Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 254 – Public Intelligence Blog

2007/03/222009/12/04

Review: Rumsfeld–His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), War & Face of Battle

Damns the Man, Ignores the Dead and Wounded,

March 22, 2007

Andrew Cockburn

Having read most of the books about the last eight years and the various debacles imposed on the world and on America by Cheney-Bush (see my lists on Iraq After-Action Reports and on Evaluating Dick Cheney), much of this book was not a surprise, but I would also be quick to say that there are a number of gems here not found elsewhere.

Of special interest to me were the reality that the lies and fantasy on the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were a replay of the Team B lies about Soviet weapons successfully carried out under Reagan. This cabal has a clear pattern of believing that any lie is acceptable, that Congress is to be ignored, that there is no constraint on Executive power.

Gems:

Rumsfeld started talking about bombing Iraq before 3 pm on 9/11.

Rumsfeld built the force that he fought with, back when he was first secretary of defense.

Sadaam Hussein was the only Arab leader that welcomes Rumsfeld in the 1990's.

Novak was a willing accomplice in destroying CIA under Reagan with Team B lies, and again in destroying Plume today.

Rumsfled liked Doug Feith *because* of Feith's notorious stupidity.

Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff was widely viewed as an “abused puppy” avoiding confrontation with Rumsfeld.

CIA won the Afghan war, but Rumseld claimed it for himself. No mention that I noticed of Rumsfeld's disterous mistakes in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3000 Tlaiban and Al Qaeda, and in refusing to but a Ranger battalion in Bin Laden's path when CIA had “eyes on” for four days (see my reviews of “First In” and “JAWBREAKER” as well as various books on my Iraq After Action list).

After a while I tired of this book. I thought to myself that the author has done a good job on destroying Rumsfeld, but there is a great deal of context that is missing, including Cheney's more active role behind the scenes, and virtually no mention of the thousands of US dead and 75,000 amputees that Rumsfeld created for no good reason.

My bottom line: Rumsfeld was put at Defense because the first candidate irritated the President, the President was a fool and wanted to appoint someone his father hated, and Dick Cheney was happy to have his former mentor over at Defense, which Cheney, as a more recent Secretary of Defense, no doubt felt he could manage from the White House. America chose to allow this cabal to steal two elections in a row, and to go to war on a web of lies denounced in advance by General Zinni,at OSS.Net, and in many other places. SHAME ON US. Rumsfled is our child, and we have to live with what we have wrought on the world.

Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

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2007/03/142009/12/04

Review: American Fascists–The Christian Right and the War On America

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Religion & Politics of Religion

Last Call for Sanity in Face of Christo-Fascism,

March 14, 2007

Chris Hedges

Of all the books I have read, inclusive of a good number on religion, on knowledge, and on the pathologies of power, this book is perhaps the single clearest, most up to date, and most compelling definition of the extreme right in America as the world's new fascists.

I created the image that I am uploading with the review several years back, when Condi Rice and others had the temerity to call General Tony Zinni a traitor when Zinni, the most recently retired Command-in-Chief of the US Central Command, made a clear public case for NOT invading Iraq. Collin Powell was more subdued, saying “if you break it, you own it,” but Bush-Cheney do not compute nuances, and were not listening. They both reflected this book's basic premise, that when dissent is considered treason, one is dealing with a neo-fascist regime.

The author is uniquely qualified as both a graduate of a top-level divinity school, and a world-class investigative journalist, to make this case.

He opens the book with an annotated list of fourteen features of fascism that set the stage, and I list them here because of their importance–buy the book to get the whole picture:

1. Cult of Tradition
2. Rejection of Modernism
3. Action for Action's Sake
4. Critics are Modernists
5. Dissent is Treason
6. Fueled by Frustration
7. Lacking Identity, Contrives Birthright
8. Humiliated and Delusional vis a vis external enemies
9. Pacifism is evil
10. Elitist contempt for weak (similar to poorest of whites contempt for hard-working blacks)
11. Cult of Hero, Cult of Death
12. War as Sexual Sublimation
13. Selective Populism (generally White versus All, but Colored can “Become” White)
14. Newsspeak, Hijacking of Language

This very educated and quietly balanced author cites Karl Popper's seminal work on Open Society and its Enemies on the pathological outcomes from faith in excess, faith that is intolerant of others. It is clear throughout this book that America is under siege from two faiths in excess–the external far enemy of violent intolerant Islam, and the more subversive internal danger of neo-Nazi fascists in waiting, mobilizing the dispossessed whites who do not read a lot, and get “all they need to know” from Pat Robertson's 700 Club and other similar self-serving channels whose primary role is to raise cash for the Hitler's in Waiting.

