I have taken an interest in firefighers every since they did their all to save the victims of 9-11, only to be betrayed by murderer Rudy Gulliani, with Larry Silverstein, the avaricous Jew, and Dick Cheney, the naked amoral thief, as the other principle actors.
Firefights are God's gift to mankind. They are the good guys. It literally brings tears to my eyes to contemplate the evidence of one surviving firefighter from 9-11, to wit, that bombs were exploding BELOW him as he made his way up toward the fires from the airplanes.
Rudy Gulliani, called “scoop and dump” Gulliani by the firefighters of New York, who rioted over his treasonous agility in destroying the crime scene and covering up the world's greatest insurance scam, $7 billion for Larry Silverstein, Rudy Gulliani, Dick Cheney, and the two unethical witless insurance company executives who thought we would notice.
This movie is about honest Americans. I hope, from the heart, that Gulliani, Cheney, and Silversttein hang one day, after a legal trial. Firefighters: salt of the earth. Gulliani, Silverstein, and Cheney: the traitors, the liars, the scum of the Earth.
WOW!! Be Very Afraid, Your Drinking Water is NOT Safe
August 21, 2007
Robert D. Morris
I get hit on a lot by authors and publishers, and one out of a hundred “leads” is actually worthwhile. This is such a lead. The author called me (the dumb ones send their stuff to create landfill) and I was absolutely interested in this topic. I list some other books below.
There are two bottom lines to this book:
1) Chlorine cannot kill all threats and causes its own damage. It specifically cannot kill cryptosporidium, which can quickly sicken tens of thousands and kill hundreds.
2) Your drinking water is not safe to drink, there are some things you can do, but on balance, the Nation needs a *major* campaign to salvage its entire drinking water and sewage treatment system.
I really, really, like this book. The author is gifted at presenting important information in an easy to understand and almost poetic manner. He really puts life into history, and urgency into current concerns.
I have a note: 5 stars. Truly EXCITING, gripping at every point.
He taught me the value of meta-analysis, and I am going to migrate that to the EarthGame that we are building with Medard Gabel, the brilliant cohort to Buckminster Fuller, whose forthcoming book, Seven Billion Billionaires, I strongly recommend.
Although I have read and strongly recommend Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy, the author does an excellent “snapshot” job of alerting us to the dangers of chlorine by pointing out that Chlorine Gas killed tens of thousands, and that as late as 1974 there was no real understanding of its pathologies, and as recently as 1996, there was no real program to address the many deficiencies of our drinking water supplyl.
I draw from this book early on the importance of NOT privatizing water services. Corporations seeking profit cut corners and are most definitely not interested in reducing the risk of death if it impacts on their bottom line. Throughout the book, one finds that BOTH the corporate sector AND the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) are in a sympiotic relationship intended to increase profits, lower costs, and kill Americans lightly.
The book provides a number of eye-opening facts, a few of which I list here:
1) Cholera is unique to humans and so tests on animals yield nothing.
2) Safe water is not an end but a constant process.
3) Chicago “yards” are the ultimate poisoneer–manure into water is our death bell.
4) As of 1992, USA water distribution is a disaster waiting to happen.
5) Usefully documents how denial and incompetence increased the death tolls time and again, around the world. Hamburg took 33 years to finally realize that it MUST filter its water.
6) I now understand the value of Environemtnal Epidemiology and will try to factor that into the EarthGame. This author does a superb job of making statistics exciting and meaningful.
7) He tars the EPA and other US Government elements for consistently lying to the public for reasons of money and politics. He makes the case for HONEST SCIENCE. See The Republican War on Science
8) He documents the need for real-time data. I am a proponent of 114 and 119 numbers, and believe that all citizens should be able to call in medical symptoms to a central database, e.g. dial 114-D for diahrea, 114-V for vomit.
9) The author is utterly compelling in describing how very hard it is to track down waterborne diseases, this is literally the needle in the haystack problem, where one might find 10 oocysts in a litter of water–ten *transparent* oocysts.
10) Katrina shut down 1200 water treatment plants and 269 sewage treatment plants.
11) Drinking water distribution is every city's weak link; Al Qaeda has studied US water distribution systems (remember, Bin Laden was an engineer), and they KNOW that enough bags of manure into the system post-filtration will do a great deal of damage.
12) Home filtration systems are ESSENTIAL to guarding against contamination, and boiling water is ESSENTIAL at the first sign of a bio-chemical attack through the water distribution system.
13) The author provides a heart-rending account of how cholera killed 60,000 in Zaire in one week, with corpses piled up 2-3 deep along the road, and the feces from the weak survivors running down the hill into the lake to contaminate that water so that many more might die.
14) The USA has up to TEN MILLION cases of waterborne disease each year.
