- Barnett, Thomas P. M. The Pentagon's New Map. New York:
G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004. ISBN 0-399-15175-3.
- This is one scary book—scary both for the world-view
it advocates and the fact that its author is a professor at the
U.S. Naval War College and participant in strategic planning at
the Pentagon's Office of Force Transformation. His map divides
the world into a “Functioning Core” consisting of the players,
both established (the U.S., Europe, Japan) and newly arrived
(Mexico, Russia, China, India, Brazil, etc.) in the great game
of globalisation, and a “Non-Integrating Gap” containing all
the rest (most of Africa, Andean South America, the Middle
East and Central and Southeast Asia), deemed “disconnected”
from globalisation. (The detailed map may be consulted on the author's Web site.) Virtually
all U.S. military interventions in the years 1990–2003 occurred in the
“Gap” while, he argues, nation-on-nation violence within the
Core is a thing of the past and needn't concern strategic planners.
In the Gap, however, he believes it is the mission of the U.S. military
to enforce “rule-sets”, acting preemptively and with lethal force
where necessary to remove regimes which block connectivity of their
people with the emerging global system, and a U.S.-led “System
Administration” force to carry out the task of nation building when
the bombs and boots of “Leviathan” (a term he uses repeatedly—think
of it as a Hobbesian choice!) re-embark their transports for the
next conflict. There is a rather bizarre chapter, “The Myths We
Make”, in which he says that global chaos, dreams of an American
empire, and the U.S. as world police are bogus
argument-enders employed by “blowhards”, which is immediately followed
by a chapter proposing a ten-point plan which includes such items as
invading North Korea (2), fomenting revolution in (or invading) Iran
(3), invading Colombia (4), putting an end to Wahabi indoctrination
in Saudi Arabia (5), co-operating with the Chinese military (6),
and expanding the United States by a dozen more states by 2050,
including the existing states of Mexico (9). This isn't globocop?
This isn't empire? And even if it's done with the best of intentions,
how probable is it that such a Leviathan with a moral agenda and
a “shock and awe” military without peer would not succumb to the
imperative of imperium?
- Barry, Max.
Jennifer Government.
New York: Vintage Books, 2003.
ISBN 1-4000-3092-7.
- When you try to explain personal liberty to under-thirty-fivers
indoctrinated in government schools, their general reaction is, “Well,
wouldn't the big corporations just take over and you'd end up with a
kind of corporate fascism which relegated individuals to the
rôle of passive consumers?” Of course, that's what they've been
taught is already the case—even as intrusive government hits
unprecedented new highs—but then logic was never a strong point of
collectivist kiddies. Max Barry has written the rarest of novels—a
persuasive libertarian dystopia—what it would look like if the
“big corporations” really did take over. In this world, individuals
take the surname of their employer, and hence the protagonist, Jennifer, is
an agent of what is left of the Government—get it? It is a useful exercise
for libertarians to figure out “what's wrong with this picture” and identify
why corporations self-size to that of the predominant government power: the
smaller the government, the more local the optimal enterprise. This is another
excellent recommendation by a visitor to this
page.
- Miller, John J. and Mark Molesky. Our Oldest Enemy. New
York: Doubleday, 2004. ISBN 0-385-51219-8.
- In this history of relations between the America and
France over three centuries—starting in 1704, well before the U.S.
existed, the authors argue that the common perception of sympathy and
shared interest between the “two great republics” from Lafayette to
“Lafayette, we are here” and beyond is not borne out by the facts,
that the recent tension between the U.S. and France over Iraq is
consistent with centuries of French scheming in quest of its own, now
forfeit, status as a great power. Starting with French-incited and
led Indian raids on British settlements in the 18th century, through
the undeclared naval war of 1798–1800, Napoleon's plans to invade New
Orleans, Napoleon III's adventures in Mexico, Clemenceau's subverting
Wilson's peace plans after being rescued by U.S. troops in World War
I, Eisenhower's having to fight his way through Vichy French troops
in North Africa in order to get to the Germans, Stalinst
intellectuals in the Cold War, Suez, de Gaulle's pulling out of NATO,
Chirac's long-term relationship with his “personal friend” Saddam
Hussein, through recent perfidy at the U.N., the case is made that,
with rare exceptions, France has been the most consistent opponent of
the U.S. over all of their shared history. The authors don't hold
France and the French in very high esteem, and there are numerous
zingers and turns of phrase such
as “Time and again in the last two centuries, France has refused to
come to grips with its diminished status as a country whose greatest
general was a foreigner, whose greatest warrior was a teenage girl,
and whose last great military victory came on the plains of Wagram in
1809” (p. 10). The account of Vichy in chapter 9 is rather
sketchy and one-dimensional; readers interested in that particular
shameful chapter in French history will find more details in Robert
Paxton's
Vichy France and
Marc Ferro's biography,
Pétain or the eponymous
movie
made from it.
- Satrapi, Marjane. Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood. New
York: Pantheon Books, [2000, 2001] 2003. ISBN 0-375-71457-X.
-
This story is told in comic strip form, but there's nothing
funny about it. Satrapi was a 10 year old girl in Tehran when
the revolution overthrew the Shah of Iran. Her well-off family
detested the Shah, had several relatives active in leftist
opposition movements, and supported the revolution, but
were horrified when the mullahs began to turn the clock
back to the middle ages. The terror and mass slaughter of
the Iran/Iraq war are seen through the eyes of a young
girl, along with the paranoia and repression of the Islamic
regime. At age 14, her parents sent her to Vienna to escape
Iran; she now lives and works in Paris. Persepolis
was originally published in French in two volumes
(1,
2). This edition
combines the two volumes, with Satrapi's original artwork
re-lettered with the English translation.
