generations].

+ On page 214 the three models come in very nicely on the subject of the environment:

– VIRGINIA: deplete the land, move West

– PENNSYLVANIA: “city in a garden,” the “middle landscape”

– NEW ENGLAND: untouched nature, against industrialization (of course this was very early on when Emerson and Thoreau were active.

The author notes that the reigning over-all idea in early America was that nature was our Eden to consume and to subdue.

Toward the end there are two fascinating insights:

+ John McCain used to rail at how the Bushes could muster money just by having “daddy” call everyone he ever gave an Ambassadorship to. The author provides some very powerful insights into John McCain, both the good (an earnest reformer) and the bad (perpetually angry).

+ John Edwards is not part of the system, both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama *are* the system–perhaps one explanation he has not endorsed either.

I note: McCain-Edwards? Probably a bridge too far, but wouldn't that be something! It's certainly a ticket I would support, leaving Senator Clinton to be Majority Leader in the Senate. . If McCain can learn to say the word “transpartisan,” and mean it, he just might be the best break-out reformist President.]

The author ends with a quote from Bill Clinton in 1993, to wit:

“There is nothing wrong with America that cannot be cured by what is right with America.”

I agree with that, but only if all Americans pay attention, get into this fight for the soul of the Republic, and demand substance from all three candidates: a transpartisan sunshine cabinet appointed immediately; a balanced budget online for discussion by 4 July 2008; and opening the final presidential debates to candidates from the top five parties in America.

Before I list other books, I want to make one other very important point: the “advisors” to all three candidates are, as a general rule, completely out of touch with reality. What the candidates SHOULD be doing is leading national conversations on the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers, and then converting those conversations, backed up by real budget numbers, into a national consensus. LOSE THE ADVISORS, lead the arguments among us, of, by, and for We the People. THAT is how you lead this country.

Kudos to the author of this great book for timeliness, relevance, and elegance.

Here are eight other books I recommend as we begin demanding substance:
The Revolution: A Manifesto
Don't Start the Revolution Without Me!
What Kind of Nation: Thomas Jefferson, John Marshall, and the Epic Struggle to Create a United States
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

2008/04/212010/01/05

Review: The Revolution–A Manifesto

5 Star, Culture, DVD - Light, Democracy, Diplomacy, Philosophy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Ron Paul + Jesse Ventura = Critical Mass, April 21, 2008

Ron Paul

Ron Paul excels at the Constitutional fundamentals: individual liberty, sound money, and non-interventionist foreign policies. Although I am dismayed by his unwillingess to play well with others (Ralph Nader has the same problem, Jesse Ventura does not), and he does not have a strategy for governance as much as a laundry list of non-negotiable starting points, he is still, for me as an estranged moderate Republican, an inspiration for breaking with the two-party spoils system.

This is an eloquent book in which he draws with extreme care from the thoughts of others, always attributed in the text, and provides a series of arguments that do not call for the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney, but certainly do call for the impeachment of the complicit Congress. Three books in particular support his angry denunciation of how Congress–both Republican and Democratic–has allowed the Executive to attack our civil liberties, sustain executive warmaking never intended by the Founding Fathers, and precipitated an unprecedented financial crisis. Congress standing still for “signing statements” [and I would add, for morons like Gonzalez that give all Latinos a bad name], is the last straw.

See:
Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders

He cites Michael Scheuer with admiration, and as I am one of the very few to notice this in my reviews of Scheuer's books, I am delighted that he validates Scheuer's basic view, to wit, Bin Laden and terrorism against America are motivated by *our* presence in Saudi Arabia, our foreign behavior, our unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and so on.

He suggests that it was the Clinton Administration that first set the course on Iraq, being too willing to listen to lobbyists for Israel. Of course it was Cheney and Rumsfeld that gave Sadaam Hussein the WMD as–as the joke goes–kept the receipts.

He is very specific on Iran not being a nuclear threat to the USA (and in other writing, e.g. our weekly GLOBAL CHALLENGES report from the Earth Intelligence Network, we note that all the oil states are going nuclear as fast as they can).

He labels the neoconservatives as false conservatives.

At this point in my notes I have written “This is an original work rife with learned quotations from other scholars and practitioners.”

He is starkly upset by how the Bush-Cheney regime has destroyed the US dollar, not just with Iraq, the The Three Trillion Dollar War: The True Cost of the Iraq Conflict but with our global presence that Chalmers Johnson has addressed so ably in The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project).

Halfway through the volume he takes issue with those who call for a “living” Constitution, and pointedly says that this would equate to a dead and worthless Constitution. Later in the book, but it goes beautifully here, he writes that the Constitution was intended to restrain government, not citizens.

He is also against the draft and income taxes, both of which suggest people are property of government and can therefore be forced into labor. As he states, “young people are not raw material” for the government to play with.

He cites former Comptroller General David Walker with admiration. Walker told Congress in the summer of 2007 that the USA is insolvent, and they ignored him. Today Walker runs the Peter Peterson Foundation and his mission is to educate citizens on their own governments high crimes and misdemeanors in the economic and financial arena.

He shares my view that the Federal Reserve should not exist and manufactures credit out of thin air, one reason we will see more credit bubbles.

