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Latest Musing Pet Peeves: Absurd Sci Fi Films Division             Settle into my seat on a flight from Heathrow to JFK. Scan through movie options. Banshees of Inn... continue Books Fire & Flood Buy from Amazon Deep Past Buy from Amazon more info Articles by Category endangered animals rapid climate change global deforestation fragging Books The Ragged Edge of the World Winds of Change Buy from Amazon more info Afterword to the softbound edition. The Octopus and the Orangutan more info The Future In Plain Sight more info The Parrot's Lament more info Silent Partners more info Affluence and Discontent more info The Alms Race more info Apes, Men, & Language more info

Afghanistan: When Losing is Winning Sunday August 15, 2021 The stunning, but entirely predictable, collapse of the Afghan military marks the latest installment of our failure to understand what wins wars. Short answer: it’s not weaponry; it’s morale. This pattern of failure goes back 60 years to Vietnam, and even further. We load up corrupt autocrats and war lords with weapons, only to see war profiteers siphon off and distribute the bounty, while the other side pursues their goal with patience, and a deep sense of mission – however wrong-headed we might think that is. There’s a tell in this pattern. When a superpower continues to hew to a failed strategy of counter insurgency after 60 years of failure, someone must be making out, big time. We don’t need to look very far to see who that is. Defense contractors get to sell the weapons  that we hand over to our feckless allies, and then, after tens of billions of dollars in materiel are left behind as we withdraw, they get to sell all over again as we restock. Thus, losing becomes a win-win strategy. In that sense, winning would be a losing strategy because they don’t get to double-dip. So, once again in Afghanistan, Mission Accomplished! contact Eugene Linden

Short Take THE MANY LIVES OF A CONSERVATION MASTERPIECE My article on John Perlin's masterpiece,  A Forest Journey, was published by TIME. The book offers an orignal view on the rise and fall of civilliztions, and the book had an epic journey of its own since it was first published. One message of my piece is that even a masterpiece has a rough time staying in print today. read more

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