15) The inter-state and inter-agency process related to water (and I surmise, to every other topic) is completely broken.
16) Washington “action” is “a glacier on steroids.”
17) 861 BILLIOIN gallons of SEWAGE go into US rivers in any given year.
18) Bottled water is not only NOT safer or cleaner than tap water, but it costs one thousand times as much, and the water needed to create the throw-away plastic bottle is GREATER than the water contained in the bottle.
The author ends rather quietly, suggesting that dialog, no secrets, and research are needed, and he provides several meritorious recommendations at the end, but I put the book down feeling that my best defense is localized resilience. Neither the federal nor the state not the local governments can be trusted. They have all been corrupted. Until the public realizes that it is drinking poisoned water, one is best off not drinking the water at all.
The book, an edited work, seeks to address a gap in scholarship, to wit, where others have covered why and how complex societies have collapsed, there is vitually nothing on how some, not all, regenerate. The editors do point out that most collapses are not total, and something is left (see my review of The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) for a more nuanced review of this matter). It fails to go the full distance possible.
The combined authors posit a cycle of growth, collapse, and regeneration between ruralism and local autonomy, and urbanization with centralization of control.
In an excellent but not quite complete summary of the causes of collapse, the editors outline the following:
1. Fragmentation into smaller political entities
2. Partial or complete desertion of urban centers
3. Loss or depletion of centalizing functions
4. Breakdown of regional economic systems
5. Failure of civilization's ideology
They do not mention the latest and best explanation, that the more complex a society becomes, the more expensive it is to make incremental improvements in management, and the unaffordability of the always increasing cost for each always decreasingly effective improvement ultimately leads to implosion (see Collapse as linked above).
The authors are somewhat narrow in focusing on prior structures of rule, authority, and governability. One puts this book down with the impression it was a first date between a political scientist and an anthropologist, and they fell into psycho-babble as a neutral common ground. See my loaded image, with the full thesis at my web site under my photo/Early Papers.
An isolated but interesting observation on how state control of time and space (e.g. Daylight Savings Time, or in the US the more recent and most unwelcome additional hour of time change) are part of mind control, was worthy of note–just a the power of the state to define crime and insantity leaves us with a The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead, legalized corporate greed, and a mendacious Vice President who has committed 25 impeachable offenses and yet carries on with impunity (see Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
The conclusion, in two parts, consists largely of psycho-babble (the first part), and a very fine second part, much more interesting for its applicability to our time, that posits that when a centralized government goes too far in overseas adventurism, this opens the way for the provinces to secede and become autonomous again. I note that we have 27 secessionist movements in the USA, and they are having their second annual meeting in October of this year. I for one feel that there is no one now running, including Ron Paul, that understands that the secessionists, not the “party base” are the ones we should be listening to, for they are the only ones that see clearly that the Republic is no more.
To save the Republic, we must destroy two things and create one thing:
1. Destroy the Democratic and Republican parties (see Running on Empty: Contemplative Spirituality for Overachievers) and
2. Destory the unbound Executive and the abdicated Congress
3. Create a transpartisan ticket that demands electoral reform prior to 2008 and provides both a Sunshine Cabinet with integrated policies announced in advance, and a sustainable balanced budget that eliminates all personal income taxes while taxing the Federal Reserve for local, state, and federal revenues.
We need to make every budget transparent, and to publish every budget in time for citizen participation in the evaluation of every trade-off. We do this, or the United States of America is destroyed, courtesy of Wall Street, the Bush Family, the Saudis, and Dick Cheney.
Definitive Statement on How Real Conservatives Despise Bush Lies and Cheney High Crimes,
August 11, 2007
Doug Bandow
Published in 2006, this collection of essays ranges from the late 1990's to its year of publication, and I was quite astonished to discover two things fairly quickly into the work:
First, the author is a conservative–a true conservative–and firmly opposed to what he calls “promiscuous intervention” or elective wars or global rampant empire-building. I was expecting a left of center diatribe against the follies of the Bush-Cheney Administration. Not so. The author is consistent–he railed against the follies of the Clinton-Clinton Administration first, and this followed over.
Second, as an estranged moderate Republican who believes in fiscal conservatism, a small government, and not supporting dictators or decadent despots like the debauched Saudi “royal” family of swindlers, pedophiles, and perverts, I was stunned to find my conservative roots reaffirmed, and the neo-conservatives, the false conservatives, soundly lambasted for their chicken-hawk enlargement of the military-industrial complex.
The author opens early with the statement that America is no longer a Republic, and I completely agree. The author, affiliated with the Cato Institute, has given me a new and deeper appreciation for that organization's intellectual and constitutional line of reasoning.
