Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 14 – Public Intelligence Blog

4.0 out of 5 stars An important book on our planet's future

April 13, 2009

Review by Future Watch Rider

Book by James Loveluck

Lovelock merits our attention because he has been proven right in predicting grim events. Indeed, Lovelock's grim views have in some ways been too optimistic in light of the speed with which the global environmental situation has been declining.

I think his views in this book are too pessimistic but Lovelock is a creative original thinker about science who does not fit into neat categories. He has infuriated a lot of his fellow environmentalists with his advocacy of nuclear power. He does so because he sees the huge size of the gap between what is needed and what exists. For example, President Obama has promised to “double” the percentage of renewable energy America uses in a few years. It sounds great….. until you realize renewable energy is less than one percent of America's energy now. (Meanwhile, renewable energy is being very badly hurt by the global economic crisis.) Optimistic predictions about a “boom” in renewable energy over the past 20 years by various environmental advocates have turned out to be pie in the sky. It hasn't happened. Hopefully, it will happen now. However, according to predictions of the International Energy Agency, the share of the world's energy coming from coal, the worst form of energy, is going to go up, not down by 2020. This is why Lovelock also supports research on making coal less disastrous although it's never going to be “clean” as claimed by the coal industry and its millions of dollars in advertising. (Some environmental purists have also attacked him for this.)

Continue reading “Review (Guest): The Vanishing Face of Gaia: A Final Warning”

2010/07/252010/07/25

Review (Guest): Whole Earth Discipline

5 Star, Culture, Research, Environment (Solutions), Science & Politics of Science, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps the most important — certainly the most thought-provoking — book in years

October 22, 2009

Review by Jesse Kornbluth

Book by Stewart Brand

I was interviewing George Soros as the Dow rapidly shed 300 points and crashed through the 10,000 level.

“Is this it?” I asked.

Soros shrugged — a very calm reaction from an investor who might have seen his portfolio shrink by hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter of minutes.

I lost much less that day, but I had a different reaction — panic. The thing to do, I concluded, was to trade my beloved Classic 6 in Manhattan for a self-sustaining house in the country. Ten acres would suffice, as long as they had decent water, land suitable for a large garden and enough sunlight for the solar panels.

I bought a URL for the web site I planned to launch: […]. This was no back-to-the-land hippie retreat. I would be stepping into the smart future: small town/rural purity (Woodsmoke) with the 21st century benefits of a fast Internet (Broadband) and Amazon.com's free shipping.

Given all that, you will understand that I was quite stunned to read “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto” — by Stewart Brand, creator of the 1960s and 1970s classic, the “Whole Earth Catalog” — and discover that the last place its author would have me go is back to the land.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Whole Earth Discipline”

2010/07/252010/07/25

Review: Competitive Intelligence Advantage: How to Minimize Risk, Avoid Surprises, and Grow Your Business in a Changing World

5 Star, Intelligence (Commercial)

REPOSTED to end Russian spammer constant hitting on former URL.

Best Possible Starting Point for Executives & Students

October 20, 2009

Seena Sharp

This book is a gem. It is a rare book that I would recommend equally to senior executives and students thinking about a career path, but this is such a book. I agreed to review this book for the publisher and received a free copy. I've known the author since the early 1990's when the U.S. Government first tried to learn how to do commercial intelligence, calling it Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). They still don't get it, for the same reason most executives don't get it: arrogance, ignorance, and a complacency that comes from having too much money and not enough accountability.Before laying down my notes, let me first place this book squarely in the top twelve books in English. This is the one I would recommend to anyone as a starter, followed by:

Continue reading “Review: Competitive Intelligence Advantage: How to Minimize Risk, Avoid Surprises, and Grow Your Business in a Changing World”

2010/07/212011/06/20

Review: International Peace Observations

5 Star, Civil Affairs, Complexity & Resilience, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Force Structure (Military), Information Operations, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Truth & Reconciliation, United Nations & NGOs, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Amazon Page

Seminal Work Cited by Dr. Walter Dorn

July 23, 2010

David Wainhouse

EDIT of 6 Sep 2010 to add comments on books once received.

