Category: Book Reviews

Review: It’s OK to be Angry about Capitalism by Bernie Sanders

I like Bernie Sanders. I have a lot of sympathy for him, and I agree with most of what he says in this book. However, I have a few quibbles I’m going to discuss here. 

Mr. Sanders addresses seven primary areas:

  • Collapsing Health Care
  • Collapsing Education
  • The Crumbling Media
  • The Obscene Wealth Gap
  • Monied capture of the Democratic Party
  • Climate Change and the Petroleum Industry
  • Labor – Unions, Corporate Representation, and the work-day

I have nothing to say in this essay about the first five. Sanders makes a superb case for every one of them. I’m going to talk about the last two, and concerning labor, only his work-day proposal because, unfortunately, like petroleum, it is linked to climate change.

THE CLIMATE CHANGE PROBLEM

Climate change is the existential crisis of our time. It is a crisis we can no longer block or even substantially mitigate for much longer. Our present global industrial and economic system is doomed. It does not mean the extinction of humanity. It does mean the end of our present way of life (see my review of The Uninhabitable Earth by David Wallace-Wells with many other links). 

The petroleum industry is not solely responsible for the problem as Sanders implies. They did not force us, from the earliest decades of the 20th Century, to rest our entire economy on oil. Before there was an oil economy there was coal, the basis of early industrialization for both Europe and America. Coal is even dirtier than oil, but the Earth had far fewer people in those days, and few developing industrial nations. As early as 1850 scientists warned that carbon dioxide would begin to warm the planet when annual production of the gas exceeded the Earth’s capacity to absorb it. At the time, no one knew when that would be, or how the warming would manifest itself in weather patterns. Some suggested a new ice age. Wait a thousand years. That may still happen.

By the 1970s, there was enough data to see that the warming process had already begun. The petroleum industry didn’t have to lie about it—although they did lie. No one listened to the science, which, by then, was long available to the public. The petroleum industry did not force consumers to buy more cars, and then bigger cars. They did not force the American government to build out a national highway system (instead of improving the railroads) or deregulate the airlines resulting—over the ensuing decades—in a hundredfold increase in flight miles per year. Consumer choice, abetted by government policy did all that. Lastly, the petroleum industry did not force other large nations—China and India in particular—to choose to industrialize like the U.S. and Europe spending the latter half of the 20th Century “catching up,” which, in their case, meant burning a lot of coal.

The petroleum companies never had to lie. Even had they told us one hundred years ago that increased use of fossil fuels would eventually upset the global climate balance, people, and in particular governments (think military competition and technology), would have felt compelled to use fossil fuels to feed growing populations, expand their economies, defend their territories, or engage in naked belligerence. One hundred years ago a fully formed sovereign world government might have acted effectively to prevent what is happening to the climate now. There was no world government then and there isn’t one now. The competition goes on. It is impossible to stop—until we are all dead.

Curtailing the use of fossil fuels sufficiently to bend the temperature curve down even one hundred years from now—it is too late to do anything about the next hundred or more years—we would have to cut their use by ninety percent immediately. No more vacation flying or driving, no more plastic, no more automobile or boat racing, no gas-powered lawnmowers—no recreational or entertainment-related use of fossil fuels whatsoever! Batteries will not save us. A Tesla must be driven fifty-thousand miles before the carbon cost of its manufacture (including the batteries) drops below that of a gas-powered car and that doesn’t count the carbon cost of battery recycling. We do not even ban professional automobile racing, a sport built around burning petroleum! That’s insane! 

The only fuel that could have saved us is hydrogen from seawater produced by renewable energy (whose manufacture has its own enormous carbon cost). Had the world begun that conversion seventy-five years ago—a conversion requiring a lot of carbon to build out—we might be there now. It is far too late.   

Of course, my recommendation above is both economically and politically impossible—globally! Every modern economy in the world would collapse immediately. A billion people would be thrown out of work and many would starve. Every politician in power, or who hopes, someday, to be in power, lies about climate change. The lie is that we can still do much about it. We cannot. 

THE THREE OR FOUR DAY WORK WEEK

Climate change is not specifically an issue of the political left. Labor policy very much is such an issue and Sanders tells us the forty-hour work week (established roughly a hundred years ago) has outlived its utility. Believe me, I get it. I’m retired now but I worked for “the man” for forty years always, officially anyway, a forty-hour week. Would I have supported a shorter week for the same pay? You shouldn’t have to ask. Bernie’s suggestion ensures full (or fuller) employment, and that would be a good thing.

The problem (I said above this issue is connected to climate change) is what the bulk of the working population would do with their extra leisure time. If people used the time to advance their education, to read—or write—more books, if they used their leisure to do philosophy, to produce art, to help aged neighbors, foster local athletics, exercise, play with their children in their own backyards, or help to grow food in local gardens, the three or four-day workweek would be a social and cultural blessing. But that is not what most people would do. They would use that time to travel, to drive and fly, to water ski, pilot ATVs across the eroding Earth, jet ski over increasingly polluted waters, or to go (travel) to more concerts and professional sporting events—automobile racing anyone? In short, they would consume more fuel belching even more carbon into the atmosphere, and that is all I’m going to say on the subject.

It’s OK to be Angry About Capitalism by Bernie Sanders 2022

A “cry of the heart” from a principled politician is refreshing. I have no objection to some people being more prosperous than others, and neither does Mr. Sanders. But the wealth disparity in the U.S. is genuinely obscene and more so in that the wealthiest among us do not contribute proportionally to maintain everything needed to keep their capital flows going. Every branch of the U.S. government is now captured by monied interests, the legislature most of all, and this is true at both national and State levels. Sanders repeatedly touches on this issue, and rightly so. It is the core of our problem.

In some detail, Sanders covers health care, education, child care, the media (all types), and our political process. His overarching issue is the class conflict between labor and capital; between the owners of concentrated capital, and the population who labor to produce the goods and services that generate the wealth. He is right. Sanders is no Marxist. He is not opposed to class distinctions. He wants to make the distinctions more balanced and he is right to do so because the present disparity is causing tens of millions to suffer in one way or another. 

Sanders paints with a broad brush—necessary to keep the book of moderate length and easily read. He succeeds on both counts, but there is a price to be paid. Many of his arguments are oversimplified. The petroleum industry—even despite its decades of obfuscation on the subject—is not solely responsible for climate change. A great deal of that accountability belongs to consumers, most of whom are of the laboring class.

Sanders writes a lot about the disarray of the present Democratic party and how it has come about. He is right about much of it. Citizens United in 2009 did not help, forcing Democrats into the same fund-raising frenzy from the rich as the Republicans. But one thing he doesn’t mention is the present cultural obsession with identity politics, a phenomenon whose emergence has been solely an effort of the political left beginning in the 1970s. As much as anything else, besides money, this has distracted the Democratic Party from the wider issue of class. No matter to what race you belong, or LGBTQ+ letter you choose for yourself, you are still, most likely, among the laboring class. That most fundamental, political divide is now diffused by the demands of alternate identities. 

I am being perhaps unfair to Sanders. His goal is not an exhaustive analysis of factors responsible for America’s social, cultural, and political unraveling. He wants us to aspire to a better American society for all, even capitalists who will face less resentment should Sanders’ vision for balancing the scales ever come about. It might never be possible, but it is a good and hopeful vision.

Review: The Accidental Species by Henry Gee

This is one of those books about which too much additional comment is warranted. In the main, I have said what needs be said in the review itself (see below). Gee can be correct about the mechanism of evolution and the inability of the physical evidence (fossils and DNA) to tell us a complete story about who came from what, and be incorrect as to its ultimate directedness towards capacity for abstraction laying the groundwork for moral free will, religion, and art.

