6 Star Top 10% – Page 23 – Public Intelligence Blog

2009/11/012009/11/01

Review: The Genius of the Beast–A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism

6 Star Top 10%, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Culture, Research, Economics, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), History, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Deep Look at Soul of Man, Society, and Capitalism

November 1, 2009

Howard Bloom

I received this book in pre-publication form so as to offer a blurb for the jacket. Below is my take on this book.This book will simultaneously tease your brain, arouse your emotions, and motivate you as it probes deeply into the soul of man, society, and capitalism as the engine of Western civilization.

The author gifts us with a counter-culture manifesto that resurrects the goodness of capitalism while also connecting to the roots of humanity, of the human soul as a microcosm of the soul of society.

Be patient, the first third of this book will amuse, enlighten, & provoke, at which point it will grab you by the throat and shake your fundamental perceptions of life. The author is compelling in both a scientific sense, weaving psychology, biology, economics, and sociology together; and in an artistic sense, delivering theater of the mind, new visions, poetic turns of phrase page after page, and a massive amount of purpose-laden provocative minutia, all of which culminates in blinding flashes of insight that explain the mind-expanding role of circuses, the failure of religion, and the natural cycles of fission and fusion, splintering apart and coming together.

Continue reading “Review: The Genius of the Beast–A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism”

2009/10/112009/10/11

Review: The Design of Business–Why Design Thinking is the Next Competitive Advantage

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Public Administration, Strategy, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

In Its Niche Beyond a Six–In Larger Context a Four

October 11, 2009

Roger Martin

First off, what got me to buy this book does not appear in the book at all–the author on record as saying that Wall Street was not designed to make money for its investors, only for its mandarins–the same is true of how universities are designed, businesses, etc. but that one observation really got my attention. I bought the book before BusinessWeek featured it as one of four in the October 5th edition (Europe version), and after looking the others over, chose this one.

In the larger context of changes to the Earth that now take three years instead of ten thousand years, as an entire literature flourishes on The Philosophy of Sustainable Design, Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage and Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution, the book is a four for narrow-casting and lack of context, but you can use Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, to search and sort among my other 1,400 reviews, so no penalty is warranted, This book will be scored Beyond 6 Stars at PBI/PIB for the simple reason that it addresses the core need of all eight tribes of intelligence (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental organizations), to re-design away from the Industrial Era waste (where Six Sigma stops), and to instead envision how the world could and should be, and set out to achieve that–a prosperous world at peace.

2009/09/282009/09/29

Review: JFK and the Unspeakable–Why He Died & Why It Matters

6 Star Top 10%, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Stake in the Heart of National Security State

September 28, 2009

James W. Douglas

The premise is that JFK went against the national security establishment, notably the CIA, the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the military-industrial complex, and was assassinated by deliberate plan of the CIA, with Richard Helms, David Atlee Philips, David Sanchez Morales, and Desmond Fitzgerald specifically culpable for high crimes of treason.

As with 9/11 and the documented culpability of Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Larry Silverstein, and Rudy Gulliani, there is insufficient proof in this book for conviction, but it is more than ample to demand a very intrusive and comprehensive investigation of the CIA, the Secret Service, and the FBI. I *want* to believe Helms when he says CIA did nothing not ordered by a President. However, if the premise of this book is proven, CIA should be abolished, its HQS demolished, and salt plowed into the earth at Langley.

The book's most positive account is of the back-channel dialog JFK developed with Khrushchev, Castro, and the Pope, dialog that not only defused the confrontations of the time, but also ended the Cold War. The theology of peace, the role of Monk Thomas Merton, the role of Norman Cousins (author of The Pathology of Power – A Challenge to Human Freedom and Safety), the role of the Pope and Pacem in Terris, and the strength JFK drew from a single meeting with Quakers are moving. This is in many ways a resurrection of JFK and both an epitaph worthy of his unsung accomplishments, and a call to arms for achieving closure–truth and reconciliation–with respect to his assassination by US Government personnel committing treason.

Continue reading “Review: JFK and the Unspeakable–Why He Died & Why It Matters”

2009/09/202010/10/05

Review: Out of Poverty: What Works When Traditional Approaches Fail

6 Star Top 10%, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Six Star Special

September 20, 2009

Paul Polack

This book is a “beyond five stars” book and will be so rated at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog where I can do things Amazon does not provide for, including reader access to my 1400+ non-fiction reviews via any of 100 different categories.

