NOT a Guide–A Coffee Table Book, Lots of Photos, No Stats, September 3, 2008
Michael Tackett
This book is on sale in supermarkets, and I spent time with both this book and its counterpart for John McCain.
I recommend both books as coffee table books, lots of great photos and general information about the individuals, but this book is NOT a guide.
There are no statistics, no tables, no comparisons, no meaningful GUIDE to who the candidate is and what they really stand for based on their actual behavior, votes, known acquaintances, etcetera.
What would be extraordinarlily valuable, if the publishers want to do a fast make-over, is a SINGLE book that compares all four candidates On the Issues and on their Values and what it all means for the federal government's future, the budget's future, and the country's future.
For an idea of what I am talking about, look online for “On the Isuses,”
and see especially the way they plot on a map relative differences.
Beautiful powerful voice, mind, soul, and face, March 7, 2008
Benazir Bhutto
The book opens with the author's detailing of the many ways in which the government refused to protect her, to include the banning of armored vests, cell phone jammers, etc. While I consider her foolish to have not used modern technology to reach more people safely, she died a martyr's death and this book ably represents her legacy.
This is an elegant, articulate, easy to read, carefully documented overview of the history, geography, culture, and disturbances that have defined the billion Muslims of today.
The author completely avoids any confrontation with Saudi Arabia, the regime that I hold responsible, along with Egypt, then followed by all those as discussed in the following three books:
It is in this context that the author finds it reasonable for many Muslims to welcome, not the attacks on the US, but the new-found US recognition of vulnerability. Of course this Administration is oblivious, and we have wasted blood, treasure, and spirit, but the fact of the matter is clear the titles of these two books:
Overall the book is replete with quotations from the Quran, fully three quarters of the end-notes. This is one of the most thoughtful, methodical accounts I have ever seen of the history, geography, and misdirection of the entire Muslim world, more often than not at the hands of the West or secular dictators it installed and supported.
An essential part of the book is the refutation of the Saudi Arabian rejection of tolerance and the terrorist confusion of jihad as struggle with jihad as unjust war killing civilians.
The last half of the book is a catalog of countries I am going to list because I was surprised by the range–these are countries where a combination of colonialism run amok, and indigenous secular and clerics vying for power.
Afghanistan
Algeria
Argentina
Bangladesh
Comoros
Congo
Egypt
Greece
Guatemala
Iraq
Lebanon
Libya
Morocco
Pakistan
Persian Gulf
Tunisia
Having provided a magnificent tour of the horizon, she then devotes a very deep chapter to Pakistan's history. She concludes the chapter concerned about Taliban incursions deep into Pakistan, but cited Iqbal, “Tyranny cannot long endure.”
Next the book gently slams Sam Huntington's “clash of civilization” into the ground, breaks every rib with a different contrasting scholar, and most admiringly, with pointers to Pippa Norris, Ronald Inglehard, Stephen Walt, and Richard Rubenstein.
Finally, the author concludes with what must now be regarded as her death-bed wishes for the future of Pakistan, of Islam, and of modernization. She considers modernization to be exclusive of extremism, and I for one, reflecting on the specific figures from Medard Gabel, E. O. Wilson, and Lester Brown, am happy to assert that for one third of what we spend on war, we could create heaven on earth. Combine that with the trillion a year that corporations and dictators loot through corruption, and the $500 billion of more than foundations squander willy nilly for lack of a strategic spending plan, and you get into real money.
She prays for more community responsibility and charity, for education and women's rights. And transparency of military budgets, for better election monitoring, for a Reconciliation Corps (see the superb book by USN Captain Doug Johnston, Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik
Her final two wishes are for the Gulf States to jump-start the Muslim renaissance, and for a Palestinian state (to which I would add, and the restoration of Lebanon as the Tibet or Paris of the Middle East).
Two years ago, after reading Prahalad's book, I realized my dstiny was to be intelligence officer to the five billion poor. Today an Indian Brigadier pointed out to me that three of the five are split between China and India. That will guide my next year or two.
See all my other reviews and lists for a free graduate survey of reality and what is to be done to move away from the war and scarcity frame of reference to a prosperous world at peace frame of reference (at one third the cost in blood, treasure, and spirit).
[Additional extraneous observations dropped into comment.]
For this reason I end with the three things I would like to the USA to agree to in the near future:
1) Funding from ASD SOLIC for five positions necessary to establish the Office of the Assistant Secretary General for Decision Support, reporting to the Undersecretary for Safety and Security. We get all the raw information, we give back decision support that can be shared and is not secret.
