4 Star – Page 10 – Public Intelligence Blog

Sarah Lurie

4.0 out of 5 stars Overkill — 50 pages fluffed to 342, October 20, 2013

If you ever wanted to get to know a Russian Kettlebell intimately, as well as its family going back 1000 years and every possible nuanced aspect of it, this is the book for you. For me it is total overkill and would more usefully be replaced by a 50 page illustrated guide and a single wall chart — or two, one for warm-up with jumprope and stick, the other a series of exercises. I watched Powerbody: Advanced Russian Kettlebell Workout with Phil Ross before going through this book,and now I am leaning toward reversing my conclusion that the Ross DVD was too advanced and one should start with this book. Given a choice between the two, I would dump this book and use the DVD as a complete package.

Bottom line: too much of everything. This is a doctoral thesis on pulling carrots out of the ground. This is a formula book on steroids. It certainly earns four stars — some might give it five (I mistrust most of the reviews, them seem to be very short and empty reviews from people doing the author a favor) — and the substance is worthy, but the overall “door stop” nature of the book is very off-putting. I could have distilled this book into 50 pages with two wall charts, and been happier with that at the same price.

Here are a few bottom lines from this book:

Continue reading “Review: Kettlebells for Dummies”

2013/10/062013/10/07

Review: Say It With Presentations

4 Star, Best Practices in Management, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Intelligence (Public)

Gene Zelazny

4.0 out of 5 stars Fundamentals Most Ignore A Bit Too Generic, October 6, 2013

I was lent this book by a colleague. Here is some context for my appreciation of the book:

01 The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (C/JCS) once BANNED all powerpoint presentations, for two reasons. First, because they had become “death by powerpoint” monstrocities in which intellectually limited people tried to substitute technology for thinking and color for precision of thought; and second, because more often than not, something would go wrong with the computer and the briefing officer would be found to be empty-headed. Too often (and I include myself) powerpoint presentations have been an aid for the BRIEFER, rather than a visual map for the DECISION-MAKER.

02 Presentations as most understand them are didactic tools (I talk you listen) instead of socractic tools (I spark, you engage, we create new understanding). Yes, one good visual can equal 10,000 words, but every visual past one radically loses value in a downward spiral. Less is more.

Presentations are not charts — they are different, a point the author addresses by publishing a separate book, The Say It With Charts Complete Toolkit, Cd-Rom.

Presentations are also not visualizations, an area where Edward Tufts is a leading light, a mind whose two books below I highly recommend:

Envisioning Information
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Presentations are a tool for thinking and a tool for inspiring human engagement, on this point I have been guided by Howard Rheingold and his books and web blogging, see for instance, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology from the 1980's and the more recent Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? (Kindle Single).

Put as simply as I can, a presentation is a tool for thinking — one third of the value is in the thinking and doodling and exploration of alternative paths leading to the presentation; one third of the value is in the final product that can inspire others on its own and as a tool, and the last third of the value, almost never achieved, is in the reaction, engagement, inspiration, and collective intelligence that the presentation might elicit.

Continue reading “Review: Say It With Presentations”

2013/09/042013/09/04

Review: The CIA and the Culture of Failure: U.S. Intelligence from the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

John Diamond

4.0 out of 5 stars Got the Obvious Right, Misses Everything Else, September 4, 2013

I regard Retired Reader as an alter ego and top gun in the field, so his review has my vote. If the book were current (it was published in 2008) I would be tempted to buy it but my time is not my own for the next year or two. Tim Weiner's book remains my top level choice, Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA along with The Secret Team: The CIA and Its Allies in Control of the United States and the World (Second Edition), and of course the many other books that I have reviewed here at Amazon, all easily scanned and leading to their respective Amazon page, by searching for “Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most)”. I last updated it in August 2011.

There are seven CIAs, not just the one that the author writes about, and that costs the book one star. Search for my post of some time ago, “Search: Seven CIAs [Steele on the Record]”.