The early part of the book is a superb collection of varied arguments for completely avoiding foreign adventurism that enriches a few in the military-industrial complex, at three great costs:
1) Loss of lives and limbs among our brave troops;
2) Loss of natural treasure we cannot space on others
3) Loss of morality and rise of vulnerability to hatred occasioned by our foreign presence
The latter point merits special emphasis. The author's views are totally consistent with my own reading and world experience:
1) Morality, as Will and Ariel Durant tell us in their The Lessons of History, is a strategic asset of incalculable proportions. Others, such as Max Manwaring, in The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century tell us that security–long-term security, can only come from legitimacy, legitimacy in the eyes of both our own citizens and denizens in every clime and place where we venture.
In 1999 the author penned this statement against the Clinton Administration that applies equally today to the Bush-Cheney Administration: “Indeed, where the President and his aides are arrogant, ignorant, and incompetent, others must lead.” I agree with this author of the strategic logic of terrorism against US misbehavior, and point the interested reader to Pape's book above.
I am heartened to read this conservative author's sensible denunciation of both the lies of Bush and Cheney to all Americans, and of the idiocy of the neo-conservatives in striving for increased unconstitutional executive power, and in believing in an “immaculate presidency” that can do no wrong. He clearly labels Bush as wrong and as owing all Americans an apology. He properly dismisses the “stay the course” propaganda by pointing out that when you are on the wrong road, you get off at the first available exit.
He segues from that to a proper denunciation of American support for a genocidal racist Israel and offers this lovely quote: “Crackpot theology is no substitute for thoughtful analysis is developing foreign policy.”
The author offers an elegant essay against conscription and the draft. As a taxpayer who now seems that 75% of my taxes are misspent on elective war, secret earmarks, and fraudulent procurements that benefit a small elite while destroying the working poor and the vanishing middle class, I am now all for eliminating federal taxes and forcing the federal government to apply to the states for funding of “common” needs. War is not in our common interest, and we should not have allowed our Congress and our Executive to become spendthrifts with out money–as Davy Crockett learned–it is not theirs to give!
I part with the author only on the subject of Taiwan–he is wrong to see Taiwan as a beacon of freedom. Chang Kai Sheik was one of the greatest war criminals and thieves on the planet in his time, and a cursory reading of the literature, for example, the books by Sterling and Peggy Seagraves, will quickly document that Taiwan is both an inherent part of China, and not at all a bastion of freedom as much as limpet fish sucking the blood from the American's so naïve as to believe these cheating miscreants.
Over-all I found this author to be inspiring. He neglects to address the war crimes of the extremist Republicans, nor does he venture to comment on the very high probability that Dick Cheney, Rudy Gulliani, and Larry Silverstein (and their insurance co-conspirators) are guilty along with Donald Rumsfeld of the mass murder of most of those who died on 9-11 to controlled demolitions in NYC and a missile into the Pentagon. Evidently there are some areas where “true blue” conservatives do not dare venture. For those interested in this aspect of the *other* neo-conservative crime of the century see my lists on 9-11 books and DVDs, and on evaluating Cheney, and most especially, Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, where my review lists 23 of the 25 high crimes and misdemeanors of Dick Cheney that are documented in the public record (for the other two, see Ron Suskind's The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11)
Utterly brilliant work of genius, joins Allott's Health of Nations
August 9, 2007
Joseph Tainter
This is an utterly brilliant stunning work of genius. It begins with a comprehensive review of what appears to be every work in English relative to the topic being considered. The author has done a phenomenal job of both dissecting and then discussed the varied authors contributing to each of the following lists explanations for prior collapse of civilizations (from page 42):
1) Depletion or cessation of a vital resource
2) The establishment of a new resource base
3) The occurrence of some insurmountable catatrosphe
4) Insufficient response to circumstance
5) Other complex societies
6) Intruders
7) Class conflict, societal contradictions, elite mismanagement or misbehavior
8) Social dysfunction
9) Mystical factors
10) Chance concatenation of events
11) Economic factors
This book is exceptionally well organized, well presented, and well spoken. The complex discussion is delivered in easy to read and absorb constructs. After a review and elegant dismissal of all of the prevailing theories, the author leads us into his approach by positing the collapse of civiliazations as resulting from the collapse of the larger systemic process for processing information to effect the increasingly complicated system of systems. In the author's words, at some point the cost of micro-managing a complex system is so high, and yields such poor returns on investment, that the natural and beneficial response of the whole is to collapse into more readily sustainable and resilience smaller parts.
I am reminded of Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies, in which he discusses how simple systems have single points of failure easy to diagnose and correct; sophisticated systems have multiple points of failure that interact in largely unforeseen ways and are very difficult to diagnose and correct; and the finally, Earth and Humanity, a system of systems so complex that “Intelligent Design” is failing us, and a natural Darwinian selection is kicking in.
