Tag Archives: Bill Clinton

Bush, Gore, Al Queda, and Sept. 11

Damadged sculpture that stands in Battery Park in New York City

The Sphere, by Fritz Koenig, in Battery Park. Image by L. Furman

Should the President have been able to foil the attacks of September 11?

Throughout the 1990’s we sustained:

  • The 1990 assassination of Rabbi Meir Kahane in New York City,
  • The 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center,
  • The 1998 bombings of the Embassies in Kenya and Tanzania,
  • The 2000 bombing of the U. S. S. Cole,
  • And in 1999 we foiled Al Queda’s Millennium plot.

President Clinton and Vice President Gore knew that Osama bin Laden was a threat. They knew he had been trained by the CIA in the war in Afghanistan against the Soviet Union. They also knew that he financed and or masterminded the simultaneous attacks on U. S. embassies in Dar Es Salam, Tanzania and Nairobi, Kenya on August 7, 1998, and the October, 2000 attack on the U. S. S. Cole. And President Clinton told us that after his January 2001 inauguration he briefed President Bush on bin Laden.

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Systems Thinking and Politics, or Rachel Carson and Donella Meadows meet The Frankenstein Monster

The Frankenstein Monster as interpreted by Boris Karloff may have been a big guy who didn’t know his own strength – again unbalanced reinforcing loops. As interpreted by Mel Brooks he was just misunderstood. Once those reinforcing loops were balanced – put the big lug in a tux – all hell didn’t break loose.

Frankenstein_monster_Boris_KarloffSystems Thinking

is a framework and a toolkit (check out Stella and i Think from I See Systems ) with which ecologists and ecological economists can model the real world of the carbon and hydrologic cycles, ecosystems and economic “bubbles.” But how do we model systems that are difficult to quantify? Is it science fiction, as in the psychohistorians of Asimov’s Foundation Series ( e-book )? The actions of the government of the United States have profound effects on this country and the world. Can we use Systems Thinking to model political movements? Did Bill Clinton and James Carville, George W. Bush and Karl Rove and Barack Obama, David Axelrod and Dan Plouffe use  Systems Thinking to create a balancing feedback mechanism and win an election? Could they have?

As we were taught in high school, the Constitution set up a system of government of three balanced branches. The “checks and balances” of the Executive enforcing the laws written by the Legislative and interpreted by the Judiciary. This is a system with balancing feedback mechanisms.

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