Blinding insight from this author: the extreme right does not limit it's cherry-picking to intelligence–it routinely cherry-picks from the Bible, which contains ample violence and bigotry and hatred for the ends of the extreme right: channeling fury into funding.

The author discussed “dominionism” as the fascist rendition of the Christian faith.

Key intellectual and patriotic contributions in this book include a study of the evangelicals and the number that take the Bible literally, the naming of names at the top who are a danger to American democracy, and in three pages of damning indictment, the manner in which neo-fascist Kenneth Blackwell, Secretary of State for Ohio, stole that state's electoral votes for Bush by manipulating and disappearing voting registrations and actual votes.

Chisto-Facism is a closed system that demands total obedience and indoctrination into a culture of hate that demonizes all who do not “believe.” Holy Cow! This is not just fascist, it's a cult!

As the book draws to a conclusion, the author compares totalitarian regimes and their elaborate spectacles for the masses, with the Christo-fascists in America. The similarities are compelling, especially when the author discusses how Hitler used homosexuals as an early target group to test drive his extra-judicial witch-hunts.

A very helpful description of the conversion process, which is scripted, deceptive, and akin to “love bombing” as practiced by the Moonies, shows that individual are being recruited into a closed system that labels all “non-members” to be outside the circle. As the author sums it up, this system divides families, friends, and communities.

The author frightens me when he discusses how the non-profit (i.e. not taxed) extreme rightist religion fuehrers favor unrestricted capitalism, the elimination of all taxes, while paradoxically including international bankers with Muslims and others who will be “Left Behind.”

On that note, the author says that the Left Behind series is a window into the souls of the blindly faithful.

My two take-aways from this superb book:

Labor unions and the progressives need to get back into the fight for America's soul. See also my review of “The Left Hand of God.”

School Boards are the weak link in the entire infrastructure of government. The extreme right has adherents from School Boards to State Legislators to Congress. On the one hand, this leads to a complex range of decisions in which our Constitutional separation of church and state is undermined every single day; and on the other, it leads to the unholy alliance of these extremists, who help elect neo-conservative extremists, even if they do not receive the promised concessions after the election (See also my review of “Tempting Faith,” and of “American Theocracy”).

This author is a brave and intelligent man. He is calling it as it is: a fascist is a fascist. I am reminded of the number of white Nazi's admitted to the US after WWII under special intelligence exemptions. Otto Reich, Karl Rove, and the Bush Family are the current manifestation of American fascism. It's time we run them out of town.

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2007/03/142009/12/04

Review: Green to Gold–How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Environment (Solutions), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Best Available Primer for Top Management,

March 14, 2007

Daniel C. Esty

I have read and praised Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, The Ecology of Commerce and Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things here at Amazon, and I mention them to emphasize that this book, “Green to Gold,” is the hands-down no-contest best primer for top management. The others are intellectual presentations. This is a business oriented primer with lots of facts, lists, and resources.

It is a pro-business book that focuses on opportunities. It is extremely well-organized, with three parts, twelve chapters, and three appendices including a superb list of active web sites relevant to doing well by doing good.

This book is based on hundreds of interviews over four years, and every aspect of it is professional presented, including boxes with “10 second overviews” interspersed throughout.

The authors are compellingly pointed in their discussion of how the environment, and attendant regulations and attendant risks of catastrophic costs, is no longer a fringe issue. Mistakes in cadmium content of connecting cables can cost hundreds of millions.