- Hammersley, Ben. Content Syndication with RSS. Sebastopol, CA:
O'Reilly, 2003. ISBN 0-596-00383-8.
-
Sometimes the process of setting standards for the Internet just
leaves you wanting to avert your eyes. The RSS standard, used by Web
loggers, news sites, and other to provide “feeds” which apprise other
sites of updates to their content is a fine example of what happens
when standards go bad. At first, there was the idea that RSS would
be fully RDF compliant, but then out
came version 0.9 which used RDF incompletely and improperly. Then
came 0.91, which stripped out RDF entirely, which was followed by
version 1.0, which re-incorporated full support for RDF along with
modules and XML namespaces. Two weeks later, along came version 0.92
(I'm not making this up), which extended 0.91 and remained RDF free.
Finally, late in 2002, RSS 2.0 arrived, a further extension of 0.92,
and not in any way based on 1.0—got that? Further, the
different standards don't even agree on what “RSS” stands for;
personally, I'd opt for “Ridiculous Standard Setting”. For the poor
guy who simply wants to provide feeds to let folks know what's
changed on a Web log or site, this is a huge mess, as it is for
those who wish to monitor such feeds. This book recounts the tawdry
history of RSS, provides examples of the various dialects, and
provides useful examples for generating and using RSS feeds, as well
as an overview of the RSS world, including syndication directories,
aggregators, desktop feed reader tools, and Publish and Subscribe
architectures.
- Gleick, James. Isaac Newton. New
York: Pantheon Books, 2003. ISBN 0-375-42233-1.
-
Fitting a satisfying biography of one of the most towering figures in
the history of the human intellect into fewer than 200 pages is a
formidable undertaking, which James Gleick has accomplished
magnificently here. Newton's mathematics and science are well
covered, placing each in the context of the “shoulders of Giants”
which he said helped him see further, but also his extensive (and
little known, prior to the twentieth century) investigations into
alchemy, theology, and ancient history. His battles with Hooke,
Leibniz, and Flamsteed, autocratic later years as Master of the Royal
Mint and President of the Royal Society and ceaseless curiosity and
investigation are well covered, as well as his eccentricity and
secretiveness. I'm a little dubious of the discussion on
pp. 186–187 where Newton is argued to have anticipated or at
least left the door open for relativity, quantum theory, equivalence
of mass and energy, and subatomic forces. Newton wrote millions of
words on almost every topic imaginable, most for his own use with no
intention of publication, few examined by scholars until centuries
after his death. From such a body of text, it may be possible to
find sentences here and there which “anticipate” almost anything when
you know from hindsight what you're looking for. In any case, the
achievements of Newton, who not only laid the foundation of modern
physical science, invented the mathematics upon which much of it is
based, and created the very way we think about and do science, need
no embellishment. The text is accompanied by 48 pages of endnotes
(the majority citing primary sources) and an 18 page bibliography.
A paperback edition is now available.
- Babbin, Jed. Inside the Asylum.
Washington: Regnery Publishing,
2004. ISBN 0-89526-088-3.
-
You'll be shocked, shocked, to discover, turning
these pages, that the United Nations is an utterly corrupt gang
of despots, murderers, and kleptocrats, not just ineffectual
against but, in some cases, complicit in supporting
terrorism, while sanctimoniously proclaiming the moral
equivalence of savagery and civilisation. And that
the European
Union is a feckless, collectivist, elitist club of
effete former and wannabe great powers facing a demographic
and economic cataclysm entirely of their own making. But you knew that,
didn't you? That's the problem with this thin (less than 150
pages of main text) volume. Most of the people who will read it
already know most of what's said here. Those who still believe
the U.N. to be “the last, best hope for peace” (and their numbers
are, sadly, legion—more than 65% of my neighbours in the
Canton of Neuchâtel
voted for Switzerland to join the U.N.
in the March 2002 referendum) are unlikely to read this book.
- Bonner, William with Addison Wiggin.
Financial Reckoning Day.
Hoboken,
NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2003. ISBN 0-471-44973-3.
-
William Bonner's
Daily
Reckoning newsletter was, along with a few others like
Downside,
a voice of sanity in the bubble markets of the turn of millennium.
I've always found that the best investment analysis looks well beyond
the markets to the historical, social, political, moral,
technological, and demographic trends which market action ultimately
reflects. Bonner and Wiggin provide a global, multi-century tour d'horizon here, and make a convincing case that
the boom, bust, and decade-plus “soft depression” which Japan
suffered from the 1990s to the present is the prototype of what's in
store for the U.S. as the inevitable de-leveraging of the mountain of
corporate and consumer debt on which the recent boom was built
occurs, with the difference that Japan has the advantage of a high
savings rate and large trade surplus, while the U.S. saves nothing
and runs enormous trade deficits. The analysis of how Alan
Greenspan's evolution from supreme goldbug in Ayn Rand's inner circle
to maestro of paper money is completely consistent with his youthful
belief in Objectivism is simply delightful. The authors readily
admit that markets can do anything, but believe that in the long run,
markets generally do what they “ought to”, and suggest an investment
strategy for the next decade on that basis.