In a 1 February 2010 article adapted from the his forthcoming book, ‘Broker, Trader, Lawyer, Spy: The Secret World of Corporate Espionage,' Eamon Javers wrote:
Full Story Online
“In the midst of two wars and the fight against Al Qaeda, the CIA is offering operatives a chance to peddle their expertise to private companies on the side — a policy that gives financial firms and hedge funds access to the nation’s top-level intelligence talent, POLITICO has learned.”
“The never-before-revealed policy comes to light as the CIA and other intelligence agencies are once again under fire for failing to “connect the dots,” this time in the Christmas Day bombing plot on Northwest Flight 253.”
“But sources familiar with the CIA’s moonlighting policy defend it as a vital tool to prevent brain-drain at Langley, which has seen an exodus of highly trained, badly needed intelligence officers to the private sector, where they can easily double or even triple their government salaries. The policy gives agents a chance to earn more while still staying on the government payroll.”
Phenomenal Integration of Ideas–Superb “Once Over”
February 10, 2010 [final review 21 February 2010]
Edmund J. Bourne
I have sent INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty to the printer and it is on that foundation that I highly recommend this book for a simple easy to understand overview of the fifteen converging forces that the author lists and then discusses in superbly-crafted very easy to read overviews. He covers:
01 A conscious universe
02 Multidimensional reality
03 Interconnection of all minds
04 Complementarity of science and spirituality
05 Radical empiricism [revalidation of intuition and visioning]
06 Consciousness has a causal influence
07 Natural ethics [I really like this, hugely beneficial for all]
08 Reverence for nature and earth [in my book, diversity rocks]
09 A sense of inclusiveness toward all humanity [diversity again]
This is not a book the Administration (regardless of which party happens to be in control on any given day) because the Administration is totally out of touch with reality, totally partisan, and largely not interested in the welfare of average Americans because Wall Street money is personal, our tax payments are not–they go to the highest bidder.
Indeed, the decisions that the Administration makes every day not only make our citizens less safe, they cost our earnest honest businesses billions of dollars as imposed costs from government errors of understanding and policy and regulation. See my article in Homeland Security Today on “America's Cyber-Scam,” and separately, my update on the massive looting of Haiti that is about to take place as American contractors rush to swindle everyone, joining the Red Cross in the 50% overhead scam–only in the case of US contractors paying Haitians a dollar a day, it will be more like 80% scam.
What the author has done that no one else has done to date, is actually “walk” the ground across America looking for obvious vulnerabilities that terrorists armed with silencers and willing to die could exploit.
Each chapter covers a different vulnerability, and the value of this book is easily seen in the fact that this is almost “real-time” intelligence on specific vulnerabilities, the author has been “up close and personal” with each one, and the bottom line is clear: The US Government and state and local government have no idea how to protect America internally, we are living on grace, not preparedness (just as CIA offices under official cover overseas are not really operating under cover, just tacit immunity from local liaison which has them all pegged).
I sat down intending to make this a five, but the two fluff reviews have to be off-set. Robert Ackoff would say this is a spectacular book about making the wrong things righter instead of the right things righter–too many lawyers and focused on improving a patent approval system that probably needs to be eradicated and the buildings and files plowed under with salt. It also lost one star because I was one of the 4,000 that actually participated in the Open Government experiment, where the legalization of marijuana triumphed and every time someone voted for my governance reform idea, a “monitor” from the partisan correctness office came in and voted against it moving it back down to zero. The author is naive to think this initiative is going anywhere without electoral reform that displaces the two-party tyranny and restores the Constitution, the Article 1 independence of an honest Congress, and integrity of the Executive at the political level. [See especially Chapter 21 in my new book that just went to the printer, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty and is free online at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, and my earlier wire-bound book, also free online, Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography).
Having said that, I found this book to be spectacularly informative, thoughtful, useful, with extraordinary insights and suggestions that were over-shadowed by the focus on the patent system–suggestions about the-redesign of government, for example. I recommend reading my reviews of SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa and of The Myth of Digital Democracy along with this review, the three books were read together as a set. Below are some quotes and my fly-leaf notes. This book is a foundation stone for righteous change into the future, but only that first stone.
QUOTE (xvi): Done right, it is possible now to achieve greater competence by making good information available for better governance, improve effectiveness by leveraging the available tools to engender new forms of collective action, and strengthen and deepen democracy by creating government by the people, of the people, and *with* the people.