Most of these arenas pertain to Gee’s discussion of consciousness, in particular “self awareness,” which he claims may be exhibited by crows and other animals. He recognizes that what looks like human-like self awareness in crows might emerge from some other mechanism (of consciousness) altogether and be unlike what humans experience. Nevertheless, he unhesitatingly declares that there is no qualitative difference between human consciousness and some of the higher animals. I beg to differ.

Gee claims that most people spend little to no time being “aware of their consciousness.” While it may be true that few besides philosophers spend hours a day in Husserlian epoche, the point is not that humans rarely think about their awareness, but that every human can exercise that capacity when he or she wishes. Moreover it lies always close at hand. All I need to do to evoke the capacity in you is to ask “are you awake?”

Self-consciousness, what I have elsewhere called recursive-consciousness, is the foundation of our ability to have abstract thoughts, thoughts about things unrelated to our sensory inputs or our need for food, sex, or avoidance of danger. It enriches our language by introducing the need to invent language that communicates the effect. From this stems religion and art. 

What signifies the emergence of art and religion in a species? Broadly, behavior that has nothing to do with acquiring food, sex, or safety, warmth, and so on. Cave paintings and decorative items (shell necklaces anyone) will do for art, while ritualized burial serves for religion.

Are there animals who spend time and energy creating art or self-decoration. Are there animals who ritually bury their dead? I know of none. Both sorts of activities require resources and energy that would be better put to hunting or reproduction. Why ritually bury your dead? Something about this implies belief in some after life, and possibly also fear of ghosts, which may be the earliest outgrowth of the nascent religious impulse. 

Primitive humans spent considerable resource propitiating ghosts later leading to venerating ancestors. The earliest human specialization might be the shaman, a profession dedicated to serving other than material needs. I know of no case of this among the animals. Gee would say (I believe) that we cannot know where exactly in the evolution of sapiens these qualities appeared. He is right, but again it doesn’t matter. At whatever point it appeared, that appearance marks “the human.” Could it be that art and religion appeared in hominid branches other than the sapiens line and petered out? Yes, it could. But that does not mean that these particular qualities are not qualitatively different from every other animal type that doesn’t exhibit them. It happens that our line, whatever sequence led to sapiens, is the only one left standing and in the absence of evidence (art, ritual burial, abstract language) the only one we know of that has achieved these milestones. 

But even granting that art, religion, and the evolution of language to express them are evidence of a qualitative difference between human mind and the animals, why should this difference suggest the teleological in evolution? Because neither art nor religion contribute to the acquizition of food, clothing, and shelter. They do contribute to socialization which has adaptive advantages, but evolution has solved this problem, even among predators (e.g., wolves) long before the appearance of art and religion. 

If it happens that there is a God, a teleologically infused evolution leading, eventually, to his recognition, would not be surprising. This is not to say that the appearance of art, religion, and the languaged to communicate about them entail a God, but a God is, at least, consistent with their appearance. 

The Accidental Species by Henry Gee (2013)

This is a book that does well in some parts and not so well in others. Broadly, it is a book about evolution, the evolution of modern humans, and the biological, social, and psychological parallels between modern humans and the higher animals.

The first part is the good part. Given the present scientific paradigm, no teleological (purposeful and established [ordained] before the fact) endpoint to evolution exists. Evolution is what it is: random genetic changes that happen to be of or take some advantage of some changing environmental condition. Gee argues convincingly that the appearance of humans as we know them on Earth now might have come out differently, arisen from different earlier stocks, or perhaps not come to exist on the planet at all. He also notes that the paleontological record is too sparse for us to reliably assemble the story of even our present form from the last handful of millions of years. This includes the marvelous addition of genetic analysis to the paleontological tool kit. Marvelous as genetics is, back past a few hundred thousand years, its samples are even rarer than fossils. 

In roughly the second part of the book, Gee compares modern humans to animals to show that none of our supposedly unique qualities (gait, brain size, tools, language–he barely mentions writing–and self-consciousness) are entirely unique to humans. Here, I think he tries to be too clever by half, suggesting the slime trails of voles, or the smell of urine to a dog, are communication with some comparable quality to human communication, which also happens to include such passive forms of signaling if more subtle than slime or urine. Some animals even possess rudimentary language communicated through gestures (bees) and often sound, as do we. 

Agreeing with Gee that the evolution of humans as we find them was not foreordained, we need not agree with him that nothing different-in-kind has emerged from the process. But since this difference manifests in art and religion, we cannot be entirely sure, as Gee unhesitatingly declares himself to be, that the endpoint (a being who could express himself in art, religion, philosophy, etc.) was not, by some unspecified ordination, teleologically driven even if it needn’t have emerged through exactly the path it happened to take. Gee’s very good first part and not-so-well-argued last part must leave that question entirely up in the air.

Gee is right that many animals possess nascent capabilities that resemble some of what humans do, though none I know of developed any form of writing. But he goes too far when he asserts that there are no qualitative differences between the abstractions of nuclear physics or moral philosophy and the chattering of birds and barking dogs. We cannot know, he tells us, what gospels the crows are telling one another. With regard to the last quality he covers, self-consciousness, which he admits is ultimately the source of religion and art (abstractions and their reflection in language in general), he is, in the end, an eliminative materialist on mind, a position that only writes off and does not explain such things as art, religion, and abstractions generally.

Review: Truths about Evil, Sin, and the Demonic by Byron Belitsos

In my formal review (included below) I said this book has problems. Byron Belitsos is a long-time friend and I did not wish to give him too difficult a time on Amazon, but there are more problems with his book than I noted in the review. It’s time I reviewed those other issues. I hope he will take these in the philosophical spirit with which they are offered.

First up is a technical quibble. Byron seems disposed to believe in demons to a greater degree than The Urantia Book (a source in Byron’s book, see below) suggests is real or sensible, at least in my reading. On page 279, with reference to Pentecost and The Urantia Book, Byron states: “The unseen followers of Caligastia … now had a choice. … Those who accepted their judgment and agreed to rehabilitation were removed. …; others who did not accept were to remain here …” (that is, on Earth). 

Byron is misinterpreting. His error makes a difference to the spirit of his book where “the demonic” is concerned. What The Urantia Book actually says is: “The entire group of rebel midwayers is at present held prisoner. No more do they roam this world … the pouring out of the Spirit of Truth upon all flesh forever made it impossible for disloyal spirits of any sort or description ever again to invade even the most feeble of human minds. Since the day of Pentecost there never again can be such a thing as demonical possession” [77:7.8 emphasis mine].

Byron has an escape! “Caligastia, your apostate Planetary Prince, is still free on Urantia to prosecute his nefarious designs, but he has absolutely no power to enter the minds of men, nor can he draw near to their souls to tempt or corrupt them unless they really desire to be cursed by his wicket presence.” [53:8.6 emphasis mine] 

What constitutes “real desire” here? The Urantia Book is not explicit. Does it demand a knowledge of Caligastia specifically, or is a sincere desire to be “possessed by the devil” sufficient? There is a continuum between these two points, and the matter of what constitutes sincerity and its relation to what is known by the individual concerned must also be examined. But my point here is that Byron has some wiggle room to insert a genuine demonic, though in my opinion, very little. Possession as such is out. What powers does Caligastia have to communicate with anyone? The Urantia Book does not say.

My next issue is about something Byron does not say much about. Theodicy has two great domains. The domain of evil originating in human doings, and a domain theologians call “natural evil,” having no or only indirect human entanglement. Earthquakes are the quintessential example of natural evils, but floods, natural fire, disease, and many other things that can kill us also qualify. Why does God allow innocent people to be killed by these things? If a building collapses in an earthquake because it was corruptly built with inferior materials, then human-entangled evil enters the picture, but earthquakes, floods, etc, have killed innocents for many centuries before humans understood, even theoretically, how to protect themselves from these things.