The authors excel at discussing the new pressures from natural limits that are now visible (changes that used to take 10,000 years now take 3–see my reviews on Ecological Economics, the Republican War on Science, the varied books on Climate Change, etc) and the fact that there is a growing range of stake-holders who are altering the balance of power.

The authors are clear in noting that environmental compliance and wisdom is neither easy nor cheap, but they are equally detailed in documenting that most investments to reduce environmental costs are recouped within 12-18 months. In one cited example, 3M saves $1 billion in the first year alone on pollution reduction, and over the course of a decade, was able to reduce its pollution by 90%.

On page 33 they list the top 10 environmental issues and I like this list very much as an expansion on “Environmental Degradation” which is the over-all threat that the High Level Threat Panel of the United Nations ranked as third out of ten, to Poverty and Infectious Disease. They are:

01 Climate Change
02 Energy
03 Water
04 Biodiversity and Land Use
05 Chemicals, Toxics, and Heavy Metals
06 Air Pollution
07 Waste Management
08 Ozone Layer Depletion
09 Oceans and Fisheries
10 Deforestation

The authors do a superb job in summarizing each of these in several pages perfectly suited to the busy manager. For those desiring more in-depth looks, see my many reviews across the board, including Priority One: Together We Can Beat Global Warming; various books on energy, Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource; Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy, Blue Frontier: Dispatches from America's Ocean Wilderness; and The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink.

The bottom line for the first part of the book: extremes can no longer be dampened down; and we now recognize the eco-system value of the wetlands that we have paid the Army Corps of Engineers to eradicate for decades.

The authors devised a schema for businesses to develop an understanding and then a strategy for reducing their environmental footprint. The authors do extremely well with their organized examination of Aspects, Upstream, Downstream, Issues, and Opportunities (AUDIO), and anyone looking at the book in a store can go directly to pages 62-63. This is an operational management handbook.

There is an excellent overview of the many new stake-holders (or significantly matured stake-holders including NGOs, religions, and local citizens. Business can no longer bribe government–government cannot “deliver” the way it used to (see my review of The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back for a sense of how corruption of other elites by our elites has accelerated all the ills of the world).

Regulations, according to these authors, should be seen as vital incentives and parameters for both reducing costs and gaining trust.

Forty global banks, and many insurance companies, now demand proper examination of ecological costs as a condition for funding or coverage.

The authors remind me of General Tony Zinni, whose books I have reviewed, in their emphasis on relationships developed over time. They urge a strong focus on relationships NOW, across the board, as a means of building a “trust bank” as well as a deeper understanding. Blocks that used to be labels “not our problem” or “not legally liable” are now labeled “IMPORTANT TO US.”

In the middle of the book they explore the digital information advantages that can accrue to those who get out of their closed loops and increase innovation. In one instance, simply adding load to trucks reduced fuel consumption and emissions considerably.

The middle of the book contains 8 detailed “Green to Gold” plays, and I won't spoil it by listing them. A box in this section says “Truth Matters” and I applaud silently.

The authors stress that mind-set, not just a check-book, is required to get this right. Five basic rules are 1) See the forest; 2) Start at the top; 3) No is not an option; 4) Feelings are facts; and 5) Do the right thing, morality DOES pay.

Pages 168-169 are sheer brilliance, and illustrate why the value chain must be completely integrated into the environmental strategy of each element of that value chain and most especially the largest and most powerful of the elements, which must carefully consider and accept responsibility for demanding improvements by the smallest elements.

Eight lessons of partnering, 13 problems and their solutions, and a final chapter of very specific actions that managers can take, conclude the book.

My final note on this book: a pleasure to read, easy to read, so well done I got through it in half the time characteristic of denser or less well designed books. This is first rate stuff!

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2007/03/072009/12/04

Review: You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth–A Brief on the Bush Presidency

5 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

Read Hare's Review, Excellent Complement to Tarpley Book on Bush,

March 2, 2007

William John Cox

After reading Hare's review I do not have anything to add other than to say that this book is a wonderful compelemnt to “The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush” by Webster Tarpley, whose book on 9/11 I also recommend very highly.

