Monthly Archives: February 2017

02.21.17
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BERNIE SANDER’S “OUR REVOLUTION” ALIVE AND WELL!

” Let’s be clear!”  This familiar quote from Bernie Sanders is the perfect introduction to his recently published book detailing his campaign for the presidency. Perhaps more  important it is a detailed description of his progressive platform

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 Bernie Sanders, Our Revolution is divided into two sections. Part one reviews the origins and the execution of his campaign for the presidency.  It is an insightful glimpse of how the improbable became reality. For Bernie supporters the read is a pleasant and reinforcing journey.

The second part of the book is an excellent and detailed a count on the Sander’s progressive platform. The narrative extends far beyond the sound bites that are dictated by media coverage of campaigns. Fact based examinations of policies and programs lend substance to his ideas regarding income in-equality, climate change, corporate concentration, greed, education and health care. The reader comes away with a far greater understanding  of the depth and the rational for his ideas.  His explanations pattern his familiar straightforward and blunt style.

Having  just read Tom Friedman’s   Thank You For Being Late ( see gordonsgoodreads.com) it is interesting to discover the similarity of ideas and policy shared by Sanders and Friedman. Of particular interest is their common ground on education, climate change and income inequality.

Do not look for a lament on a lost cause because you will not find that narrative in these pages.  Bernie’s  Our Revolution, appears alive and well. I thought it appropriate to quote this battle cry from the final chapter.

” We will not be able to accomplish those goals if we look at democracy as a spectator sport, assuming others will do it for us. They won’t. The  future is in your hands. Let’s go to work.”

Let’s be clear!

 

 

 

 

 

02.10.17
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Tom Friedman’s ” Thank You For Being Late.”

In the world of incredible  acceleration of technology, information, globalization and climate change, Thomas Friedman’s latest book takes a momentary pause to reflect. Thus the title,  Thank You For Being Late.   In reality, Friedman details a world-changing so quickly that civilization itself is now in fact very late, falling far behind Moore’s Law where exponential information changes driven by technology  literally double every two years!  ” Every society and every community  must compound the rate at which it re-imagines and adapts its social technologies, because our physical technologies will not be slowing down anytime soon, ” says Friedman.  Moore’s Law will win out and societal changes will have no choice but to try to keep pace.

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Friedman’s work is not a treatise only on technology. Quite to the contrary, it is a study of the current state of humankind. ” Warning ” writes Friedman. ” In  the age of accelerations, if a society doesn’t build floors under people, many will reach for a wall-no matter how self-defeating that would be.”

Much of this work deals with the impact of climate change as Friedman documents the globe’s movement out of the Holocene period of a more perfect  natural equilibrium into the present where the climate is on the edge of changing life as we have known it to exist on the planet. Friedman writes, ” I have said it before and I will keep saying it as long as I  have the breath: We are the first generation  for whom “later”  will be the time when all of Mother Nature’s buffers, spare tires, tricks of the trade, and tools for adapting and bouncing back will be exhausted or breached. If we don’t act quickly to mitigate these trends we will be the first generation of  humans for whom later will be too late.”

Just like his books  The World is Flat, The  Lexus And  The Olive Tree,  Hot Flat and Crowded and That Used To Be Us ( written with Michael Mandelbaum) Friedman’s work is readable, understandable and written for the layman even though the subject matter can become highly technical. That is very much his literary genius. He educates.  Search gordonsgoodreads for overviews of all of Friedman’s titles.

In today’s climate both political and technical,  Thank You For Being Late could not be more timely. Become  informed, painlessly!