There is also a total lack of integrity as well as intelligence in Washington, D.C., and while I might normally take a second star away from the book — the author is pimping the cover story and not addressing the deep pathologies across the Executive, Legislative, and corporate worlds — this last bit is something I focus on and will return to in a year or two once I am done with my service overseas.

Yes, the CIA failed on 9/11 because Dick Cheney ordered it so and the Director of the FBI, two weeks on the job, was hired for the explicit purpose of covering it all up (just as the FBI actively covered up George W. Bush's participation in the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and its own culpability in the assassination of Martin Luther King, as well as many other crimes of state from Waco to Oklahoma and beyond).

No, the CIA did not fail on Iraq. Charlie Allen got it right, and George Tenet prostituted his office in willfull betrayal of his oath of office and the public trust. we had the defecting son-in-law, we had the 20 plus legal travelers, we knew they had kept the cook books, destroyed the stocks, and wer bluffing for regional influence's sake.

Continue reading “Review: The CIA and the Culture of Failure: U.S. Intelligence from the End of the Cold War to the Invasion of Iraq”

2013/08/122013/08/12

Review: Chinese Industrial Espionage: Technology Acquisition and Military Modernisation

4 Star, Intelligence (Commercial), Intelligence (Government/Secret)

William C. Hannas (Author), James Mulvenon (Author), Anna B. Puglisi (Author)

4.0 out of 5 stars Valuable but not first…., August 12, 2013

See first Chinese Intelligence Operations, and also War by Other Means: Economic Espionage in America as well as a plethora of articles and chapters over the past twenty years.

The Chinese are doing what the Germans, French, and Israelis have been doing, along with the Japanese. See for example the still relevant:

Friendly Spies: How America's Allies Are Using Economic Espionage to Steal Our Secrets
Robert Maxwell, Israel's Superspy: The Life and Murder of a Media Mogul

It is seriously ignorant to complain about their interest in our technology when we are our own worst enemy — corporations keeping technology off the marketplace to milk legacy systems and externalize costs to the public; government ignoring my 1994 letter on the urgency of starting to spend $1 billion a year on cyber-security, cyber-education, and cyber-standards (search for <1994 sounding the alarm source=phibetaiota>), and then of course we have NSA and the Department of Defense being retarded and lazy for the past quarter century, with NSA explicitly refusing to do its assigned duty of protecting US corporate and public communications.

There is not much left to steal in the USA, Goldman Sachs and the rest of the Wall Street financial terrorists have looted us all, and the government not only let them do it, it legalized their crimes and to this day the FBI is a protective service for Wall Street elite. On this point see, for instance:

Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Who Stole the American Dream?
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

The book should be read by specialists. The general public will be better off reading across my reviews in 98 categories, most easily accessed at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, with each review leading directly back to its respective Amazon page.

2013/07/192013/07/19

Review: Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Democracy

John Nichols and Rbbert W. McChesney

4.0 out of 5 stars Sickening at Two Levels — Superb Indictment of Periphery, Completely Avoids Two Party Tyranny Issue, July 19, 2013

This book makes me sick at two levels.

Level 1: It is the best treatment available of what I and many others have been saying for years. My own treatment was provided in a Preface, “Paradigms of Failure,” in the book under my signature below, that also had a preface by Thom Hartmann, another by Tom Atlee, and a third, reprinted, from Senator Bernie Sanders. The entire book is free online, so I am not pimping it.

Level 2: The book is at best naive and at worst deliberately misleading in suggesting that Congress somehow needs to be “empowered” to resist. This is absolute and utter bull. I ran for President in 2012, accepted by the Reform Party, listed at Politics1, interviewed for On The Issues, and I ran for two reasons: to get all of the best ideas in one place (We the People Reform Coalition) and to test the boundaries of the two-party tyranny as immortalized in Theresa Amato's outrageously superb Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny. I specifically ran to be able to contact every single other Presidential candidate from the small parties, and to learn — as I did — that not a single one of them could overcome their ego (as Occupy could not overcome its mob) to come together in a demand for Electoral Reform from 2011 in time for 2012. That report to Hackers on Planet Earth and also published in Reality Sandwich is easily found online by searching for “How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny.”