This single man, this author, has lifted 17 million people out of poverty by focusing on the needs of the one-acre and below subsistence farmer living on $1 a day. I get goose-bumps just thinking about the magnitude of both the accomplishment, and the implications of the accomplishment.

2009/09/082009/09/08

Review: An Enemy of the State–The Life of Murray N. Rothbard

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Biography & Memoirs, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Gfited Author Summarizes Gifted Libertarian Mind

Justin Raimondo

September 8, 2009

I was so impressed by the AUTHOR of this book and the manner in which he so ably presented in summary form the very complex economic, philosophical, and consequently political reflections of Murray Rothbard that I immediately looked for “About the Author” and did not find it. So let me start with the author rather than the subject.

Justin Raimondo an American author and the editorial director of the website Antiwar.com. He describes himself as a “conservative-paleo-libertarian.” In addition to his thrice-weekly column for antiwar.com, he is a regular contributor to The American Conservative and Chronicles magazine. Raimondo also writes two columns a month for Taki's Top Drawer. He has published three other books, the last one only available from Google Books:
Reclaiming the American Right: The Lost Legacy of the Conservative Movement (Background: Essential Texts for the Conservative Mind)
The Terror Enigma: 9/11 and the Israeli Connection
Into the Bosnian Quagmire: The Case Against U.S. Intervention in the Balkans (AFPAC, 1996) via Google Free Online

As someone who appreciates complexity in all its forms, I found the author's intellectual endeavor in this book to be stunningly formidable. Of the over 24 books by Murray Rothbard, the author presented a coherent account of the high points, and particularly of these that merit further study:
Man, Economy, and State with Power and Market – Scholars Edition
Economic Depressions
An Austrian Perspective on the History of Economic Thought (2 Vol. Set)
The Case Against the Fed
Wall Street Banks and American Foreign Policy

From my nine-pages of notes, respecting the 1,000 word limitation on reviews:

Continue reading “Review: An Enemy of the State–The Life of Murray N. Rothbard”

2009/09/052009/09/06

Review: Weapons of Mass Instruction

6 Star Top 10%, Corruption, Democracy, Education (General), Education (Universities), Misinformation & Propaganda

Beyond Six Stars–a Manifesto for Liberty

September 5, 2009

John Taylor Gatto

This book shocked me, and while I am not easily shocked, in shocking me made me realize how even my own radical outlook (as Howard Zinn notes, a radical is someone who no longer believes government is part of the solution) has come to accommodate, to accept, the most obvious tool of subordination, the public school system.

First, my fly-leaf notes, and then a couple of conclusions.

Constructive quote up front (xiv):

“We could encourage the best qualities of youthfulness–curiosity, adventure, resilience, the capacity for surprising insight–simply by being more flexible about time, texts, and tests, by introducing kids to truly competent adults, and by giving each student the autonomy he or she needs in order to take a risk every now and then.”

The author's bottom line: public schooling is a deliberate transplant from Germany that Carnegie and Rockefeller and Ford and other foundations designed as a deliberate means of dumbing down the mass population and segregating elite learning from mass “functional” learning devoid of political or philosophical reflection.

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2009/09/042009/09/05

Review: Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Leadership, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Some Warts But If You Buy Only One Book, Try This One….

September 3, 2009

Harrison Owen

The author (developer of the modern Open Space Technology) that revives the Native American open circle) tells us the book will inevitably be a repetition of his past books in different form, but I do not deduct for that because for me this is the first and only book, and may therefore prove his point: you have to keep telling the story in different forms to reach different segments of the public. I put the book down feeling it was an excellent overview, and feeling no need to acquire and read the other books.

I identify with the author when he notes (without complaint) that his insights that are so mainstream today (at least among the avant guarde) caused him to be labeled as totally lacking in credibility. Been there, done that–called a lunatic by CIA in 1992 for pointing out the urgency of getting a grip on open sources of information.

The author, the founder of the “Open Space” protocol that elicits boundless creativity in very short times by NOT seeking to structure, lead, or control, spends a lot of time on the concept of self-organization, concluding at the very end of the book that EVERYTHING is self-organizing, and all systems that seek to command & control are, by and large, part of the problem, not part of the solution.

Continue reading “Review: Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World”