5.0 out of 5 stars Can Cause Discomfort, But This Book MATTERS
May 17, 2008
Grover Norquist
I was given this book as a gift, along with Groundswell: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies and to my great surprise, being an estranged moderate Reagan Republican, I found that I am much more of a Libertarian than I realized, and this author, although he causes me great discomfort in some areas (such as privatizing Social Security), he makes complete sense. I learn he has been voted one of the 50 most powerful people in DC by GQ (2007) and I believe it. Senator McCain has better listen this time around. I urge all who are enthused with Senator Obama to read Obama – The Postmodern Coup: Making of a Manchurian Candidate. Senator Obama is NOT transparent and I consider his top foreign policy advisors to be dangerous–Dr. Strangelove (Brzezinski) has one last war with Russia left in him, and seriiousl believes he can confront the Chinese in Africa–this is lunacy (search for my Memorandum online <Chinese Irregular Warfare oss.net>.
The book lacks an index. This is a HUGE MISTAKE on the part of the publisher because there are too many important ideas in this book. The publisher should create and post online an index to this book. The publisher can also be criticized for failing to provide Library of Congress cataloguing information. This is a REFERENCE work. The author should consider holding the publisher accountable for such fundamental incompetencies that detract from the book's lasting value.
The five core reforms that he builds up to are:
1) Portable pensions
2) Competitive health care
3) Educational choice including home schooling
4) Outsourcing of all government functions possible
The author posits a stark choice between the Leave Us Alone movement, that appears to be growing daily (and included 27 secessionist movements that meet annually at a conference organized by Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Human Scale, and what he calls the Takings Group, the tax and spend elected officials both Republican and Democratic.
This is a serious reference work with an even mix of books, articles, and online citations.
There are some areas where the author could benefit from knowledge that is not yet mainstream–for example, we can blow away the Medicare unfunded obligations by negotiating prices that are 1% (ONE percent) of what we foolishly pay now, and as a recent PriceWaterHouseCooopers study documented so well, also eliminating the 50% of the medical professional that is waste, including (the author does address this–the tort lawyers like Senator John Edwards who make millions putting good doctors out of business so bad doctors can do more elective operations).
On balance–and this was my first exposure to this individual–I put the book down thinking to myself that this author deserves his reputation, and that he combines a very powerful intellect with an equally powerful moral force.
Extraordinary, Inspires Need for 183 Other “Lost History” Studies, January 27, 2008
Charles C. Mann
Paul Hawken recommended this book during a Seattle lecture introducing his latest book Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming. It took me a while to get to, but it is certainly an extraordinary achievement, and it has enormous meaning for future studies of both lost histories of 183+ indigenous cultures and languages, and for a new appreciation of how humans can and should shape the environment, not just try to protect it.
The maps alone are a treasure, and are complemented by perfectly selected photographs and graphics, including one on page 144 that documents the deaths of 50 million indigenous Indians in Mexico alone, over the course of a 100 years from 1518 to 1623. The maps highlight the extraordinary contribution of this book and this author in documenting the scope and sophistication and massive numbers of native Americans across both continents, and with some documentation going back to 5000 BC.
The author opens by pointing out, as “Holmberg's Mistake,” the long-standing incorrect views that history began in 1492, and that the indigenous people's were few in number and lacked any semblance of influence or “agency” over what historians over hundreds of years assumed was a “state of nature” in which the indigenous humans were nothing more than a higher state of animal.
The book, which comes with 140 pages of endnotes, is world-class scholarship and world-class investigative journalism. It compellingly documents an Inka Empire spanning a continent in the 15th century and before, with 25,000 miles of roads that last to this day. Tens of millions, many languages, a great deal of trade, sophisticated culture with metalurgy and stone masonry equal to or superior to the Europeans.
I was particularly impressed by the author's description of how language analysis, looking for common words or syllables, helped to document a breadth of unique languages going far back in time.
Overall the book documents how the introduction of smallpox from humans and many other pandemic diseases from pigs that spread to wildlife and then humans, killed perhaps 100 million indigenous American Indians (north and south).
The book ends, appropriately for our time, with a section on the Five Nations of native American Indians who in the early 17th Century were practicing the Great Law of Peace. The Chinese brought Dick Cheney's airplane down over Singapore with precision electronic pulses, and have demonstrated that they can sneak up on our carriers and also immobilize or neutralize are mobility and weapons systems which are completely unprotected against advanced electronic warfare. Simultaneously, the Chinese are waging peace across the southern hemisphere, and rapidly displacing the US and Europe as the primary external actor (see my one-page memorandum on Chinese Irregular Warfare).
I mention other books below that are relevant to the larger issue of “what can we know” about the past or about reality that can help us craft a future that delivers a good life for all, including the five billion poor, a prosperous world at peace. I am persuaded that the emphasis on secret intelligence and military “might” has gone a long way toward destroyed the Earth and Humanity's hopes. The ten books below do not include any books I have written, edited, or published, but I do want to mention that they are all free online at OSS.Net, or more recently, Earth Intelligence Network, where we have posted the new edited work, “COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.”
This book is more of a scholarly work and has eye-glazing detail. However, as best I can tell, this is the single best and most carefully documented book, with the stellar advantage of having as a co-author the Honorable Bill Hendon, who is not only a former Representative (R-NC) but was on the POW/MIA beat while there.
I am very very very angry. Our politicians, both Republican and Democratic, have betrayed us all, and this brings me to tears, betrayed the honorable warriors who became POWs or were MIA in Viet-Nam.
There are several points that grab me:
Over 1,500 POWs still known to be in Viet-Nam and probably alive.
Viet-Nam had a clear strategy for capturing AND KEEPING ALIVE our personel in order to charge the US for reparations after the war was inevitably won by the Vietnamese
The authors explicitly suggest that Senator John McCain has been fully witting of the reality of how many have been left behind, and complicit in our federal government's deliberate decision to abandon them rather than pay Viet-Nam the compensation they appear to fully merit given our violation of the Geneva Convention and our intrusion into the civil war between North and South.
I hold the authors of this book, and the excrutiating detail that they have assembled, in the greatest regard.
It is now clear to me that the Federal Government as it is now constituted, cannot be trusted. We need Electoral Reform, open books, and an end to secrecy.
USG Has Betrayed Us All