2) Conversion of the rapidly vacating Coalition Coordination Center into a Multinational Decision Support with access to all information in all languages all the time THAT IS NOT SECRET to serve as provider of reach back strategic, operational, tactical, and technical intelligence to all stabilization & reconstruction, humanitarian assistance, and disaster relief operations.
3) Use of the MDSC to create a global range of gifts table covering the ten high-level threats to humanity and the twelve core policies (learn more at Earth Intelligence Network), such that the UN can call an annual givers conference and publicise $1 trillion a year in needs from $10 to $100 million, all online and accessible for both individuals (80$ of the giving) and organizations.
India now understands that a call center and a virtual network using Telelanguage.com, registering 100 million volunteers covering 183 languages and able to teach the five billion poor “one cell call at a time,” is the fastest way to create stabilizing wealth.
This is the BEGINNING of a new history one powered by public intelligence, itself comprised of collective, peace, and commercial intelligence, and in phase two, gift, cultural, and Earth intelligence.
I put down this book well satisfied with the Swedish concept as taught to me in Stockholm: Multinational Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information Sharing (M4IS) and Multinational Decision Support. We are going to answer this great lady's prayers, for the best of reasons, to give all of our children seven generations of hope into the future.
Edit of 10 November 2008 to lament the betrayal of John McCain.
The election is over. Obama fooled most of the people, and the Democrats out-frauded the Republicans with at least $300 million in illegal campaign contributions and double voting between New York and Florida and varied other states. McCain did himself in, allowing Bush staffers to destroy any attempt to address the substance of governance, and less the staffer that helped create the first speech by Governor Palin, Vice Presidential Operations was staffed by inept has-beens from spin-land, none of them with any deep knowledge about governance.
Sadly Obama, himself a talented individual, has been bought and paid for by Wall Street, and his transition team is totally committed to keeping the two party spoils system alive. He is, in short, a fraud. I am deleting fivce of the HOPE books below, and herewith provide five books that should give any citizen pause–Obama will be Cheney lite, seeking to pursue Abraham Lincoln's treasonous expansion of Executive powers with the active connivance of a treasonous Congress unfit to represent the United STATES of America.
Bernie's review is great and I have voted for it. I am going to stop buying formula books that combine a politician's name with a staffer's library browsing. I was especially distressed to not find the world “intelligence” or its commercial equivalent, decision-support. There is nothing wrong with the content, but as someone who writes and reads broadly about intelligence and decision support under conditions of ambiguity, this book could not hold my attention.
This is a rather unusual book, one that takes a clever approach of seeking to understand Bush Junior in the context of a Shakespearian tragedy, and specifically, Henry V.
Here are my flyleaf notes–this is a totally worthy book by a real professional with insight.
+ Three myths of the House of Bush:
– Made it on my own
– Not really rich
– Running for office to serve the Nation
+ Seven Lessons from the House of Bush
– Treachery of the press
– Importance of moment
– Money before politics
– Primacy of manners
– NE moderates an endangered species
– Don't give up
– Trust only the family
+ The author opens early with his conclusion that George Junior is a Walker (the differences are explained), not a Bush and the rest of the book is a lovely explanation of a family tragedy in three acts:
– ACT I: the loser struggling to be like Dad and failing
– ACT II: success at being different (drunk, boorish, inept, but different)
– ACT III: descent into mesianism (what happens when a village idiot gets the illusion of power)
+ Early on I have a note: national and global catastrophe rooted in a broken family whose black sheep got promoted more than one rung too far. It must gall the second fiddle that his own mother does not like him and thought the Presidency should have gone to Jeb.
+ Despite my extensive reading on the last eight years of high crimes and misdemeanors, this book contains information I have not seen before. The author hits the reader early on with:
– Rove, Cheney, Rumsfeld, and Rice were “enablers” for George Juniors' idiocy (Powell in my view confused loyalty with integrity)
– The second term flame-out was avoidable–Bush had good intentions but Rove held sway
+ The author addresses Bush's faith as false, non-theological, more like “self-help Methodism,” using Alcoholics Anonymous meetings instead of church as a group activity.
+ There is a superb discussion of the juxtaposition of Bush's linguistic blunders combined with the manner in which he was gifted at using evangelical and conservative code words.
+ There is fine coverage of George Juniors meanness and overbearing humiliating toward all, Rove in particular, who accepted every humiliation, including the nickname “Turd Blossom.”