He ends by pointing out that the Patriot Act not only violates all our liberties, but was unnecessary because the USG had all the information it needed in advance of 9-11 was was in his words, inept. I disagree. I am fairly certain Dick Cheney received nine different warnings, including from Pakistan and Israel, and he arranged an exercise so he could control the government and let it happen. I think Larry Silverstein, with Bush family assistance, planted controlled demolitions to get rid of his asbestos problem at tax payer expense, and I think Rudy Guliani should be indicted for his role in “scooping and dumping” fire fighter bodies in his rush to destroy the crime scene. See, among many other excellent books and videos, 9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, First Edition

He favors the legalization of marijuana and is opposed to attention deficit and other drugs being prescribed to children without adequate testing. I put the book down wishing that Gary Hart, Dennis Kucinich, Ralph Nader, Ross Perot, Michael Bloomberg, Jesse Ventura, and Ron Paul could have formed a new party, the Constitutional Party, and cleaned house. I have lost all respect for Bill Bradley–he sold out to the Trilateral Commission and greed (as did Al Gore). See Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate

John McCain is walking a tightrope. In my view, if McCain can form a Transpartisan Cabinet now–even if only a transitional one–and get David Walker and Ron Paul to lead the group in creating a balanced budget that wipes out the national debt and begins pulling back from all our overseas bases, especially the secret ones that are not worth the outrageous $60 billion a year we pay for the 4% we can steal and not process), then I think it is possible some good may come from this election. Otherwise, it is just four more years, and we MUST create a new political party.

IMHO.

2008/04/212011/02/24

Review: Acts of God–The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America

5 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Disaster Relief, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design

Nature is the What, Culture is the Who–Lovely Analytic Account, April 21, 2008

Ted Steinberg

I am starting to think about a 2009 book on CULTURAL INTELLIGENCE: Faith, Ideology, and the Five Minds (the later from Five Minds for the Future and I am constantly enchanted when I run across a vital reference to how culture is the disaster, not nature.

This book is a magnificent epistle on the folly of mankind and the duplicity of government, business and the media. The author of totally brilliant as he gently sets forth the myth that we are not responsible for acts of God when in fact we are the perpetrators of complex human, social, economic, and political fabrications and decisions that invariably:

1. Screw over the poor and those of color

2. Amortize high risks taken by the rich across the entire taxpayer base

3. Conceal, lie, deceive as to the actual premediated decisions that occasioned the disaster turning into a catastrophe.

I am reminded of that excellent work, Catastrophe & Culture: The Anthropology of Disaster (School of American Research Advanced Seminar Series).

Here is “the” quote from the author, on page xxii:

“The official response to natural disaster is profoundly dysfunctional in the sense that it has both contributed to a continuing cycle of death and destruction and also normalized the injustices of class and race.”

The middle of the book is a detailed but not at all tedious account of California, Florida, and the Mississippi flood plain. In all three cases calamity was treated as a cultural script to execute:

1. A political agenda on the poor

2. Conceal and deceive outsiders to keep investment coming in

3. Further land speculation, with insurance company as well as state government complicity

I am reminded of the two books, Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin and The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead. Our country has lost its moral compass across all of its institutions. This is not new, the price is simply higher now.

The account of how a railroad magnate built a railway from Jacksonville to Miami (which was 200 feet of sand at first) and then on to Key West, with the taxpayer footing the bill, the state government giving away the land, and the speculation leading inevitably to enormous disaster and death, is riveting. Or at least captivating.

He lambasts the federal government for venturing into the political economy of risk, for trying to control weather from the 1950's, and for “writing off” the poor in their mobile homes. Land in hazardous terrain subject to flooding is cheaper, mobile homes are cheaper, the poor cannot afford to evacuate, this strikes me as something only a genocidal maniac would love: “natural eugenics,” only a little connivance needed.

The author tells us that through the 1970's the federal government stunk at both forecasting and warning, in part because of poor budgeting for the National Weather Service, in part because of privatization, in part because of ineptness (e.g. not repairing critical buoys).

He states, and this did not begin with Katrina, but goes back 40 years, that the Federal response to disasters has been consistently pathetic. One explanation is that the Federal Emergency Management Agency has consistently been a dumping ground for political hacks, with nine times more losers than in other agencies.

He explicitly blasts Bush-Cheney for lies in relation to Katrina, which was accurately forecast. Every POLITICAL level of government, from the chicken mayor to the complacent governor to the dumb-s..t FEMA director to the village idiot President failed us.

The books ends by skewering both Clinton and Bush for 16 years of deregulation of all industries having anything to do with public safety, allowing them to increase their profits by increasing the risks and costs to the unsuspecting buyers upon whom they were enabled to prey.

Not a pretty story, but I for one am starting to see the pattern of government and corporate deception, and that is why I have committed the last twenty years of my working life to creating public intelligence in the public interest.

I cannot remember all my past weather and climate books, but here are a few more links:
The Atlas of Climate Change: Mapping the World's Greatest Challenge (Atlas Of… (University of California Press))
The Weather Makers : How Man Is Changing the Climate and What It Means for Life on Earth
Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization

2008/04/212010/01/05

Review DVD: Who Am I This Time?

5 Star, Culture, DVD - Light, Reviews (DVD Only)

Evokes the Best of America in a Time of Mass Insanity, April 21, 2008

Susan Sarandon

I bought three copies of this, having seen it many years ago.

One copy for a newly married couple that discovered themselves in theater.

One copy for the daughter of a colleague with a big brain and great shyness that is dispelled in amateur theatricals.

The last copy for me, for my permanent collection. Along with DVDs such as I list below, this is an utter classic without a single false note. Indeed, the editorial descriptions above are better than usual. You will not regret this for an instant.

Other perennials with me are:
Dances with Wolves – Extended Cut (Two-Disc Collector's Edition)
The Last Samurai (Two-Disc Special Edition)
De-Lovely
Pretty Woman (10th Anniversary Edition)
Henry V
The Snow Walker
Bonhoeffer
The Bourne Ultimatum (Widescreen Edition)
Smiley's People

Category: Reviews (Books & DVD)

Review: How We Missed the Story–Osama Bin Laden, the Taliban and the Hijacking of Afghanistan