Early in his book, Byron explicitly says he is not going to deal with “natural evil.” That’s fine, author’s privilege. But I do not see how one can write a book on theodicy and ignore natural evil. It, and not human-sponsored evil, is the foundation of the theodicy problem. Even in the earliest days of monotheistic theology, that humans did evil and that this evil is associated with free will and, therefore not directly, personally, God’s doing was understood. But what today is understood as a natural physical process was another matter entirely. The blame for an earthquake killing my family could be laid directly at God’s feet. Ironically, The Urantia Book has the finest answer to the matter of natural evil I have seen in any source. God cannot do the impossible. He cannot make a square circle, and he cannot make a universe grounded in universal physical law that evolves everything from stars to humans without the process sometimes harming humans (not to mention dinosaurs). I cover this in more detail in my essay Theodicy in The Urantia Book.

My third issue has to do with Byron’s use of Ken Wilber’s classification scheme to organize his “integral theodicy.” Wilber’s scheme here is not the issue but Byron’s use of it. Byron notices that not all the various theodicies he covers fit neatly into Wilber’s schema. More seriously, though, I wonder what Byron gets out of his process. I did not find anything in his “integration” that improved upon ideas already discussed in the book. Yes, one idea fits into category B, and another fits category C, but what of it? The integration did not, in other words, advance or enhance any understanding of the individual theories as he covered them prior to this ending. If anything, Byron’s process in this section is a categorical differentiation which is valuable as far as it goes, but it doesn’t “integrate” anything.

My fourth issue is more abstract. Byron began this book with a Master’s Thesis. The first part of the book, enhanced, is the thesis. Among the purposes of this book (personal communication with the author) is to introduce The Urantia Book to the scholarly (academic) theological community. I happen to think there is a lot that is nonsensical (cosmology, biology, human origins) in The Urantia Book (see my Problems with the Cosmology and Astronomy of The Urantia Book for details on the cosmological issues). However, The Urantia Book’s theology (and so the theodicy) eclipses everything humans have written on the subject for twenty-five hundred years! It isn’t that human speculations are all wrong, but they are woefully incomplete. Their truths are melded and greatly expanded in The Urantia Book, enhancing them in relation to one another.

Human speculations are often cast as either-or choices: either “free will” or “greater goods” for example. But The Urantia Book argues convincingly that the truth is more usually both-and. Not only are all the [partly correct but incomplete] human theories amalgamated, but much more is also given. The Urantia Book’s depiction of the universe’s administrative structure adds a thick layer to the resolution to the theodicy problem (on both “natural” and human-gendered sides) that no theologian has ever suggested (see my above-referenced theodicy essay)! The Urantia Book is the integration that Byron seeks! But for that very reason, his project must fail–at least for now. Western academic theology is chained wrist and ankle to the Old and New Testament, such source documents as exist, and centuries-old Apocrypha. No academic theologian today could publically embrace The Urantia Book without committing professional suicide!    

Truths about Evil, Sin, and the Demonic by Byron Belitsos 2023

The book is a scholarly examination of a subject called Theodicy. Theodicy attempts to answer questions like “Why does an omnipotent and good God permit evil?” Such questions arose with the appearance of Judeo-Christianity because this evolving thought was the first to arrive at the idea that there is one God who must be infinite, unified, and good.

Mr. Belitsos reviews the history of the discipline from pre-Christian thinkers through Augustine in the Fifth Century and on to modern times. He also covers the broad difference in approach to the subject between the Western (Roman) and Eastern (Orthodox) Christian traditions. He brings us up to modern times via Kant and Hegel and into the twentieth century. I am oversimplifying. There are many others he includes in his explorations.

Next, the author brings up The Urantia Book. While not considered a scholarly or authoritative text by academicians, the book does contain an approach to the theodicy question that adds significant psychological, social, and historical insights. I have read this text, and Mr. Belitsos misinterprets it in various respects, but that is only my opinion. The Urantia Book is complex and nuanced enough to stand up to differing interpretations. I will deal with these matters in my blog.

After introducing The Urantia Book and pulling together its theodicy, Mr. Belitsos combines it and traditional thought on the subject into what he calls “an Integral theodicy” based on a four-way partitioning of experience–subjective-objective, individual-social–by Ken Wilber, whom the author calls “an integral philosopher.” I’m not a big fan of Mr. Wilber’s work, but that is not to say his thinking might not be helpful in this regard. Mr. Belitsos believes this is the case. 

From that point, adding back the insights of the Eastern Orthodox Church–of which he is a fan–the author attempts to summarize everything into a satisfying answer to the theodicy question. He fails, and to be fair, he knows he fails, pointing this out in the book’s last pages. Formulating an intellectually satisfying theodicy is possible–the author’s efforts are exemplary. But intellectual achievement is far from emotional repose. There is, the author realizes, no emotionally satisfying answer to the theodicy question in the face of our daily exposure to evil throughout our present world, not to mention the horrors of our history.

Mr. Belitsos’ scholarship is here and there uneven despite over three hundred detailed end-notes. At one point, the author connects the thought of a contemporary theologian with conspiracy theories that don’t belong in this book. Elsewhere he introduces a bit of “Urantia movement lore,” also misplaced in a scholarly work, even one that accepts The Urantia Book as a source! But these diversions are few and short. Truths about Evil, Sin, and the Demonic is a good summary of the subject and a commendable effort to find at least an intellectually satisfying answer to theodicy’s puzzle.    

Book Review: Cult of Aten by Matthew Rapaport

By Wehttam Tropapar, October 2023

Cult of Aten, the highly anticipated capstone novel in the Foreign Agent series is out, and this one is different!

Book one (Foreign Agent) and book two (Foreign Agent the Last Chapter) are closely related. The final setting in the first book (Bangkok), and its characters, carry through the entirety of the second book. The “Cult of Aten” is introduced in the second book where its infrastructure begins to be built, but the novel ends before it is finished and launched.

Book three takes us back to the U.S. where its author, having published the second novel, receives a thumb drive from Bangkok containing the code for an elaborate website along with an image. As with the other novels, Cult of Aten is written in memoir style, this time explicitly as a diary begun in 2028 while Matthew lies in a hospital bed recovering from an assassination attempt–no spoilers here, this fact is noted in the first chapter. The bulk of the novel (everything through Chapter 19 of 22) is Matthew catching the reader up to all that happens from the autumn of 2023 when he launches the Cult of Aten, to his present–in the hospital–in 2028.

Except for five chapters in its middle covering a single [important] week spent in Mexico the pacing of this novel is much faster than the first two. This is necessary because the third novel spans five years compared to two years for the first and only one for the second. It is also consistent with Matthew’s claim (in 2028) that this catching-up was drafted in two weeks from his hospital bed. It is a result of this “catching-up” and explanation that Cult of Aten can be read as a stand-alone novel. Yes, the story is enriched by the first two novels–especially the second–but they aren’t strictly necessary. The reader is not lost without them.

What would a novel from Matthew be without sex? It’s here in plenty, but there is a change, Matthew says a “literary advance” on his part. While still explicit, the sex (with one exception “because it was unusual compared to the rest”) is softened around the edges. The exceptional detail Matthew is otherwise known for is absent, most of the time. Interestingly, this is also consistent with the story’s pacing.

So how does a text written in 2028 come to get published in 2023? Two words: time travel! You’ll just have to read the story!

All in all, in my opinion, this is the best of the three books. I asked Matthew what gave him this idea. What he said was: “The first novel’s insight was ‘what if the Chinese offered to pay me for my opinion.’ The second novel’s was ‘what if there was more than one alien spaceship and the other didn’t crash?’ This novel, the third was ‘what would happen if the Cult of Aten (first invented in novel number two) and the books really took off and became a global phenomenon?’”