+ The author summarizes the scandals on Rove's watch: Plume, Katrina, Iraq, firing of prosecutors (I would also add, subversion of Congress in violation of Article one, see Breach of Trust and also Broken Branch).
+ We learn in passing that Rove was abandoned three times:
– By his father who ran away
– By his stepfather who ran away (one of the two was homosexual, I forget which)
– By his mother who committed suicide
+ It was Rove, the author tells us, who pushed privatization of social security. As I review this book there are ads on the radio that seek to communicate that 40% of America's shares are owned by normal people. What they do not tell you, which you can lean in John Bogle's book, The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, is that we are no longer an ownership society, we have abdicated to financial management intermediaries, and they have skimmed one fifth of the value off for themselves, a select few.
+ According to the author it was Rove and not George Junior that pressed for a strategy of demonizing terrorism. The author says Rove destroyed the Bush II presidency with the “catastrophic blunder of politicizing the War on Terror.”
+ When the author finally gets around to covering Dick Cheney he casts him perfectly as “Lord Chief Justice” from Henry V, the sycophant who revels in pulling the strings behind the scenes. I have the line, my own interpretation of the author's words, “played Bush like a fiddle.”
+ The author asserts that Cheney was not transformed, as Brent Scowcroft believes, but rather finally found an opportunity to exercise his own judgment about the irrelevance of Congress and the need for a unilateral Presidency autonomous from oversight and able to take bold initiatives without consultation. [See One Percent Doctrine for a review of Cheney's mal;feasance going back to the Ford Presidency, in ursurping Presidential power].
+ The author, editor in chief of Slate, observes that the press really missed this about Cheney, his intent focus on expanding Presidential power and dismissing Article 1 of the Constitution.
+ Addington receives concise but chilling coverage.
+ Pages 170-171 are a priceless summary of how Cheney
– Managed Bush's mind
– Framed choices
– Accelerated Bush's neurotic shoot from the hip uninformed decision making (while ensuring behind that Cheney's decision was preset or, if necessary, counter-manding the President behind his back after the fact, alleging to others not in a position to question, that President had changed his mind).
+ The author discovered in Lynn Cheney's “Executive Privilege” (evidently no longer carried by Amazon) a telling fictional tale all too real.
+ The section I found most interesting outlined the six phases of Bush Doctrine:
– 1.0 Unipolar Realism (we make reality in our own image)
– 2.0 With us or Against Us
– 3.0 Preemptive attack
– 4.0 Democracy in the Middle East
– 5.0 Freedom Everywhere
– 6.0 No doctrine at all
+ The author surprises me with one defense of Cheney that I consider credible: Cheney truly wanted to vaccinate the entire nation against smallpox because he truly believed the threat existed. I am reminded of Daniel Elsberg who in Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers recounts how he warned Henry Kissinger that reliance on Top Secret Codeword information would “make him like a moron, unable to listen to those who actually know.”
+ The author tells us that Bush II reads books many of them “but does not know how to think historically.” I am reminded of my youngest son, 12 years old, a brilliant wide receiver and first baseman, who at this point can read a book and not remember a thing from the plot.
+ The author ends with a devastating comparison of Winston Churchill, who did outgrow Lord Randolph and make his mark, and George Junior who “in the end, … failed to be his own man or displace his father.” Naturally there is the humiliating irony of proving that his father was right not to have gone on to Baghdad.
I just shake my head wondering how the American people have been so silent. Here are a few other books that round out the catastrophic decrepitude of the Bush-Cheney regime:
Some time a go I wrote a piece on 9/11, “who's to blame,” and it boiled down to this: We the People are to blame, for having dropped out of the democracy and abdicated our civic responsibilities. Cheney's high crimes and misdemeanors, not least of which was letting 9/11 happen as FDR let Pearl Harbor happen, Congress abdicating its Article 1 responsibilities, the mainstream media refusing $100,000 fully paid ads against the war; a piss-ant like Wolfowitz being able to get away with questioning Shinseki's experience, insight, and honor–all of these are secondary causes and I would hasten to include the “failure of generalship,” flag officer who, like Colin Powell, forgot their Oath of Office and confused loyalty with integrity. The prime cause is that we gave our government over to what I now consider to be four organized crime families: the Clintons, the Bushes, the Democratic Party, and the Republican Party.
As McCaffrey said on CNN last night (13 Feb 08), “anyone who votes for an incumbent in 2008 should lose their American citizenship.” Tongue in cheek? Perhaps. Relevant and actionable? Absolutely. It's time to abolish this government and start over.