I bought this book, a real bargain, at the suggestion of Dr. Walter Dorn, the “dean” of the peace intelligence scholars, who cites the book with great favor in his own forthcoming book, KEEPING WATCH: Monitoring and Technology in UN Peace Operations, which I am going through now in galley form.

Now that I am holding it in my hands, here are some comments.

1) Published in 1966, it is a phenomenal, an utterly superb, historical review of League of Nations, Latin American Union, and UN peace observation missions from 1920 to 1965. The book concludes with a major section on “Strengthening Peace Observations.”

2) Right away I decide to donate this book to the George Mason University library without marking it up, nor am I reading it, having seen enough to understand why Professor Dorn recommends it so highly as a historical reference work.

3) The book clearly needs a sequel, from 1966 to date, over 40 years of new conflicts and new peace missions, and I make mention of this hoping that someone reading this review will be inspired to take on the project with many collaborators.

Continue reading “Review: International Peace Observations”

2010/07/212010/07/22

Review: Dear Hacker–Letters to the Editor of 2600

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Change & Innovation, Games, Models, & Simulations, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Philosophy, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean)

Half of the Priceless Set

July 16, 2010

Emmanuel Goldstein

I've been browsing this marvelous collection–559 pages–all afternoon, and the afternoon has been broken up frequently with outrageous laughter and occasional gasps of disbelief. This book, organized as it is, is vastly more important and easier to read than the original 2600 Magazine letters that I have been glancing at since first helping and joining this group in 1994.

The other book, The Best of 2600: A Hacker Odyssey now reprinted in a more expensive The Best of 2600, Collector's Edition: A Hacker Odyssey is absolutely essential and the other half of this set.

Hats off to Wiley for having the brains to see the value, and the editorial talent to select, edit, and present so perfectly. This book, thick as it is, has exactly the right amount of white space, the selection and use of fonts is just right, and the index, while not as extensive as I would have liked, is adequate.

“Look Inside the Book” has been set in motion, in the meantime, here is the table of contents that runs from the early days in the 1980's up through today, with absolutely phenomenal selections that provide priceless insights into the mindsets of BOTH bona fide hackers AND the clueless wanna-bes.

1. Question Upon Question
2. Tales from the Retail Front
3. The Challenges of Life as a Hacker
4. Technology
5. Our Biggest Fans
6. Behind the Walls
8. A Culture of Rebels
9. Strange Ramblings

Easily half if not more of the value of the book is to be found is the witty, acerbic, funny, insightful, surprising comments of the author Emmanuel Goldstein (not his real name), who has single-handedly but with many willing volunteers created the legitimate means of enabling information sharing and sense-making among hackers, who I am often at pains to describe as being the same as astronauts and pioneers, pushing the edge of the envelope.

Continue reading “Review: Dear Hacker–Letters to the Editor of 2600”

2010/07/212010/12/19

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

00 Remixed Review Lists, Worth A Look

00 Remixed Review Lists is the persistent URL for all of them as they are updated. This was done in preparation for the final part of INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability. In contrast to the 98 Review categories where books are cross-listed and appear in multiple categories, in this set of “good news” reviews, each book appears only once.

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Africa

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Analysis

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Atlases

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Bio-Economics

Worth a Look: Book Reviews of Capitalism Reincarnated

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)”

2010/07/212013/03/03

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

00 Remixed Review Lists, Worth A Look

The long list below is organized along the lines of the Revolutionary Prediction Matrix discussed in a short Marine Corps University paper and a longer graduate thesis, to wit: Political-Legal; Socio-Economic; Ideo-Cultural; Techno-Demographic; and Natural-Geographic. It is also available online as Chapter 20: “21st Century Counterintelligence: Evaluating the Health of the Nation” in the new book INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability (Earth Intelligence Network, 2010).

Political-Legal

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Government Corruption

Continue reading “Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)”