What’s left of the real Cult of Aten can be found on Matthew’s WordPress account here: https://ruminations.blog/cult-of-aten

Review: Spy Fail by James Bamford

There aren’t any philosophical danglers in this book (that I can see) to discuss, but there is the matter of Israeli apartheid. Several stories Bamford ties together begin with Israel and apartheid South Africa in the 1970s, particularly the man Arnon Milchan, an Israeli agent who became (and still is) a billionaire Hollywood film producer. His story threads its way through half the book.

In the 1970s and 80s, the Israelis and South Africa were allies. In particular, the Israelis were actively helping South Africa maintain and strengthen apartheid. Arnon Milchan (before he was a Hollywood producer) was Israel’s primary asset on the ground in South Africa. But why? It was one thing for Israel to want friends; it had few enough. But why would a State composed of formerly oppressed people actively work to promote racial oppression? Jews are, as far as I can tell from America, no more biased against Black people than anyone else. But Jews in Israel, not all the people, but the government, are biased against Palestinian Arabs and have been since before 1948! When Israel became a State, there were far more Palestinians living in the territory than Jews. Supposedly emerging from the European democratic tradition, Israel immediately created a two-track hierarchy. Jews were citizens who had a vote. Palestinians living in Israeli territory were second-class citizens who did not.

Zionists (the term for militant Jews still in use today) planned an apartheid state from the beginning. There were more Arabs in Palestine than Jews, and no matter how many Jews flocked to the new Israel, the Arab population would always be able to out-reproduce them. There would never be a Jewish government in Palestine if Arabs had an equal vote. Today, the situation has become even more fraught. As Bamford points out, Israeli apartheid is worse than what black populations suffered in the southern tip of Africa! South Africa, after all, is a big country. There were places for the oppressed population to live. The same is not the case in Israel. Even the territory the Palestinians occupied until the 1967 and 1973 wars is now 85% Israeli! Further, the political climate in Israel has shifted far to the right because extreme right-wing Jews (mostly religious fundamentalists whose theologic egotism blocks any compromise, and not coincidentally are the occupants of all the Israeli settlements in what was Arab land on the West Bank) have, for decades, been out reproducing the much more liberal secular population.

Still, why support South Africa? A reading of Bamford’s book explains much. Israeli apartheid was overt from the beginning, but South Africa’s oppression of the black population went back to before the turn of the 20th century and was much more in the focus of the world’s attention than Israel’s. The longer South Africa could maintain apartheid, the longer Israel could avoid the world’s scrutiny. Zionists had an excuse. South Africa was not the world’s only white-dominated nation, but Israel is the world’s only “Jewish State.” When apartheid ended in South Africa (early 1990s), Israel was already decades into its American influence operations, with Milchan orchestrating much of it and American presidents of both parties looking the other way for the sake of the Jewish vote and the largess of big donors. 

Spy Fail by James Bamford 2023

This is, to put it bluntly, a fantastic read. Mr. Bamford is a professional journalist with almost forty years of investigative credentials in the counterespionage world behind him, beginning with the Puzzle Palace in the 1980s. Overall, the story is about the failure of America’s counterintelligence agencies (mostly the FBI, but also the NSA) to catch any spies until long after they have spied, sometimes for decades. But incompetence (and sometimes just bad luck) is one thing. In the book’s last tale, the FBI and Justice Department become positively demonic, persecuting a wholly innocent woman–whom they had themselves determined was innocent–because there was, at the time, a hysteria over Russian election meddling (Russiagate) and the FBI needed a Russian to parade before the media.

Bamford begins with a couple of hacking stories. One can complain about the shoddy state of security in Military computers and those of the NSA, CIA, and FBI. Still, in the end, it is impossible to prevent all penetration of even [supposedly] secure systems, whether by actors outside the U.S. or employees within it. The most laughable case cited was one of the most serious, the theft of the most sensitive spy tools: software developed by the NSA and stolen by a hacker calling her/himself “Shadow Brokers.” As I said, it is hard to stop a hack until after it happens, but the shameful thing about this case is that Shadow Brokers, who claimed to be working INSIDE the American government, has to this day not been identified! By way of illustration, Bamford next relates the story of the North Korean hack of Sony Pictures as revenge for the Seth Rogan movie “The Interview.” That attack, and a number of others around the world by Russia, perpetrated with the tools stolen by Shadow Brokers!

The next and longest section in the book is about the Israelis, who have spied on and run influence operations in the U.S. for fifty years! In the 1970s and early 80s, it was about stealing nuclear secrets, not only secrets but physical uranium and nuclear bomb triggers. Since then, it has been about managing perceptions of Israel (declared an apartheid state by every human rights organization in the world, including those inside Israel) inside the U.S. Besides the Russians, no State wanted Trump elected president more than Israel; the Russians because Trump would weaken NATO and the European alliance, Israel because Trump would move the U.S. embassy to Jerusalem and look the other way as Israel continues to squeeze the Palestinians! Russian disinformation has been all over the news, but not a whisper about Israel!

But this particular story, as Bamford details it, is not exactly a failure in U.S. counterintelligence. According to the author, the FBI has known all about what the Israelis have been doing in the U.S. since the beginning (the 1970s at least) and has dutifully reported it up the chain to the Justice Department under every president (Democrat and Republican) from Carter to Biden! But every administration, afraid to lose Jewish campaign money, has ignored the reports! The names of the head people involved on both the Israeli and American sides–Israel’s fifth column in the U.S.–are given, and their portfolios are detailed! Readers will be shocked at the revelations, even more so if they are familiar with the Hollywood scene. Israel is after much more than merely electing pro-Israel candidates. Bamford lays out a vast Israeli operation since the mid-2000s to suppress the “Boycott, Divest, and Sanction” movement that seeks to have Israel abandon its apartheid anti-Palestinian policies by applying the same sort of pressure the world applied to South Africa. I will address some of this further in my blog.

Beyond the Israel story, Bamford delves into more traditional sorts of spies, all of which the FBI failed to catch until after much damage had been done. Sometimes not even then. In one case, a beautiful Chinese double agent (ultimately working for China) was sleeping with her two FBI handlers (see the book Tiger Trap: America’s Secret Spy War with China by David Wise for more details on that story)!

Bamford’s last story is that of the brutal treatment of a young graduate student, Maria Butina, who had the misfortune of being Russian, interested in geopolitics, and had started a small organization in Russia hoping to promote gun ownership. The FBI had investigated the girl a year earlier and concluded that she had no connection whatsoever with the Russian government. But when the Russiagate hysteria broke out in 2017, and then just after the release of the movie “Red Sparrow”, the Justice Department decided they had to go after someone to divert media attention from their own bungling of the matter. Ms. Butina was Russian, like the character in the movie. She was young, pretty, and a redhead. She was interested in the NRA and went to some Trump rallies. An entirely fabricated case was put together. Maria was arrested and psychologically brutalized before she pleaded guilty to conspiracy–a bargain to get out of indefinite solitary confinement in a maximum security prison. For three months she was held in solitary having done nothing at all! Still, the poor woman served another twelve months in prison on the trumped-up conspiracy charge before being flown back to Russia!

But the FBI and the military learn little. Despite Chelsea Manning and Edward Snowden, a young man, a twenty-one-year-old air national guardsman has been arrested for putting a trove of top secret documents on a server in a private chat group some six months ago! He wasn’t trying to sell or release the documents for political purposes. It was all about impressing his buddies on the chat group! Of course, the boast went on too long. Somebody in that private group released the documents more widely. The FBI didn’t catch wind of it until the whole world saw them!

Highly recommended reading! I expect America’s counterintelligence has successes (however that is measured), but the depth and extent of the failures are shocking. Enjoy!