Brilliant, Sensible, Noteworthy, First-Rate, Truth in Your Face, February 10, 2008
Víctor Huggo Martin
I come to this movie as the son of an oilman, with 30 years spent all over the world, flying around the world at the age of 16 alone, and then moved on to the Marine Corps, the CIA, and other stuff. Over-all, I have spent close to 15 years in Latin America.
Bottom line: Fidel kicks US ass while also being a mixed blessing for the Cuban society.
There are an awful lot of individuals in denial, but the raw facts are these:
1) Castro overthrew a dictator that sold out the Cubans to US companies.
2) The US did everything in its (impotent) power to assassinate him while also imposing a brutal and probably illegal embargo on Cuba.
3) Now that we are all conscicous about both sustainability and health:
++++ SURPRISE: Cuba and the Amish are the TWO–the only two–models for sustainable development; and
++++ SURPRISE: Cuba not only has better health care than the US, but they can afford to send 10,000 doctors to Venezuela.
This is a great movie that Americans should watch, but will no5.
As a fine side note, the Bay of Pigs, an operation that was ill-conceived and badly supported, drove Fidel into Kruschev's arms, and led to the Soviet effort to install nuclar ballistic missiles in Cuba.
I do not believe in socialism and top-down elite control, which both the US and Cuba suffer from, but I do believe there is a third way between the US, Cuba-Venezuela, Costa Rica, and others. We are close to being able to use the Internet for digital deliberative dialog and real-time science as well as real-time decision-support.
If I had the ear of an honorable intelligent President, I would create a special envoy for Cuba and Venezuela, and find a way to create a Western Hemisphere Prosperity & Peace initiative with Venezuelan oil, Cuban health care, and US communications technology brought together.
CRYSTAL CLEAR: The US has been the rogue elephant. ENOUGH.
Superb, self-effacing, common sense, deeper insights into the company, January 11, 2008
Michael Bloomberg
I bought this book on 1 January when news first came out of the University of Oklahoma “bipartisan” gathering, but I did not have a chance to read it until this week. I went to Oklahoma, only to see this good man embarrassed by a truly rotten press conference that invited mockery. My three page trip report is at Earth Intelligence Network.
I'm going to summarize what I learned from this book,and then conclude with an observation on how Bloomberg could go to the next level while simultaneously cleaning up our government and educating the 5 billion poor free, one cell call at a time.
There is absolutely nothing in this book that is conceited or self-serving. This is straight talk from a hard worker, an Eagle Scout at a very young age, an ethical businessman, an inspired information entrepreneur. This is an honest worthy book I wish I had noticed sooner.
The author lived in a one-room studio apartment for his first 10 years, working 12 hours a day as a matter of routine, not counting his early morning jogging, where he says he gets his most creative thoughts.
It certainly helped that he had a $10M termination payment from his first job, but this book positively lights up around the combination of open workspace, open mind, how to create a company on the fly, fully integrating customer views, ignorning banks and other pyramidal consultants. The author discovered the “power of us” a quarter century before Business Week did its cover story on this topuc, 21 June 2005.
What I was not expecting, and what made the book riveting for me, is the complete well-paced coverage of how the author realized he could monetize financial data, then information about the people behind the data, and then information on the politics behind the people.
A few of my fly-leaf notes:
+ Build from scratch, don't buy over-priced companies or capabilities.
+ Trust me, or go out the door.
+ Do'ers with fires in their belly make for a great team
+ Pioneered compact low-cost workstations with English buttons
+ Excelled at rapid prototyping where good intention was better than any business plan
+ Really superb overview of how numbers can lie, how dangerous an automated numbers game can become
+ Outsiders do what's asked; insiders do what's needed.
+ Superb vision for the future of the hand-held cell phone as the single device, he knew this long before Eric Schmidt came along to help Google.
+ Corrects my long-standing mis=hearing of Marhsall McCluhan's book title, The Medium is the Massage (not Message, that was a separate quote)
+ Really excellent stories aabout how hard Bloomberg had to fight to be accredited both in Washington DC and in Tokyo as a legitimate news organization
+ I agree with his view that computers should not be allowed in the classroom throughout elementary school.
+ Throughout the book, it is clear the author knows what I learned from Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, both personally and through his book, Miles to Go: A Personal History of Social Policy, Change is Hard. Specificially, big change takes 25 years (I am in year 18 of reforming secret intelligence and creating public intelligence, he is now in year 1 of reforming democracy and saving the Republic as well as moral capitalism).
+ The chapter on Management 101 is decent, sensible, and worthy of study.
