5 Star – Page 52 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/05/132012/05/13

Review: NET SMART – How to Thrive Online

5 Star, Communications, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Education (General), Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Misinformation & Propaganda

Howard Rheingold

5.0 out of 5 stars Author is THE Path-Finder for Assisted Thinking,May 13, 2012

I first discovered Howard Rheingold through his book Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology. This led to my inviting him and with him, John Perry Barlow, to a conference in 1992, where over 600 intelligence professionals got to realize how far behind they were in relation to the art of the possible. We have stayed in touch over the years, and among his many other books, I also recommend as a prequel to this one, Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution.

Howard writes–and I read him–at multiple levels. Below I offer a couple of additional recommended readings for each level, with the assertion that you need this book in order to help your child learn what is not so obvious about the world–we can start with Google being math hacks on digital garbage.

Strategic. At the strategic level Howard sees the convergence of many minds connected and empowered by the Internet and related applications to create infinite wealth. He himself cites Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom to which I would add Alvin Toffler's superb wrap up Revolutionary Wealth: How it will be created and how it will change our lives.

Operational. At the operational level Howard is easily on of the top practitioners of “who you know is what you know” and I know of no one who better melds the tools from the tactical level and the vision from the strategic level to achieve the personal and communal efficacy embodied in a “smart community.” This book is a blend of how to make the most of who you know, what applications you use, and how you apply your own mind to include being super alert to the fact that 80% of the Internet is garbage. At this level I would point to two books, the first by David Weinberger, Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room and the second by Tom Atlee, Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics.

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2012/05/04

David Isenberg: Thomas Powers on Ike Eisenhower – He Got the Big Things Right

5 Star, History, Leadership

He Got the Big Things Right

Thomas Powers

New York Times, April 26, 2012

Eisenhower: The White House Years
by Jim Newton
Doubleday, 451 pp., $29.95

Eisenhower in War and Peace
by Jean Edward Smith
Random House, 950 pp., $40.00

Bettmann/Corbis

When the youngest man to be elected president of the United States was inaugurated in 1961, the contrast with his predecessor could hardly have been greater, and John F. Kennedy made the most of it. “Let the word go forth,” he said grandly at his inaugural, “…that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans.” The Harvard graduate from Massachusetts had no great achievements to his name but he had a thick head of hair the color of chestnuts, brainy friends who played vigorous touch football, an activist international agenda, and a stylish wife with a soft voice who was already planning to bring high-end decorators and artists of international repute to the White House. Kennedy intended to move boldly where his predecessor had been watchful and slow.

ike and khrushchev — Dwight D. Eisenhower and Nikita Khrushchev at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, September 1959

The man Kennedy replaced was seventy and none too robust. He had suffered a heart attack and a mild stroke in office, along with other ailments, and was notorious for losing himself in a tangle of words when addressing sticky questions. Dwight David Eisenhower won deathless fame as commander of the 1944 invasion of France that helped to end World War II in Europe, but once out of uniform genial blandness seemed to settle over the man, called Ike since youth. His bald pate and broad smile gave him an amiable, grandfatherly air. His tastes matched those of a generation winding down. He got up early and went to bed early. In the White House he and his wife Mamie frequently had dinner together alone in front of the TV. Ike’s favorite movie was Angels in the Outfield, a sentimental baseball film of 1951. Close seconds were the western films High Noon of 1952, in which the town marshal faces down four men come to kill him, and The Big Country, in which a retired sea captain brings peace to feuding ranch families.

Ike watched High Noon three times and The Big Country four times. In the audience at one showing of the latter was the British prime minister, Harold Macmillan, come to the US to argue for sweet reason in dealing with Khrushchev over Berlin. Macmillan hated The Big Country. “It lasted three hours!” he protested in his diary. “It was inconceivably banal.” Gregory Peck turned the other cheek for most of the film but a moment came when he had to fight. That, roughly, was what the president had been telling Macmillan all day. Macmillan was reluctant to push the Russians over Berlin; Eisenhower felt a line had to be drawn clearly before the talking could begin.

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2012/04/302012/04/30

David Swanson: Sibel Edmonds Finally Wins

09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, 5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Sibel Edomonds Finally Wins

Sibel Edmonds' new book, Classified Woman, is like an FBI file on the FBI, only without the incompetence.

The experiences she recounts resemble K.'s trip to the castle, as told by Franz Kafka, only without the pleasantness and humanity.

I've read a million reviews of nonfiction books about our government that referred to them as “page-turners” and “gripping dramas,” but I had never read a book that actually fit that description until now.

The F.B.I., the Justice Department, the White House, the Congress, the courts, the media, and the nonprofit industrial complex put Sibel Edmonds through hell. This book is her triumph over it all, and part of her contribution toward fixing the problems she uncovered and lived through.

Edmonds took a job as a translator at the FBI shortly after 9-11. She considered it her duty. Her goal was to prevent any more terrorist attacks. That's where her thinking was at the time, although it has now changed dramatically. It's rarely the people who sign up for a paycheck and healthcare who end up resisting or blowing a whistle.

Edmonds found at the FBI translation unit almost entirely two types of people. The first group was corrupt sociopaths, foreign spies, cheats and schemers indifferent to or working against U.S. national security. The second group was fearful bureaucrats unwilling to make waves. The ordinary competent person with good intentions who risks their job to “say something if you see something” is the rarest commodity. Hence the elite category that Edmonds found herself almost alone in: whistleblowers.