Book Review: Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari (2016)

There isn’t much extra I want to say about this book I haven’t said in many other essays. The review itself (see below) says what needs to be said about his projections for humanity. The issue for me here is his contention that (1) physics is all there is, (2) we have no free will, and (3) personality and mind are illusions. None of his projections for a human future depend on these assertions. If God is real, human religious institutions might be substantially wrong about his nature. Like almost everyone else, Harari fails to distinguish between religion (and what God is) and religious institutions (what the churches say about God). If we are mostly wrong about God (should he exist), we might still pursue the course Harari lays out in his book. The same is true of free will and personality (distinct from character). In the review, I’ve already pointed out the absurdity of denying free will. If Harari was right, he would no more deserve credit for his book than my printer deserves for an essay I print on it. Indeed, the obviousness of free will, along with its impossibility under a purely deterministic/random universe (quantum phenomena aren’t random, by the way, they are indeterminate. There is a difference). In fact (I contend), the manifest obviousness of free will is the evidence that physics is incomplete!

For more on this, see my other essays on the subject:

The Nonsensical Notion of Compatibilism

Arguing with Automatons

Mental Cause

Response to Criticisms of Agent-Causal Libertarianism

From What Comes Mind

Why Personality

Homo Deus by Yuval Noah Harari (2016)

God-Man is what this title means, but the content isn’t quite so literal. There are no themes in this book that haven’t been dealt with by numerous science fiction novels. But this isn’t supposed to be fiction, instead a sober look at where the history of humans, coupled with the technology of the twenty-first century, is taking us.

So where is that? The author cites three overall goals motivating humanity since its inception, and, according to Harari, now nascent and imbedded in modern technology. They are: (1) to be ageless, literally to live forever (beginning with living much longer than we do now) provided that we are not killed in accidents or murdered, (2) to be happy always, and (3) to acquire god-like (small ‘g’) powers of mind and body through mechanics, genetics, and cybernetics,

All of these are, he thinks, possible in the next 50 or so years despite the first’s violating the second law of thermodynamics, the second being a mental state that appears to demand an occasional (at least) lapse into something else to reset itself, leaving the third as the only one understood well enough to be achievable in some measure. Interestingly, achieving the third goal would have the most predictable negative impact on our present value systems and ways of life–illustrated to chilling effect in his last chapter. Putting it bluntly, post-sapiens humans take over the world, enslaving (or just eliminating, there being no further need for human labor) the rest of us. In a further twist, cybernetic intelligence eventually eliminates even those quasi-sapiens for its own sake, there being no further need for humans of any sort.

Concerning these specific prognostications, Harari gives himself an out. This is only speculation. The future is open, and there are many ways our technology might develop, and not everything we want may be possible. He also understands that perhaps time is not on our side. Some near future events (global nuclear war or civilizational collapse due to climate or ecological disaster) might derail our progress. Concerning the foundational assumptions of his projections, what makes them reasonable (and possible), he leaves himself no wiggle room.

Three things he assures us must be true: (1) the universe is entirely physical (no God, no extra-physical mind). As a consequence (2), free will is an illusion, and (3) so is the self. This leads him down a path of epistemic nihilism. Our brains react to every sensory input and make every decision some seconds (or fractions of seconds) before we are even aware of them. Our experiential arena is subjectively real (how this is given there is no subject) but has no impact whatsoever on what we think, feel, or do–there being no individual “us” anyway. The absurd consequences of these assumptions (he is not alone in believing these and cites long-challenged experiments purporting to prove them), for example, that there is no “he,” no Yuval Harari to whom we might give credit for this book, escape him.

Homo Deus is rich with philosophical implications, but the author is writing from a historical perspective and a forecast of “future history.” He is not trying to do philosophy, so I leave explorations of these implications for a blog essay. The book is well-written and entertaining. His take on human history from the paleolithic to the Enlightenment, the book’s part one, is novel. He credits literal religion (among other things) with pushing mankind forward until our own discoveries dethroned it, installing a new [metaphorical] religion, Humanism, the book’s part two, which brought us to the edge of the present age. Humanism is to be dethroned now, part three, and yet another [metaphorical] religion Harari calls Dataism is emerging. This overall thesis is coherent given his assumptions and gracefully presented with considerable humor, so four stars, even if it is more than a bit presumptuous!

Foreign Agent the Last Chapter. A Review

By Wehttam Tropapar

In September 2022, the anticipated Foreign Agent the Last Chapter arrived on the scene! Sequels are often formulaic and dull compared to first books, but this one is an exception to the rule. By comparison, the original Foreign Agent becomes a prequel –albeit a necessary one. Foreign Agent the Last Chapter is the real story; a masterwork of surreal, absurdist fiction! 

I asked Mr. Rapaport how this chef-d’oeuvre came about. I quote his reply in full.

“I hadn’t envisioned any sequel to Foreign Agent, but besides geopolitics, there were two other broad topics I’d always wanted to get into a novel, and for which there was no room in Foreign Agent: religion, specifically the religion of The Urantia Book, and an unusual (I think) take on an alien invasion of Earth.

About four months after the publication of Foreign Agent, while taking a shower (these ideas always seem to hit me in the shower), it suddenly occurred to me that a line in the last chapter of Foreign Agent [Chapter 20 ed], the 1976 crash of an alien ship in Xinjiang (leading twenty years later to the Chinese genetic experiments), along with the fact that the narrator of Foreign Agent is never told, despite his asking several times, exactly why his geopolitical opinions were so valuable to the Chinese, could be the two keys to a new novel.

There remained several problems. How to merge these ideas with all the sex, and how to get the aliens to Earth in a reasonable time. The Urantia Book is not anti-sex, even sex for fun. It is, however, anti-obsession of any kind, including sex, and no one is more obsessed with sex than the novel’s narrator. One of the essays on my blog, Prolegomena to a Future Theology, in which I describe the three pillars of reality, provided the key to solving both problems. Of course, the solution is ridiculous, even absurd from a Urantia Book viewpoint, but other ridiculous ideas have been linked to that book by others so I don’t feel too bad about it.

When I stepped out of that shower, I had the basic idea for the first half of the novel, the buildup to the scene where all the main characters come together. Beyond that, I had no idea what I would do, but I started writing anyway. When I reached that middle, chapter 11, I knew what the end had to be, but still not how to get there. Chapter 12 followed naturally from 11. In chapter 13, I put six words into the mouth of one of my characters (no spoilers). When she spoke those words, I knew how the chasm would be bridged. The rest is history.” 

Bearing in mind what Mr. Rapaport says above, there is a shift in the story exactly where he indicates. Chapters 1 through 11 proceed naturally. Beginning in chapter 12, the story becomes a bit unfocused and soon splits into three separate threads. Besides the main line involving the alien invasion (I hope that is not a spoiler, Mr. Rapaport mentions it above), two subthreads appear. Both begin naturally enough rooted in the main thread but end up having little to do with it or with one another except that the narrator must repeatedly traverse all three as the story, memoir-style, moves forward in time. Little is not nothing, however. The effect of each thread on the others is felt through their effect on the narrator, and Mr. Rapaport deftly uses this part of the book to expand on the subject of sex and drugs, in particular opium, introduced in Foreign Agent. 

Yet while these chapters are not wasted, indeed they are the novel’s most literary, there is one rather long section, I’ll call it an infrastructure description, that takes up a few pages but ends up not being used anywhere else. I asked Mr. Rapaport about this and he told me those passages begin elevating the significance of two minor characters first introduced in Foreign Agent. He admits he might have done a better (read shorter) job with that section.  

I’m not going to do a chapter-by-chapter review as I did with Foreign Agent. That book was a flat story, a single exciting thread from beginning to end. Foreign Agent the Last Chapter is more textured. Even the first eleven chapters describe multiple events occurring in parallel.

This novel, like Foreign Agent, ends with two epilogs, one by Mr. Rapaport and another by two new characters who are instrumental in the main thread. As in the former book, Mr. Rapaport tells me these epilogs are analogous to the photographs displayed at the end of the two movies “Hangover” (2009) and “Hangover 2” (2011). Their purpose is not so much to add comedy, though they are funny, rather to re-highlight comedy already encountered.  