+ I've spent hard time trying to do digital innovation, and the details in this book just blew me away as I followed the innovations the author led back in the 1980's when CIA tasked me with creating a “smart desktop” for clandestine operations. Had I known then about this man, I would have gone to his doorv and offered to help him put CIA out of business. There is still time.
I put the book down with both a feeling of pain–the Oklahoma debaacle should never have happened–and hope. This author embodies three big ideas: moral informed capitalism, honest informed self-governance, and educational reform.
I have three ideas I offer to anyone who can reach the author, I do not believe the book I created for him (Democracy 2008, see it at Earth Intelligence Network) was delivered to him by his staff, one reason he got humiliated in Oklahoma.
Idea #1: Fund a global “True Cost” project within the Natural Capital Institute's rapidly growing World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER). Get Paul Hawkins in to energize everyone, and become the Moody's for true cost information (e.g. designer T-shirts with 4000 gallons of water, water bottles whose plastic required more water to make than is contained in the bottle, etc). This will change markets within 2-3 years, especially since ScanBack would allow Bloomberg to deliver this information to end-users via their cell phone at the point of sale.
Idea #2: Forget about running for President. It's a lousy job. BE the virtual president, forming a Transpartisan Sunshine Cabinet (Senators Nunn and Graham should be respectively Defense and Intelligence), and leveraging True Majority and Reuniting America to lead a national conversation firmly grounded in a balanced budget, on how to orchestrate $1 trillion a year in planning giving to eradicate the ten high level threats by harmonizing the twelve policies, while also creating the EarthGame to help the eight demographic challengers avoid our mistakes.
Idea #3: Examine Telelanguage.com and figure out how to register and put online 100 million volunteers who can use Skype, Telelanaguage, and their Internet connection to teach the 5 billion poor in any one of 183 languages, one cell phone call at a time.
The above will sound self-promoting, it is not. I have labored with 23 other co-founders to do Mike Bloomberg's staff work for the next decade, and if someone can get him to carefully consider these ideas, I give them to him freely. I don't need a job, but I do need a planet my three boys can grow up in, and I believe that if Mike Bloomberg stops trying to leverage political has-beens (with a few exceptions), and instead creates an architecture that can deliver public intelligence in the public interest, he will achieve his grand vision, faster, better, cheaper.
Thank you, those whom Dick Cheney has inspired into reading my non-fiction reviews. I never, ever, expected to be of service to the Nation in quite this way. If my reviews help us restore the Republic, of, by, and for the people, working with moral capitalists and leaders like this author and John Bogle (The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism then the author's unbridaled optemism could be warranted.
I bought four of Governor Huckabee's books, and spent much of Sunday going through them. I've decided to do one review posted four times, to provide anyone visiting one of the four books to see four snapshots in one place. I am NOT looking for multiple votes. This is my bottom-line over-all assessment of one of the three people I believe is qualified to b;ring our Nation together, the others being Senator Obama, and Representative Paul, who will not win but could demand electoral reform when Congress returns. The two formula books lose one star each but in no way does this discredit the substance within each.
1) This citizen is not going to let go of God or faith. He is completely different from Milt Romney, whom I consider to be just a little too slick about his Mormon loyalties (CIA officers who were Mormons would fall asleep at their desks because the Mormon church had them up working all night).
2) This is a sincere good man (I based this on seeing him elsewhere as well). I frankly think that he brings the right respect for faith and God, and we need some of that in the White House, not lies and treason documented in Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction and American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America. As an estranged moderate Republican and Methodist, outrages by the crimes committed in our name, I think its time we had a moderate faith in God back in the White House.
The latter book touches on various “mandate for change” issues, and one has to be somewhat dubious on his record, since more than one person from Arkansas has told me they lost income and the schools lost funding during his tenure.
We need change. I'd like to see Mike Huckabee lead a dialog with all congregations on God's Politics, the Left Hand of God, and Faith-Based Golden Rule morality in all our policies at all levels. Barack Obama is energizing the young, but still severely handicapped by his elderly advisors who are out of touch with global reality.
In my view, as a person who cares deeply about the Republic and has spent the last 15 years obsessing on global reality and a strategy for saving the Earth for seven generations and beyond, I would like to see Mike Huckabee being the evangelicals back into the fold, without the attendant lunacy and criminality that characterized the Bush-Cheney White House.
Please do not vote for this review in more than one place.
NOT a Guide–A Coffee Table Book, Lots of Photos, No Stats, September 3, 2008