This book educated me. It challenged and soundly negated some of my assumptions, but it also reinforced my view that the Internet at this time is a communications network, not a knowledge network or an action network.
Here is the last paragraph:
“Yet where the Internet has failed to live up to its billing has to do with the most direct kind of political voice. If we consider the ability of ordinary citizens to write things that other people will see, the Internet has fallen far short of the claims that continue to be made about it. It may be easy to speak in cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard.”
Totally awesome. This is an impressive piece of work. At Phi Beta Iota I am posting four web diagrams showing top news and political sites and a couple of other things (I no longer post images to Amazon after they removed 354 images as a lazy way of censoring twelve copies of Obama-Bush sharing the same face–I no longer trust Amazon with my work, hence Phi Beta Iota–and a lesson about Internet abuse).
Behind this elegant book is a great deal of hard work with lots of math, lots of elbow grease, and lots of time spent making sense of massive amounts of data. I am totally impressed.
01) Digital divide is not the only divide–Internet is a winner take all environment
02) Liberals predominate online
03) Googlearchy has replaced meritocracy…top ten sites rule, everyone else go fish
04) Pornography and webmail are the two big dogs on the Internet, followed by search engines and a very small news set. In comparison to webmail, news is less than 20%, and in comparison to news, politics is perhaps 1% at best (of news–a tiny tiny fraction of it all).
05) The author does not really get into the deep web, the reality that there are over 75 search engines and Goolge is losing marketshare, or the fact that China and India and Brazil are creeping up and will one day soon hit a vertical rise in their web presence, especially now that kanji and other webname character sets are accepted.
06) The heart of the book, but not the bulk of the book, is about the “missing middle” and the very real fact that ordinary citizens are neither seen nor heard within the Internet overall and within the political chambers of the Internet particularly.
My review does not do this book justice. It is profoundly deeper than my summary above.
The book does reinforce my view that we must get all research and all budgets online, and that we must create the World Brain Institute and the Global Game, mandate true cost information online, and start using citizen buying power to move capitalism in a more moral sustainable useful direction (see my review just posted of Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country and my many other reviews of books on capitalism, one more of which I will mention here, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism.
Beyond Six Stars–Hugely Important Useful Collection
February 20, 2010
Edited by Sokari Ekine
Contributing authors include Redante Asuncion-Reed, Amanda Atwood, Ken Banks, Chrstinia Charles-Iyoha, Nathan Eagle, Sokari Ekine, Becky Faith, Joshua Goldstein, Christian Kreutz, Anil Naidoo, Berna Ngolobe, Tanya Notley, Juliana Rotich, and Bukeni Wazuri
This book will be rated 6 Stars and Beyond at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, where we can do things Amazon refuses to implement here, such as sort useful non-fiction into 98 categories, many of the categories focused on stabilization & reconstruction, pushing back against predatory immoral capitalism, and so on.
When the book was first brought to my attention it was with concern over the price. The price is fair. Indeed, the content in this book is so valuable that I would pay $45 without a second thought. I am especially pleased that the African publishers have been so very professional and assured “Look Inside the Book”–please do click on the book cover above to read the table of contents and other materials.
This is the first collection I have seen on this topic, and although I have been following cell phone and SMS activism every since I and 23 others created the Earth Intelligence Network and put forth the need for a campaign to give the five billion poor free cell phones and educate them “one cell call at a time,” other than UNICEF and Rapid SMS I was not really conscious of bottom-up initiatives and especially so those in Africa where the greatest benefits are to be found.
I strongly recommend this book as a gift for ANYONE. This is potentially a game-changing book, and since I know the depth of ignorance among government policy makers, corporate chief executives, and larger non-governmental and internaitonal organization officials, I can say with assurance that 99% of them simply do not have a clue, and this one little precious book that gives me goose-bumps as I type this, could change the world by providing “higher education” to leaders who might then do more to further the brilliant first steps documented in this book. Continue reading “Review: SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa”
I like the “fireside chat” description of this book and am providing my own summary primarily for my own benefit and the benefit of those that follow all of my non-fiction reviews at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog where all of my reviews, in 98 non-fiction categories, are more easily exploited than here at Amazon (but they all lead back to Amazon.
QUOTE (1): We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo.
Phenomenal Integration of Ideas–Superb “Once Over”
Almost a Five–Making Wrong Things Righter