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2012/04/17

Review (Guest): Gandhi and the Unspeakable

5 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Culture, Research, Justice (Failure, Reform), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

James W. Douglass

Reviewed by Christian Newswire

Ghandhi and the Unspeakable looks upon the father of the Indian independence movement and examines why a prophet of nonviolence was assassinated by Hindu nationalists during a prayer meeting in New Delhi.

From James W. Douglass, the bestselling author of JFK and the Unspeakable (Orbis 2010), Ghandhi and the Unspeakable shines new light on the untimely death of Mohandas Gandhi. Following the theme of his study about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Douglass shows how the people who conspired to kill Gandhi hoped to destroy a compelling vision of peace, nonviolence and reconciliation.

By tracing the story of Gandhi's early “experiments with truth” in South Africa, Mr. Douglass shows how Gandhi confronted and overcame the fear of death. He also explains why, as with the case of JFK's death, this story matters today and what can be learned from Gandhi's truth and its opposition to the powers of his time.

Mr. Douglass is a scholar and peace activist. His book about the JFK assassination is widely acclaimed by historians and political scientists as one of the most important books written about the subject. Gandhi and the Unspeakable, according to Publisher's Weekly, “provides readers with a slim, elegant volume containing explosive insight into who conspired to assassinate the father of modern nonviolence and why.”

2012/04/16

Review (Guest): TRAITOR: The Whistleblower and the “American Taliban”

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Jesselyn Radack

5.0 out of 5 stars Extremely Important,February 8, 2012

David C N Swanson (Charlottesville VA United States) – See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)

It began with that monstrous young man so evil we needed to blindfold him and strap him to a board, that confusing young man who looked like Christ but cast us in the role of crucifiers, that treasonous young man who brought dark and heathen evils across linguistic and cultural borders and brought torture onto the list of accepted government actions.

When you hear the phrase “American Taliban” you probably think of a young American who betrayed his country, aided its enemies, and – like Saddam Hussein – was behind the attacks of 9-11. John Walker Lindh was an American. That part is accurate. He converted to Islam at age 16 and traveled to Yemen to study classical Arabic and Islamic theology. In 2001 he went to Afghanistan to join an ongoing battle between a political group funded by Russia and another group funded by the United States. Lindh joined the group that was backed and funded by the Bush Administration. It was called the Taliban. Lindh trained to fight the Northern Alliance, not civilians, and not the United States. But, after 9-11, the United States attacked the Taliban, and Lindh attempted to escape and return to America.

Instead he and other soldiers were captured by the Northern Alliance and beaten senseless in the presence of two CIA officers, Johnny “Mike” Spann and Dave Tyson, who interrogated Lindh and threatened him with death on the spot. When some of the other prisoners rebelled (Lindh was not involved), Northern Alliance troops shot and killed scores of prisoners, many with their arms tied behind their backs. Lindh was shot in the leg. Spann was killed. (Though he was not involved, Lindh was later charged with conspiracy to murder Spann.)

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2012/04/162012/04/16

Review: Polarity Management – Identifying and Managing Unsolvable Problems

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Priorities, Survival & Sustainment, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Barry Johnson

5.0 out of 5 stars Much Less Complicated Than Expected, a Great Workbook,April 16, 2012

Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)

I bought this back in December 2011 when I was scrounging around for books on panarchy (see for instance, Panarchy: Understanding Transformations in Human and Natural Systems. It stayed in my pile as other books moved because my first impression was that it was more complicated than I cared to deal with and might – shudder — even include mathematical formulas. I was wrong.

This is a very straight forward book that I recommend as a read-ahead or work book for any group seeking to radically evolve their internal decision making processes away from the current standard of “I talk, you listen; I decide, you obey.” It has clear charts, the right amount of white space, and I put it down thinking very well of the book.

Panarchy is an evolution of the whole systems approach to anything, with the clarity and integrity of FEEDBACK LOOPS among the elements being the core of any successful system. If everyone does not talk; if everyone does not listen; if everyone does not decide; if everyone does not act in harmonization with all others, system failure is inevitable.

Interesting to me, because Harrison Owen is a friend and mentor, this book is a restatement, in panarchic terms, of his path-finding work, Open Space Technology: A User's Guide–I also recommend his more recent Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World.

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2012/04/062012/04/06

Review (Guest): Conversations with Wall Street – The Inside Story of the Financial Armageddon & How To Prevent the Next One

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

cover conversations with wall street — Amazon Page

Peter Ressler, Monika Mitchell

5 Stars

Co-authors Peter Ressler and Monika Mitchell have been 20-year Wall Street insiders as partners in an executive search firm. Their book is a page-turning account of the 2007-8 meltdown and continuing unsolved issues that will inevitably lead to the next crises. Woven throughout their analysis are conversations with dozens of top executives from Lehman, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, AIG, Deutsche Bank, UBS, Citibank, Bank of America, Wells Fargo and many hedge funds and private equity firms.

Only the executives' first names are used (for obvious reasons), which makes their recorded interviews with the authors more revealing, with all the vivid expletives un-redacted. We hear first-hand of how Wall Street's culture actually worked based on the “buyer beware” treatment of sophisticated clients. Pension funds were considered “big boys” who should do their own due diligence and against whom it was OK to bet that the securities sold to them would blow up. These were the market makers who, unlike the partnerships of yore, regularly took both sides of deals with their often unsuspecting customers while pushing ratings agencies to stamp these toxic products as triple-A. The prevailing culture is reflected in their language: “eat what you kill,” “ripping the face off” clients and the jungle rule of “survival of the fittest” (often incorrectly associated with Charles Darwin rather than originally coined by Herbert Spencer, a British economist of that era who wrote for The Economist).

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