Edit of 3 May 08: Just finished Who Speaks For Islam?: What a Billion Muslims Really Think and one point that jumped out at me was that the Pope heard from 100 Muslim scholars about basic mistakes in his reconciliation speech. We do NOT understand one another, and any civilization of love is going to have to start there, alone with tolerance.
This is a real gem. The author is learned, balanced, and other than managing to not recognize all the other religions in the world, has written an excellent testament for those of any faith who wish to follow in Gandhi's path, in Bonhoffer's path.
I am reminded of a Shi'ite that asked a question of me at the last Hackers on Planet Earth, he told me that Shi'ites in Saudi Arabia who seek to get government jobs, have to answer questions that put them into hell. We cannot go that route. Reconciliation at the community level, one man one bullet at the Dying to Win Logic of Suicide level.
The author provides reflective questions or suggestion actions for reflection at the end of each chapter, and these make the book worthy of more than one reading.
I like the other reviews so after a handful of notes I am going to do my duty by adding links.
+ Knights of Columbus an insurance business that is also committed to charity and unity
+ Human self-knowledge is not possible in the fullest sense without recognizing or receiving Christ. Here I would point to The Faiths of the Founding Fathers.
+ Popes have recognized that reconciliation is essential but from where I sit, the Catholic hierarchy in particular wants to have it boths ways: secret blood money from the Mafia, and Holier Than Thou on the pulpit.
+ The author explores the moral view of human dignity and I am totally with him. I like this book. As blatantly Catholic as it is, this is a thoughtful author who has done his homework can can hold his own with anyone.
Am loading a few images from Earth Intelligence Network. There is plenty of money for peace and prosperity, we just have to eradicate government and Wall street and prison-medical industry corruption first.
Double Spaced Very Useful Tour of the Energy Horizon, May 2, 2008
Miriam Horn
I like this book and recommend it for students of any age from high school to the geriatric crowd that I represent. It has a super index but no mention of Lester Brown or Herman Daly, but that is offset by back cover recomendations from E. O. Wilson, Mark Lewis, and Michael Bloomberg.
Highlights from my fly leaf notes:
+ 1977 Clean Air was a command and control one size fits all that did not pass the market test
+ Lead author and others with the Environmental Defense Fund were instrumental in getting the 1990 Clear Air Act passed.
+ Making clean air a commodity makes the environment a profit center
+ The author is fully aware that Acts of God are in fact Acts of Man. Another book, I cannot remember which, tells us that changes to the planet that used to take 10,000 years now take three. Not only do we need real time science, but we also need The Precautionary Principle: A Critical Appraisal
+ Clean energy is described by one sources as “the mother of all markets.”
+ The author considers the energy markets to be completely “rigged” and notes that grain based ethanol, which I have called idiocy on more than one occasion, exists because of lobbying from Archer Daniels Midland among others.
+ In 2005 solar power grew by 45%.
+ Solar is distributed power, storage is a major obstacle.
+ The author clearly excited by Silicon Valley nano-tech, and also cautious about what we do not know when it is destabilized.
+ The solar energy industry is shooting for the Home Depot marketplace, stuff so simple I could install it. The author also tells us that banks are starting to get into power purchase agreements that will finance clean energy the way a home or car might be mortgaged. Home depot level will also mean graceful degradation and no “crash” or energy equivalent of Bill Gate's “blue screen of death”.
+ Concentrating the sun is another promising approach. The author tells us that solar energy is six times more land efficient than wind energy.
+ Cuba is sitting on a sugar cane gold mine, biofuels with zero emissions are on the way from sugar modification.
+ Algae is covered, as well as bacteria.
+ Ocean power is also making headway, and is consistent, predictable, and has a high energy density.
+ Earth thermal includes hot water that comes with oil, previously considered a nusiance.
+ Coal is getting a make-over, and biomimicry is helping. It must get a make-over because it is an essential part of the mid-term power solution.
+ Sequestration is working and will work long enough to matter.
+ Regenerative reserves (e.g. the Amazon) are an essential part of the future. More more on this see the lovely and informative Climate Change and Biodiversity
+ Manure is turning into a major league energy source (when it's not contaminating our spinach, there is a whole land under surface water use deal here that we just do not understand.
+ Energy efficiency, hybrid cars, and smarter land use (compacting towns and cities to increase efficiency of public transportation) are part of the solution.
+ All parties will spend $10 trillion over the next thirty years to achieve clean energy.
This is a fine book. See also the WIRED Magazine Cover Story from 2000, it came out the same month Dick Cheney was meeting secretly with Enron and Exxon executives.
Howard Rheingold may well have been the first pioneer to fall down into the chasm of cyberspace and the write about it.Ā As Editor of the Whole Earth Review, following in the footsteps of founder Stewart Brand, he has consistently been on the bleeding edge of both righteous living for a Whole Earth, and the bleeding edge of technology and the human mind.Ā Below are links to his books, the first of which, Tools for Thinking, catalyzed deep soul-searching within the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) which at the time (1986) had nothing to offer such as Howard envisioned.Ā He was, with John Perry Barlow, one of the two speakers at OSS '92 who challenged virtually every aspect of the secret intelligence paradigm.
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.
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).
+ 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.
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.
– 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).
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.
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.
Marko A. Rodriguez is currently conducting research at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in Los Alamos, New Mexico. The best place to find Marko is through a Google search of his name or physically in Santa Fe, New Mexico.
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.
By a Catholic for Catholics, May 2, 2008