As documented by this book, this attorney and author, George Bush is one of the most crooked, inept, and deceitful people ever to serve in the Presidency. By no means alone, he never-the-less takes mendacity to a new level, and this author is to be congratulated for his painstaking effort to document the facts–I only regret that we could not reach enough Americans in 2004 to prevent a second four years.

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2007/03/062009/12/04

Review: Priority One–Together We Can Beat Global Warming

5 Star, Environment (Solutions)

Viable Solutions Instead of Platitudes–In Public Service,

March 6, 2007

Allan J. Yeomans

This 492 page book is the work of a a seriious pioneer in Australia who decided that the public could use a serious book with serious solutions, instead of the range of platitudes, fear-mongering, or outright misrepresentation (energy companies like Exxon lying about the facts).

It is an over-size book that ships from the USA and reached me in a few days instead of the 4-6 weeks that Amazon shows. It is very well laid out, two-column, 12 chapters, listing 50 specific local, national, and global strategies that can be implemented today. I regard this book as the graduate school equivalent of “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth.”

What I find especially powerful about this book is that it focuses less on the industrial undermining of the atmosphere, and more on agriculture, which suffers from a range of problems including top soil rather than deep root farming, very unwise use of toxic chemcials that pollute aquifers (while failing to separate animal feces from water feeding into spinach fields, as the US found to its horror recently).

The author also does a superb job of pointing out that global warming is an ENERGY problem as much as it is an emissions problem. It is down-right nuts for the US to contront Iran over the need for nuclear energy while pretending that the US is not the primary proliferator of both nuclear technologies and the weapons of death. Safe nuclear energy as well as many forms of renewalbe solar and wind energy, and portable energy such as hydrogen from water using a renewable energy to make it effective, are all with us now.

Bottom line: this book should be in every educational program that seeks to understand solutions, and this book should be required reading for everyone that respects “Inconvenient Truth.” This book is the book you read after you agree with Al Gore, and recognize that he is summarizing, very eloquently, the problem, without actually providing any solutions.

Winston Churchill, God-Father of the English-speaking peoples, is smiling down at Allan Yeomans, the author and self-financed publisher of this volume–he's fighting the real war for our future, rather than the false war against terrorism.

A book like this would normally sell for US$75 or so, but the author, as a public service, ordered it to be priced close to cost plus Amazon commision plus shipping from Australia, and only recently found a US distributor so the book could be listed in the world's single greatest library catalog, Amazon.com.

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2007/03/042009/12/04

Review: The Edge of Disaster–Rebuilding a Resilient Nation

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Security (Including Immigration)

Major Contribution That Congress is NOT Paying Attention To,

March 4, 2007

Stephen Flynn

This is a major contribution to national security & prosperity that is being actively ignored by Congress. We must all buy the book and force the issue. HR 1 from the House purports to implement the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission but does so in a shoddy, incomplete, and largely anti-democratic fashion, imposing the secret stovepipe model of one-way federal to state communications, without any respect (or understanding) of what this author recommends instead, which is to add the public to the loop, and also create localized means of facilitating communications among all the leaders–county government, law enforcement, business, academic, labor, religious, etc.

This book is every bit as good-even better–than the author's first book, “America the Vulnerable,” which I reviewed and rated very highly. I recommend that both be bought, and then waved in every public meeting possible.

The major leap forward in this book is the juxtaposition of localized resilience to disaster of any kind (not just terrorism), with the very pointed and strong dismay about how we are wasting $700 billion a year on a heavy-metal military to fight (and anger) people overseas, while spending less than $70 million a year on key infrastructure and homeland defense needs. While the Department of Homeland Defense now has roughly $36 billion a year (perhaps even more), they are giving waste, fraud, and mismanagement a completely new meaning, taking pathological irrelevance to new heights. This is especially true of their antiquated approach to intelligence and not sharing information nor being receptive to bottom up non-secret information.

I especially respect the author's detailed cataloguing of our infrastructure vulnerabilities that are of our own making. Badly patched dams, high-rises built on sand, hospitals with no excess capacity, power grids over 50 years old that a single tree can bring down, waterways that are broken, and that if broken any more cannot deliver coal to run power plants essential to Middle American commerce, the list goes on. Especially frightening in the concept of the firestorm, which I first encountered in the 1980's when a newspaper looked at the NYC water mains, most built in the 1920's (that's the nineteen TWENTIES). If they break in a certain way, and a fire starts, NYC gets burned to the ground.