For America to have 27 robust secessionist movements and a plethora of “Home Rule” regimes springing up local levels, while the Bush-Cheney regime runs the nation into bankruptcy with their elective war in Iraq that has cost half a trillion dollars that could have been better used to restore our failing infrastructure and our failed schools, tells us all we need to know: the federal government has collapsed, and the Republic as a whole is next absent draconian public engagement and mandated electoral reform prior to 2008.
The author concludes that “complexity is a problem-solving strategy” and that when it fails to solve the high-level threats or challenges, then the society collapses so that smaller and more resilient parts might be more innovative and adaptive, and hence survive better without the burden of inept “guidance” from above.
In the context of this book, the 27 secessionist movements in America are clearly what the author calls “resistance” to the now unaffordable higher costs and lower results of the federal mismanagement of the nation, best depicted by the grotesquely inept and even inhuman lack of effectiveness with respect to New Orleans and the Katrina hurricane.
There are gems throughout the work, which joins that of Philip Allott, also of Cambridge, who in his The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State suggested that the Treaty of Westphalia was a huge mistake, and we should have elevated and recognized peoples instead of sovereign states, as the latter have been too easily corrupted into aided the global elite to loot every commonwealth. A few that I noted:
Collapse is cultural, systemic, a collapse of process, not of any discrete event, institution, or location. The information processing becomes impossible for a complex system that does not adapt from an industrial-era model of command and control to an information era model of distributed localized resilience. I think of The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project) and The The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back on the one hand, and the varied books on the “wealth of knowledge,” wealth of networks.
Although others including myself in my US Institute of Peace paper on virtual diplomacy have expressed concern over the growing gap between people with power and people with knowledge, this author has provided us with what may well be the most erudite focused diagnosis of the coming collapse of the West, a lumbering industrial era mammoth whose small elite brain cannot compete with the sleeker Third World “tigers” that are using leap-ahead technologies to avoid our legacy of ashes.
In my view, the West can be saved only if America achieves electoral reform and restores the constitution, with a draconian reduction of federalism and the federal budget, while restoring to the states all of the powers not explicitly assigned to the three branches. Open Carry, Open Spectrum, all of the “opens” must prevail against the rule of secrecy and the use of scarcity to impoverish rather than enrich what should be “seven billion billionaires (forthcoming from Medard Gabel).”
This is a righteous book. I have loaded two images from my own earlier work (at my web site under the photo in Early Papers) and am now working on War and Peace in the Digital Era. This book here is Ref A.
Semiinal Work from Early 1990's Badly in Need of Update and Expansion
August 9, 2007
Richard Rosecrance
Published in 1993, this is an excellent book badly in need of reissue with a commensurate updating and expansion of content. The book whets the appetite but does not fully satisfy. What is does have is useful in all respects.
The contributing editors note that the US has never really had a “grand strategy” in the sense of charting out long-term goals and then devising a strategy that uses all of the sources of national power. Instead–and President General Ike Eisenhower warned us of this–we militarized our security and privatized its execution.
The authors' intent is to also show that realpolitik can only go so far, and that a clear integration of the domestic bases and their biases is needed. The books shows that domestic influence can stop external actions that might be otherwise inspired by foreign events; and can also inspire unwarranted actions regardless of how unrealistic the goals might be.
I especially appreciated the chapter by Michael Dole discussing the disconnect between military strategy divorced from politics, political strategy divorced from reality, and the gap-filling intellectual strategy divorced from both politics and the military (as well as commerce and other frames of reference). I am reminded of the philospher that warned that the separation of soldiers from scholars will have its fighting done by fools and its thinking done by cowards.
Although I enjoyed the 1970's advocacy of Richard Falk and several others seeking to inspire a systemic understanding of the world and how to adapt and sustain, this book is an early proponent for combining systemic thinking with a full grasp of domestic constituencies and their role in driving foreign policy and national security in ways one might anticipate.
The book does not address transnational actors or the global reach of corporations and elites that manufacture wars, move drugs, launder money, and otherwise threaten any traditional structures for conserving, protecting, and nurturing societies at large.
I would like very much to see the authors adopt my construct of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers, and recreate this book looking at Brazil, China, India, and Indonesia in contrast with Europe and the US. Now that would be quite an amazing contribution, and I shall hope to see something along those lines in the future.
See also my list on strategy and my recent related reviews.
When I first read and reviewed this book I left only a cryptic notation, “downside of Islam” but I neglected the opportunity to point out that the book also captures the downside of poverty as well as the enormous cultural and emotionial indignities toward women that are sanctioned by Islam and not only practiced in Islamic countries but also exported to Europe and the USA, where women are treated behind closed doors in a manner that would put any normal American behind bars for years.
Manly Film with Romance and Respect