I dare not, however, close this review without mentioning the novel’s seminal contribution to literature. Throughout the book, beginning in chapter 1 and in many, though not all, subsequent chapters, Matthew Rapaport himself is discussed in third-person by the narrator and other characters! In short sections of two chapters, Mr. Rapaport speaks to the narrator in the form of replies to emails! Both of these little sections serve to enhance the contrast between Mr. Rapaport’s ideas and what the narrator experiences. There are, Mr. Rapaport keeps reminding me, “no rules in the novel.” I know of no other novelist who embeds him or herself into the novel in this way. In my humble opinion, some significant literary prize, perhaps a Pulitzer, is due Mr. Rapaport for this innovation. 

In Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, Mr. Rapaport promised us a more complex and more ridiculous story, exceeding even the absurd limits of Foreign Agent. He has succeeded beyond my expectations on both counts!

Review: The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan, 2022

I have issues with this book (as always the full Amazon review is included below), but none of them involve the author’s contention that the present global civilization is going to unwind back a century or two (possibly much more) starting, well, now. My main problem has to do with Zeihan’s treatment of climate change but in addition, and in general, the problem is his own failure to fully integrate the impact of all the unwinding that will take place along every dimension he explores. I will give one example.

Zeihan says that as the world’s land becomes mostly barren again (shortages of water, fertilizer, and fuel for farm machinery) we might yet be able to grow more food on what remains thanks to genetic engineering. He forgets however that genetic engineering is an incredibly high-tech process demanding inputs (chemicals, plastics, facilities, instruments, electricity, computers) that will no longer be reliably available even in the best-off places. There are parts of the book where he goes to some lengths to illustrate the effect of such overlaps, so it surprises me to find such failures, and the elephant in the room is climate change.  

I sent Peter Zeihan an email after reading “The Dis-United Nations” suggesting he read Wallace-Wells’ “The Uninhabitable Earth”. I do not know if he took me up on my suggestion and this present book has no bibliography. From what he does say about climate’s impact on his geopolitical subject matter it does not seem that he has. Zeihan thinks the U.S. is in the best position to weather the storm (metaphorically and literally speaking). Even if he is right about the last part, things won’t be nearly as sanguine as even he thinks – and that isn’t very sanguine to begin with. 

To set some parameters and be fair to Zeihan, I note up front that his timeframe is a mere 30 or so years beginning now and extending into the 2050s. The Earth is not going to be uninhabitable as soon as 2050. On the other hand, Zeihan thinks that some sort of new geopolitical equilibrium will emerge around that time. That contention is problematic because by then the impact of climate change will have become extreme (and costly) enough to prevent any such equilibrium from evolving and that is the point he misses. As bad as climate-related issues will be in 2050, they will continue to get worse for hundreds (possibly thousands) of years.

By 2050, at least, the Eastern seaboard and Gulf coasts of the U.S. will be fighting for their lives if there is any money left to fight with. Zeihan seems to think there will not be a lot of cheap (or any) financing by then; for example financing to prop up sea walls and harden port facilities. If he is right about that part, then Manhattan will lose its subway system, and the barrier islands protecting our Eastern and Gulf coasts will be gone; if not underwater entirely, then so battered as to be useless to anyone. New Orleans will almost certainly be underwater most of the time as will the southern half of Florida. Port facilities can be relocated to the new coasts at great expense, but cities are not so easily moved at any expense. 

The southern half of the U.S. will experience unlivable summer temperatures not for twenty or so days a year as they do now but sixty, ninety or more, as will most of India, Southern Europe, the Middle East, much of China, and so on. Survival will depend on air conditioning, of which there will be much less because there will be much less electricity (gas and oil goes away for lack of transport, solar and wind for lack of critical imported materials, leaving coal as the only option for most including the U.S. which will have mostly exhausted its shale resources). In the winter, the jet stream becomes unstable projecting itself deep into the American south bringing freezing arctic cold. Not such a big deal (except when people in Texas freeze to death), but those icy intrusions move east and come into contact with ever warmer air coming up from the Gulf. The result is an explosion of tornados and torrential rain. The massive midwestern floods (I note in both the summer and winter) of the last few years will be small potatoes by comparison.    

A California forest service scientist recently said: “in twenty years, every burnable acre in California will burn,” a timespan well within Zeihan’s forecast. Indeed, this applies to almost the entire western third of the country and extends into both Canada and Alaska, not to mention drought-plagued Mexico and Brazil.

Zeihan says we cannot predict what will happen climatologically at the zipcode level. True, but we can do better than he does, especially as concerns that part of the world surrounding the Himalayan mountains, the source of water for both greater India and Pakistan, but also China and every country of South East Asia. The Chinese are daming every major river coming out of Tibet and passing through China – which is most of them! At the moment, water (albeit less of it) still flows through the Mekong Delta. Soon enough (twenty-five years? Fifty?), it will not, and much of that sub-continent will starve. How long before Himalayan ice is gone or irrelevant?

China will have the last of that water, but when the Tibetan glaciers finally disappear, the Chinese dams will do little good, much as the Hoover dam in Nevada, which is now so depleted that its ability to generate electricity will soon be curtailed – so much for green hydropower. Southern California’s multi-billion dollar agricultural industry could now suck down every remaining drop of the Colorado River. So could Phoenix, and they are but two of the jurisdictions that have relied on that water for the last ninety years!

This is the big problem in Zeihan’s book; he ignores obvious intersections between climate and his major sub-topics. For example, there is a long chapter on the world’s present capacity to finance mega-projects of all kinds. He gives very good reasons why, in a more disconnected world, such financing, and so such projects, will vanish. But that means money for climate disaster mitigation (already unaffordable multi-billions a year for the U.S. alone) will be gone altogether. 

Even where we see disaster approaching, we will not be able to do anything about it! In my part of the world major highways and coastal infrastructure already begin to flood regularly in king tides – even in the absence of heavy rain. The region (a mere two or three hundred square miles in America’s still-richest State of 164,000 square miles) already cannot afford to address all the problems we see now! Above I noted that ports can be moved to new coastlines. But that takes a lot of money that won’t be available. How will America trade with even regional partners (or berth its mighty navy) with all her ports underwater?

That is the sum and substance of the book’s problem, in my opinion. For further reference, this review of “The Uninhabitable Earth” by Wallace-Wells is the center of my view on climate geopolitics. Have a look. 

The End of the World is Just the Beginning by Peter Zeihan 2022

This latest by Peter Zeihan is something of a culmination of his last few books. The present interconnected world in which every independent State, even failed ones, can participate in a global market is coming to an end and what will replace it will look much more like 1850 in the “developed” world, and 1500 in much of the rest. 

Sustaining the world’s present connectedness rests essentially on three things: safe and cheap transport across the world’s oceans, energy for everything (including said transport), and a  population young enough to turn the economic cranks that make it all run. The first of these depends on the Americans who will soon find it too expensive to maintain the practice (and this especially in the face of headwinds put up by two powers otherwise the biggest beneficiaries of American protection of the sea lanes: Russia and China). If bulk transport becomes too expensive, energy supplies dry up. Not everywhere of course but enough places to disrupt every market on the planet. Demographically, most (but again not all) of the world is doomed to experience labor shortages and excessive costs for retirees in this decade.

Zeihan explores the intersection of transport, energy, economics, materials, demographics, technology, and agriculture. He tries to suggest who will be winners, losers, or fall in between in the great unwinding. Before the modern era of protected sea lanes, geography, where your country is on the globe, its climate, resources, and what it looked like, mountains, rivers, etc., made the biggest difference between the winners and losers. True global trade changed all that. It’s going to change back. I think his handling of all this material is superb (though many of the quips sprinkling the book fall flat). He does note that even at its most destructive, the sort of devolution he projects is not the worst that could happen if, for example, someone starts throwing nuclear weapons around. 