Here is what this book does NOT tell you, and the reason it gets only four stars from me (it is superb in what it does tell you, but misses the key point): NINE TIMES the US Congress has been asked to pass legislation that would mandate — for federal elections only — that the six small parties blocked from ballot access (Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, and Socialist) — and Independent candidates — be guaranteed both ballot access and debate access. NINE TIMES, the last four sponsored by Ron Paul, the two-party tyranny has refused. They have a deal: they borrow one trillion a year in our name, one third of a federal budget that is documented to be 50% waste, and in return they share the right to loot the public treasury and pay off their voting blocks — corporate welfare and the banks for the Republicans, individual welfare for the Democrats. Obama is an anomaly — Wall Street bought the white half, the Progressives got the black half, and we all know how this turned out.

Continue reading “Review: Dollarocracy: How the Money and Media Election Complex is Destroying America”

2013/06/242013/06/24

Review: The Assassination of JFK – Who Really Did It and Why

4 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), History, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)

Craig Newman

4.0 out of 5 stars I hate electronic books, but worth considering, June 24, 2013

I've reviewed the major books on the JFK assassination and list them at the end of this review.

First off, since the table of contents is not in Look Inside the Book, where it should be, here is that bit:

Preface
1. The 1960 Campaign and Election
2. Vietnam and the CIA
3. The Conspiracy and the Global Elite
4. Oswald and his Part in the Conspiracy
5. Why Johnson was only a Part of the Conspiracy
6. The Real Reasons
7. Repercussions
8. Conclusion

The book asks and tries to answer a few questions about the Kennedy assassination that haven't been asked often enough even after nearly 50 years.

Questions like, “Why?”, “Who benefited?”, and “Why the major cover-up?”.

Continue reading “Review: The Assassination of JFK – Who Really Did It and Why”

2013/05/31

Review (Guest): The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn’t What It Used to Be

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Leadership, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Moises Naim

4.0 out of 5 stars What kind of power, for whom, and for what?, May 31, 2013

By Tom Atlee (Eugene, OR USA) – See all my reviews

Moises Naim's new book THE END OF POWER should properly be called “The Decay of Power”. His thesis is that while it is becoming easier to get power, it is also becoming harder to use it to control others and harder to keep it once you have it.

Naim suggests that globalization, economic growth, a growing global middle class, the spread of democracy, and rapidly expanding telecommunications technologies have changed our world. Together these developments have created a fluid and unpredictable environment which has unsettled the traditional dominions of power.

Three revolutions, he says, “make it more difficult to set up and defend the barriers to power that keep rivals at bay.” He details these revolutions as follows:
* “the More revolution, which is characterized by increases in everything from the number of countries to population size, standards of living, literacy rates, and quantity of products on the market”;
* “the Mobility revolution, which has set people, goods, money, ideas, and values moving at hitherto unimagined rates toward every corner of the planet”; and
* “the Mentality revolution, which reflects the major changes in mindsets, expectations, and aspirations that have accompanied these shifts.”

In other words, says Naim, there is too much going on, too much moving around, too many changing demands and perspectives – and at any time someone new can show up and effectively challenge or undermine your power. In addition, “when people are more numerous and living fuller lives, they become more difficult to regiment and control.” Among other things, such people value transparency, human rights, and fairness to women and minorities – and they share a sense that “things do not need to be as they have always been – that there is always…a better way” and that they need not “take any distribution of power for granted.”

All this is happening at the very time when large hierarchical institutions are losing their “economies of scale” and becoming increasingly difficult to manage, while smaller, more flexible organizations and networks are proving increasingly successful.

Naim provides compelling evidence that power is decaying in all these ways in all fields – from business, governance, geopolitics, and military affairs to religion, philanthropy, labor, and journalism.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): The End of Power: From Boardrooms to Battlefields and Churches to States, Why Being In Charge Isn't What It Used to Be”