ARTICLE: "Who's Monitoring Chinese Food Experts?," by Nicholas Zamiska, Wall Street Journal, 9 April 2007, p. B1.

China, as it increasingly engages the world, becomes a frequent source for tainted foods, in large part because of its "loose regulations and highly fragmented food production"--doubleplusbad in a connected world. America is testing only a tiny fraction of food shipments from overseas, and that volume grows. Hell, everyone imports more food over time, so what to do? Know-your-customer becomes know-your-supply-chain becomes know-your-biology. You will need to track everything soon enough from cradle to grave. Not by testing at chokepoints but by auditable transparency throughout the process, with new rule sets applied throughout, subject to oversight at home and abroad--at every link in the chain. Your product's entire reputation will depend on it. It will be amazingly complex and require automation of rules throughout. Those rules and the systems that apply them will need to sense, think, respond, plus grow in intelligence. Hard coding will not suffice. Everything--but especially the rules--will need to live and breath and enjoy constant refresh. Welcome to the age of resilience. Every time I read an article like this, I realize Steve DeAngelis is a real genius, which is why I stay with Enterra despite all the myriad challenges of helping direct a start-up tech firm (and I barely pull my weight compared to the titanic Steve). But like I say in my massive blog post on my just-coming-out "State of the World" piece for Esquire, I don't believe terrorists will ever run the world, because globalization's normal demands will push us all in the direction of the resiliency that Steve not only imagines but invents. This will be a government job only in the creation of rules. Their implementation will be more a private-sector affair. Companies will do it because it's good for business and it'll become the only way to stay in business in a connected world. This is the ultimate pre-emption strategy: the systematic elimination of vulnerability. Anything you can do, I can counter faster. I can track anything better than you. Not a day's work, but a societal evolution. Winning the Long War will be mostly non-kinetic, and everyone will do their part in a mobilization as profound but far more transparent than anything the greatest generation pulled off. We are just beginning to see the winning strategy emerge, and it will be grander than anything enunciated--much less pursued--before. It's cool to live in a home you design. It's cool to live in a world you make resilient. It's amazing that in a time when so many feel powerlessness, real power is lying all around, just waiting for you to pick it up and wield it.