The author is gifted as both a former Coast Guard officer, and as a serious and articulate scholar that has done his homework. Especially valuable to me was his citation of a 2005 series of studies done by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), in which our Nation received 4 C's, 10 D's, and one Incomplete. That alone is grounds for the impeachment and dismissal of every Governor and every Senator and every Congressman. These people are not minding the public interest in a substantive sustainable way.

I have the word “holistic” written in my notes. This author provides in this book both a “big picture” and a whole range of vignettes that drive home the fact that the devil is in the details, and no one, at the Federal or the State levels, with a handful of exceptions, is actually minding the public interest.

He offers specific recommendations for the local level including improved webcam surveillance of ports and waterfronts, a bigger COPS II program, infrastructure committees with weight, a tax on the wealthiest beneficiaries of the public infrastructure, and his older recommendation from the first book, pushing cargo inspections overseas and incentivizing those that comply with Green Lanes that save hundred of thousands in ship and crew time.

Two success stories are Project Impact, and the Disaster Resistant Business (DRB) Program.

The Coast Guard is under-funded in all respects and I agree with this. As one who designed, with Norman Polmar and Ron O'Rourke, the 450-ship Navy for global coverage, I absolutely agree that we can afford to scrap plans for more nuclear carriers and B-2 bombers, and instead fund the resilience and disaster relief and waterway safety needs of the Coast Guard.

The author concludes that our top priority should not be a heavy-metal military global war, but rather a focus on being able to weather the age of terrorism (that I would add, Bush-Cheney have done more to exacerbate than anyone else–Cheney started this war, not Bin Laden, and Larry Silverstein murdered most of those who died at the World Trade Center, not Bin Laden. For these two individuals to not have been indicted, along with Rudy “scoop and dump” Guliani, tells me that our entire government is corrupt and inattentive to the public interest. It is time to either reconstitute the entire government, or break up into the “Nine Nations” and stop giving Washington money to waste on Dick Cheney's favorite crime syndicates).

The author ends very persuasively with the admonition that the Federal Government is totally out of date and unable to shift from stovepipe secrecy to networked information sharing and shared bottom up resilient decision making. He recommends that we begin at the home and neighborhood level, and then work up to the village, county, and state level. He does not suggest what can be done to beat the Federal government back into affordable utility.

Here is an abbreviated version of the ten recommendations at the end of the book:

1) Force Washington to build national resiliency at home
2) Put terrorism in the context of the other threats (see Wikipedia, “Ten Threats”)
3) Fix the infrastructure now
4) Inform the American people, they are our greatest asset
5) Tap the ingenuity and resources of the private sector
6) Do not underestimate the value of individual preparedness
7) Do not allow government to pretend the pandemic will not happen
8) Discourage construction along vulnerable coastlines and in flood plains
9) Properly fund and support local police and emergency responders
10) Promote the concept of resiliency as a global imperative.

The author's bottom line is clear: the Federal Government is in denial, and also ignorant. We can do better. Public anger needed NOW.

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2007/03/022009/12/04

Review: The Google Story–Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time

4 Star, Information Society, Information Technology

Useful Insights, Not the Whole Story,

March 2, 2007

David A. Vise

EDIT 10 Dec 07 to point to “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator.” Costs $675 for an online copy, causes panic behind the scenes on Wall Street. Google for my review book review by the same title.

This book is as close to the “authorized biography” as one can get. Engineers and investors and competitors should go instead to “The Google Legacy” by Stephen E. Arnold, sold only by Infonortics UK (online). End users and third party developers are better off with any of the 50+ other books that focus on penetration testing, analytics, Google Earth, etcetera.

The book purports to be a revelation of secrets, but that is simply not true. This is a compilation of what anyone could have put together from enough coffee house conversations.