The shortcoming appears on the matter of climate change (one of the factors increasing the cost of everything and so corroding global interconnections) which Zeihan mentions here and there, but considers more specifically only with respect to agriculture. This is far from enough treatment. I will deal with this further in my blog, but here mention only one issue. Zeihan projects that the really bad stuff, the global unwinding, will begin now, go through its roughest patches by the 2030-40s, and in the 2050s will congeal into something new. Some stability will reemerge, at least in the better-off places. 

I think he is wrong about this last part because the climate situation (and he correctly notes many reasons why “green tech” will not save us) is not going to stabilize merely because a reduced human population comes to some new lower energy equilibrium in the 2050s. The climate is going to keep getting more destructive, and more inimical to human life across the entire globe for the next several (possibly more) thousand years!

Finally, I have a technical bone to pick with the publisher. This book is filled with tables and graphs impossible to read on a real Kindle. Yes, I can use a Kindle reader on my phone or laptop and examine the figures, but that is no excuse. There is a way to format embedded images so they can be expanded and read easily on a real Kindle. In this case, the publisher didn’t bother. The result, in the ebook, is less than optimum. 

Review: The Short Life & Curious Death of Free Speech in America

In the review (attached below), I said I would deal with two issues that Ellis Cose touches on but does not elaborate. The two matters are: first, a principled way to draw a line between acceptable speech and unacceptable speech in a liberal, democratic, political order, and second, how to prevent or significantly reduce garbage speech (lies, propaganda, even if technically acceptable) automatically so that it does not overwhelm true speech without having armies of censors passing judgment on every post. I’ve written about both of these points elsewhere, but not here on the blog, so I will lay out the argument.  

First, a tolerant society (liberal democratic order) cannot remain stable if it tolerates intolerance. Put another way; it is illogical for a tolerant society to tolerate intolerance. Why? I begin with what a tolerant society would look like. In an entirely tolerant society, every social institution would accept every other institution, with no exceptions. This does not mean that every social group would agree with every other group. Still, disagreement is not permitted to rise to the level of intolerance of any group’s existence. Such a society would be stable. If any intolerant group arose, they and their speech would be immediately suppressed, and the group banned if for no other reason than that they are intolerant.

Now let us look at a quintessentially intolerant society. By definition, such a society cannot be a liberal democratic order. Intolerance inevitably, over the longer or shorter term, rises to the level of national power and suppresses all dissent. See below for why this is so. This society is also technically stable (though uncomfortable and potentially dangerous for dissenters) because the intolerant government can theoretically maintain its position indefinitely, having a monopoly on legal violence. Of course, there are other reasons why such a society might someday unravel, but not merely because those in power are intolerant. Nazi Germany provides a good example.

Finally, I offer modern America as an example of a mixed society. Mostly, historically a blended culture, we try to maintain civility and tolerance. We tolerate intolerance in the mistaken view that a “tolerant society” must do this. Intolerant groups arise from time to time, and over time, intolerance tends to win out politically over tolerance. Sometimes this happens quickly, and sometimes more slowly. America has survived attempts to bring down its liberal order, but we are now very close to losing it; the Supreme Court and Congress are controlled by persons representing fewer than a third of the adult population. 

Why does this happen? The reasons are straightforward. First, to the intolerant, ends always justify any means, while the tolerant must strive with means constrained by fairness. Second, in any radical transition in political power, the better-organized group always wins out. The Nazis and the Communists in Germany were both intolerant, but the Nazis were better organized. The same in Russia, where the Mensheviks (relative liberals), having overthrown the Czar, were overthrown six months later by the better organized Bolsheviks. The intolerant are [usually] better organized because they have only one agenda (their intolerance) around which to rally, while the tolerant must deal with competing programs. Contemporary America illustrates this in the unanimity of intolerant Congressional Republicans compared to the competing demands of various liberal and quasi-liberal Democrat constituencies.   

The second issue is how to filter junk (lies, propaganda) from quality material without having armies of censors on salary. Ninety years ago, Paul Otlet envisioned a global network of content consumers and creators. It was not the Internet it rested upon, but it did mimic something like the world-wide-web built on top of today’s underlying Internet architecture. Otlet’s insight concerning our issue here was this: while readers could remain anonymous, if content creators were allowed anonymity, or effectively so, one would have, well, what we have now, a global social media filled with lies. 

When the American government opened the Internet to commerce in the early 1990s, there was good reason to insist that every user who wishes to put something onto the net be verifiably who he or she claims to be. Social (in an online context) problems surfaced even before the net’s commercial debut. I wrote about them in the 1980s! It isn’t specifically the web or its underlying architecture that is the problem here, but the anonymity of content providers in any architecture.

That is all I’m going to say here. Other than missing these two points, the Ellis Cose book is an excellent read.

The Short Life & Curious Death of Free Speech in America by Ellis Cose 2020

An excellent review of the U.S. constitution’s first amendment, its motivation, limitations, problems, and how its interpretation has varied. No one should be surprised that things have changed. The free speech debate (not to mention religious freedom also mentioned in the amendment) is considerably different today than it was in the past when the U.S. government, in WWI, for example, banned any speech criticizing the war effort.

The book roughly falls into two parts or themes. In the first, Cose mainly covers literal speech and how the idea of permissible expression has changed since the writing of the first amendment down to today. Propaganda is covered here. The best counter to lies and misinformation is truthful, competing information, a mantra still believed by some. This idea, sensible at one time, is no longer valid in a world where false information reproduces itself many times more rapidly than truth. The issue turns back to the matter of what are acceptable expressions. When does a lie become a dangerous lie? Cose asks this question but never quite answers it. 

In his second theme, Cose turns from speech to the structure of our political institutions, which, as it so happens, are hardly respectful of the notion that voting is political expression and so metaphorical speech. The founding fathers compromised on institutions like the electoral college and the senate (never mind restrictions on suffrage) as well as more recent efforts to limit or dilute political expression by various voter-suppression, all-or-nothing electoral college rules, and gerrymandering schemes, not to mention “Citizens United” allowing corporations to sway elections through unlimited campaign donations. 

The founders thought (1) they were ensuring only the qualified become candidates, or for that matter, voters, and (2) that they blocked a “tyranny of the majority.” Instead, as things have turned out (and not all to the blame of the founders), we now have a system in which the worst can become candidates, and vicious minorities control political policy and debate. 

There is an answer to the question: where to draw the line in acceptable speech freedom, at least in general terms. Cose never quite states it, and it demands a little explanation. I will address the matter in my blog. Overall this is excellent coverage of both direct and indirect free speech issues, historically and concerning our present cultural and technological environment. 

Review: In the Shadows of the American Century by Alfred McCoy

One of the points of this book is that America’s imperial decline is largely of its own making. Even well-managed empires eventually crumble (the geopolitical, technological, and political conditions that bring the empire about inevitably change leaving the empire fragile). A well-managed American empire might easily have sustained its dominance beyond McCoy’s projected end in the 2030-40 timeframe. I think Dr. McCoy would agree with me here (though the world’s center of gravity would inevitably return to Afro-Euro-Asia, the center of the globe’s landmass). Except for climate change, America might have managed it all from its peripheral position (the North-American continent) for a couple of centuries (its native geographic resources being less expensive to access) if it hadn’t, instead, stupidly squandered them. My purpose in this addendum to my book review is to review a little of that squandering.

I make no criticism of McCoy’s analysis. Looking at it from a global viewpoint, America’s power is clearly on the decline. He is a little sanguine about China which has, it is true, already eclipsed America on several important metrics, but has fragilities of its own he does not explore. 

