Review: Only Forward
Only Forward is funny but also dark, and the protagonist breaks the fourth wall – so I was hooked from the get go. (I’m a sucker for Deadpool if you read comics, and this book was reminiscent of that fellow.)
The first half is a fun slicing and dicing of society, a cool vision of disparate city-states with varying approaches to resiliency. For example: Stability isolates itself from everything, including the weather, to… remain stable. Another collapsed into perpetual violent gang warfare- think Somalia. Fun stuff, with AI embedded in everything.
The second half jumps beyond that world, and even the scifi genre, into a fantasy land thing. I made it through but it wasn’t thought provoking or particularly poignant, so I don’t have much to say about it. Your mileage on that half will vary.
The Essential Gardening and Food Resilience Library
Here. I like how it walks you through both the mindset and tangible steps to take to both grow and store.
Kosovo PM = Warlord
Interesting article about the long run implications of the Awakening (open source counterinsurgency) in Kosovo:
The group:
Kosovo PM Thaçi’s links with organised crime date back more than a decade, when those loyal to his Drenica Group became the dominant faction within the KLA.
Entrepreneurialism:
It says the group’s supremacy over splinter groups in the guerrilla movement enabled them, from 1998, to seize control of “most of the illicit criminal enterprises” in which Kosovans were involved south of the border, in Albania.
What happened:
During the Kosovo conflict, Slobodan Miloševi?’s troops responded to attacks by the KLA by orchestrating a horrific campaign of ethnic cleansing against ethnic Albanians in the territory. As many as 10,000 are estimated to have died at the hands of Serbian troops.
Dayton worked right?:
While deploring Serb atrocities, Marty said the international community chose to ignore suspected war crimes by the KLA, “placing a premium instead on achieving some degree of short-term stability”.
He concludes that during the Kosovo war and for almost a year after, Thaçi’s forces meted out revenge against Serbs, Roma and ethnic-Albanians accused of “collaborating” with the enemy.
Back to Thaci:
Thaçi and four other members of the Drenica Group are named in the report as having carried out “assassinations, detentions, beatings and interrogations”. This same hardline KLA faction has held considerable power in Kosovo’s government over the last decade, with the support of western powers keen to ensure stability in the fledgling state.
Entrepreneurialism:
It says: “In confidential reports spanning more than a decade, agencies dedicated to combating drug smuggling in at least five countries have named Hashim Thaçi and other members of his Drenica Group as having exerted violent control over the trade in heroin and other narcotics.”
Expanding into a different market:
Her most shocking claim, which she said required further investigation, was that the KLA smuggled captive Serbs across the border into Albania, where their organs were harvested.