What jumps out at me is Google's potentially crippling addiction to advertising revenue, its failure to offer sense-making and visualization, and its extraordinary good luck in being able to draw the best talent from NASA, Microsoft, Bell Labs, etc.

I am impressed by what Google is doing in becoming a multi-lingual service, and eager to see when they can start offering multi-lingual search with translation on demand for micro-cash.

There is no denying the brilliance of the founders in using links as a form of citation analysis, but as anyone who has compared the results from a professional set of sites via Deep Web Technologies, with a Google search, the former is 10 to 1000 times better on any given serious topic.

The book is useful for insights into the founders, and especially Larry Page. One learns of his interest in transportation analytics, and in molecular biology and genetics.

I was surprised to learn that Jeff Bezos helped the founders in the beginning, but now I have the impression that Google does not play well with others, even those that helped them get started, and that is a shame.

“The Google Legacy” does a much better job on the technical strengths of Google (see also the briefing by Stephen E. Arnold in the Archives at OSS.Net), but this books does note the strength of Google in combining software innovation with scalable economic hardware.

Anecdotes include how Google Doodles emerged, the early use of focus groups, and the hiring of a brain surgeon to be the network manager. There is adequate mention of the 20% free play rule, but insufficient discussion what has emerged from that.

On page 143 the author, no doubt misled by whoever he interviewed, claims that “CIA agents use Google to track terrorist groups.” Baloney. Google has a “secret” relationship with CIA (the Office of Research & Development), and a test was done that produced a handful of “hits” all of which were worthless and most of which were severely dated.

Gmail foundered on privacy issues, as did Google's desktop search. The author is incorrect when he says that Google has added sufficient security. The fact is that the US Government is still finding restricted documents leaking out whenever they install Google Enterprise. I for one would never trust Google on my small business machines.

The author describes the division of responsibility among the founders and the CEO: Eric is operations and finance; Serge is policy, politics, and people; Larry is hiring, priorities, and physical space.

While the author describes the Google digital library projects, he fails to satisfy. .

Google's idea for satisfying publishers by using the content only to entice the reader to buy the book is either idiocy, or a subterfuge. Presumably Google knows that synthetic information is free of copyright, but they seem loath to take the easy step of offering footnotes or micro-text extracts for micro-cash. In this regard, they really should be merging with Amazon and the Internet Archive (Brewster Kahle) to create a world library that can be translated into all languages on demand, given for free to the five billion poor, and monetized by using Doug Englebart's Open Hypertextdocument System (OHS).

The book ends with a few pages of “tips” on how to use Google that are nowhere as good as Nancy Blachman et all “How to Do Everything with Google,” or Arno Reuser's briefing at OSS.Net on the open source intelligence system of the future.

I end the book with a small diagram that is NOT in the book, it is my own intellectual property, but it is a useful means of evaluating why Google is not as good as it could be. On a compass, SEARCH is West; SENSE-MAKING is North, SHARE is East, and Saving the World is SOUTH. Google sucks at three of the four, and that may be their epitaph.

I asked a very smart person why Google does not play well with others and is so slow to reach out (see the two images I have loaded to the book on Wikinomics) and he had a direct answer based on direct experience with the founders: “Young guys who made their first 100 million on their own ideas are not really interested in ‘not invented here.'” That's a real shame. If Google were to focus on rapidly offering the eighteen desktop functions that were defined by CIA in 1986 (CATALYST, see OSS.Net), using Drupal 5.0 as the foundation, in close alliance with STRONG ANGEL, not only could we bury Microsoft and ORACLE, but we could save the world in the time allowed, which is to say, in the next fifteen years.

Larry Brilliant (Director of Google.org) points out that pandemics have killed over 20 popes, kings, queens, and prime ministers. Google has the opposite problem–it's not willing to gain control of the planet by giving up control of the hub. I know for a fact that India is thinking about how to displace Google (even if their chief R&D guy is there–who knows, he may have gone native again), and I am earnestly dismayed that Google, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and Amazon as well as IBM, CISCO, and Yahoo cannot get together with an anti-trust waiver similar to what was granted to the MCC with Bobby Inman and Doug Lenat. Time is a'wasting and time is the one thing we cannot replace nor buy.

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