If America’s power peaked roughly from the end of WWII to the Vietnam war, it experienced a ghost peak in the immediate aftermath of the Soviet Union’s collapse. I say “ghost peak” because the objective of American foreign policy from WWII through to that collapse was that collapse! Of course, the Soviets and Americans could not but be competitors, but the singular obsession with destroying the Soviets (it’s beginning in the aftermath of WWII when Western intelligence agencies began employing ex-Nazis in large numbers as strategic advisors – see my review of Blowback by Christopher Simpson) though ultimately successful (at ridiculous cost) was unnecessary and counterproductive. 

The Soviets were never, at any time in their post-WWII history, desirous of or in a real (fiscal and otherwise) position to invade Western Europe, the ostensible justification for all the expense that went into dismantling their empire. There were analysts in America’s intelligence services who understood this, but their views and reports were suppressed by superiors who much preferred the views of the Nazis who lied precisely to whip up anti-Soviet (and anti-communist in general) hysteria. Meanwhile, even in a weaker position than the U.S. and Western Europe, the Soviets did help to keep a lid on terrorist activities throughout central Asia and in great part also the Middle East. 

If in the late 1970s and early 1980s we had let the Soviets dominate Afghanistan (both Carter and Reagan were so advised) there would, today, be no Al Qaida or ISIL, no attack on the World Trade Center, and so on. If you think the liberation of Eastern Europe was worth our bleeding the Soviets in Afghanistan (McCoy mentions Zbigniew Brzezinski, Carter’s secretary of state, in this context) one has only to note that half of these liberated nations are slowly (so as not to jeopardize their EU funds) turning away from liberal democracy towards proto-fascism! Our first Afghan intervention may have helped precipitate the breakup of the Soviet Union, but it isn’t clear this has been a good thing for either the U.S. or the world. 

This is the first lesson American foreign policy experts (in particular intelligence operatives) never learned. Indigenous agents and partisans lie to their benefactors for their own purposes. These purposes are not usually aligned with American purposes (in fact they almost never are) other than on the single matter of defeating communists (or any socialists, American policy wonks have never learned to tell the difference) wherever they might appear. The failure to learn this lesson was in large part responsible for our subsequent involvement in Vietnam, Afghanistan (twice), Iraq (twice), Libya, and Syria. 

The second lesson is even more stark. In a civil-war environment (Vietnam, Afghanistan, and Iraq (the last two the second time around), no matter how well trained or equipped by the Americans, once U.S. forces pull out the more fanatically nationalistic (or religious) side will always quickly sweep our side away. The Korean war was fought to a standstill because American troops remained to the end, and are still there. In Vietnam, we left behind us a well-trained and equipped South Vietnamese army, but the Vietcong and North Vietnamese fought with patriotic fervor while the South’s soldiers fought for a visibly corrupt government. In 1975 the North Vietnamese made the same offer to the South’s soldiers that, thirty-five years later, ISIL made in Iraq, and ten years after that the Taliban made to soldiers fighting for the Kabul government: stand down and we’ll let you live. They all stood down.

President Biden was around (he’s older than me by fifteen years and I was around) to understand this lesson. But quite obviously (as concerns Afghanistan) he didn’t learn it. Why am I not a highly paid policy wonk? I am obviously more qualified than those who have held such positions since the late 1970s! 

Nowhere was American stupidity (a result of cultural ignorance and chutzpa) more obvious than in Vietnam and Cuba. If the election of 1954 (which Eisenhower blocked) had unified Vietnam under the Communist North’s government, they would have happily been aligned (by trade) with us in a few short years (we are culturally blind to the fact that not all Communists are alike. The Vietnamese have been at odds with China for a thousand years). We threw them at China, and yet now, after all that blood and treasure, we are happily working with them notwithstanding they are still Communist. 

In Cuba, Castro overthrew one of the most corrupt governments in the world at the time. Castro was not a Communist but a socialist (as noted above, Americans have never learned to tell the difference). He offered a fair price for the American-owned private companies he nationalized  (based on their own tax-motivated under-reported valuations) and offered to do business with us. Eisenhower and later Kennedy spent years pillaging and murdering, employing known criminals (literally organized crime) and terrorist partisans in Cuba literally throwing Castro at the Soviets. The world’s greatest superpower has ever since (except for a brief moment under Obama) carried on with what the Economist called a “sixty-year tantrum.”

Besides costly overt and covert military and paramilitary adventures (McCoy goes to great length about these), America has wasted its power in ways directly political and economic. Before globalization, America’s power rested on a high-capacity and versatile industrial base paying its workers a living wage. By the late 1970s, the power elite (a congress captured by the very rich) realized that fostering “global free trade” would produce a much larger world economy and about this they were correct. But you cannot “free trade” with nations whose labor costs are much lower than yours without hollowing out your own industry throwing tens of thousands out of work leaving only the wealthy elite in a position to benefit from the expanding global economy. This might not have gone so badly if the elite were properly taxed to subsidize the higher wages of a domestic industrial base. Of course, this did not happen given a congress captive to their interests alone. 

McCoy details many more bad foreign and domestic policy decisions serving to weaken the American Empire even before its time. Most of them (the foreign ones at least) in one way or another come down to American cultural ignorance, the naive belief that if a people want to get rid of a particular government, they must want liberal democracy in its place. I wonder if any other empire in Earth’s history ever rose to its peak while remaining so ignorant of its client’s cultures?  

In the Shadows of the American Century by Alfred McCoy (2017)

This is the first book in my geopolitical musings to “tell it like it is” concerning the doings of America in the geopolitical arena and places us firmly in the position of a declining empire. It is also the first book I’ve read that adds climate change to the list of external forces precipitating not only America’s decline but the rest of the world along with it. Indeed, besides myself, Dr. McCoy is the first author I’ve read who points out that the American collapse might first be economic; mitigation of environmental disaster will be unsustainable.

Dr. McCoy begins by reviewing what other empires looked like in their decline. Turning to America, he points out that we exhibit every single one of those characteristics. Historically, such declines can be seen from the viewpoint of the imperial center or in the way that client states (allies or otherwise) respond. In America’s case, all the signs are visible on both sides from increased repression at home to break-ups in long-established international alliances.

This is a nuanced look at the global situation. McCoy notes for example that America differed from other empires in that it attempted to bolster the economies and political inclusiveness of client states rather than merely exploiting them for resources. This was not done out of altruism, but rather the American empire (and the world in our time) is trade-dependent in ways prior empires never were. America’s client states increased American power by buying from (and not only selling to) America. Such an empire could only succeed if the center helped to enrich the periphery.

Alas, given much of what America has done in the world since the late 1950s (one might say beginning with Vietnam and Cuba, and never learning lessons since) has not only seen our advantages eroding but literally being thrown away (I will have more to say about this in a blog article). The amazing thing is that American hegemony (culturally if not always militarily) has taken this long to dissolve and is not yet entirely gone. China, by contrast (on which McCoy focuses as the present major player with an expanding empire), has already eclipsed America in many fields, with more to come. My only quibble with McCoy is here. China has its own kind of fragility, different from America’s, but surely inhibiting its imperial aspirations. McCoy doesn’t address these matters.

I’ll end this review by returning once more to the matter of climate change. McCoy focuses on America here, while noting some of the impacts rising temperatures (violent weather, rising seas, droughts, large-scale refugee migrations, and so on) will have on other parts of the world. But in this context, he also does not mention China whose coastal cities are subject to rising seas while its interior must suffer from all the same sorts of problems experienced in the United States. China will probably grow the world’s single biggest economy in a couple of years, but it is also a much bigger territory with far more people to feed. Mitigating climate disasters cannot be less of a drag on the Chinese economy than it is (and will become) in the United States.

In summary, a well-researched (the endnotes occupy 50% of the book) and well-written examination of the American empire. The signs of decline are everywhere. Future details cannot be known, but the general trends are unmistakable.