4 Star – Page 13 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/10/082012/10/08

Review: Towards a World War III Scenario: The Dangers of Nuclear War

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Michel Chossudovsky

4.0 out of 5 stars Five for Detail, Three for Bias, Solid Four for the Serious Reader / Researcher, October 8, 2012

Michel Chossudovsky is a known researcher and writer who is easily left of center; his greatest value lies in his presentation of truth in detail, something the neo-conservatives (far right of center) are incapable of doing. Anyone who demeans this author or his work is evidently incapable of understanding that Dick Cheney led the telling of 935 now-documented lies in taking the US to war on Iraq and in Afghanistan.

The book is NOT easy to read, with small print and 70 distinct separately titled pieces, all well-organized but reading like an op-ed book. The author also over-states, in my view the threat of a global nuclear war, while very pragmatically outlining the many ways in which the US and NATO are giving all indications of both tolerating an Israeli attack on Iran, perhaps with an Israeli nuclear bomb into Iran so they can pretend that they destroyed a nuclear facility that was no nuclear at all.

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2012/10/082012/10/09

Review: The Bhagavad Gita – The Original Sanskrit and An English Translation

4 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Intelligence (Spiritual)

Lars Martin Fosse

4.0 out of 5 stars Straight Forward But Disappointing for a Lay Reader,October 8, 2012

This book's special niche is for those who want to read the book in Sanscrit and English at the same time.

Perhaps I have been spoiled by the excellence of The The Bhagavad Gita: A Walkthrough for Westerners that was recommended to me by Harrison Owen, himself the author of several books including Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World. My review of the Gita for Westerners is a reflection of what I can get out of a book.

This one, while appreciated as a gift, and while also clearly a valuable contribution in terms of new twists on the English translation, is for me largely valuable for the ten page introduction.

I will say that the simplicity of the presentation (as in sparse sophistication demanding attention) focused my mind and I did draw out from this book the emphasis on non-attachment. In addition to the above two books, I would recommend The Zen Leader: 10 Ways to Go From Barely Managing to Leading Fearlessly, from which I drew the insight that I have been wasting time and energy trying to reform legacy systems that are too self-invested to every contemplate change, and that I should instead focus exclusively on “attracting the future” by being who I am, representing the constructive ideas that I do, and let others do with those ideas what they will.

Reading this book at a time when dark forces are conspiring to attack Iran and justify it with a variety of false flag attacks and the same kind of lies that led to the three trillion dollar war on Iraq, I try to FOCUS on the message in this book. Here is one example:

QUOTE (15): Know that this, on which all the world has been strung, is indestructible. No one can bring about the destruction of this imperishable being.

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2012/09/052012/09/05

Review (Guest): The Penguin and the Leviathan – How Cooperation Triumphs over Self-Interest

4 Star, Civil Society, Culture, Research

Yochai Benkler

Robert Steele: This review is so useful in its summary and links to other books that it is being cross-posted to Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. Both this book and its virtual sidekick, Liars and Outliers: Enabling the Trust that Society Needs to Thrive completely miss the point of Statecraft as Soulcraft, of The Exemplar: The Exemplary Performer in the Age of Productivity and Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition. It's about education. How a society educates EVERYONE is the ultimate foundation for transparency, truth, and trust (the subtitle of my most recent book, THE OPEN SOURCE MANIFESTO. Education is the soul of a direct democracy, and the primary enabler of pervasive voluntary reciprocal trust.

A Very Good Book on Cooperation,July 14, 2012

By J. Gomez “Book Shark”

“The Penguin and the Leviathan” it's the interesting book about the dynamics of cooperation and working in collaboration in the 21st Century. The main thesis of this book is to debunk the notion of a selfish human nature and how this knowledge can better serve our societies. Israeli-American author and professor of Law, Yochai Benkler, uses the latest in multiple converging scientific fields and a variety of examples to illustrate the power of cooperation. This 272-page is composed of the following ten chapters: 1. The Penguin vs. the Leviathan, 2. Nature vs. Culture, 3. Stubborn Children, New York City Doormen and Why Obesity Is Contagious: Psychological and Social Influences on Cooperation, 4. I/You, Us/Them: Empathy and Group Identity in Human Cooperation, 5. Why Don't We Sit Down and Talk About It?, 6. Equal Halves: Fairness in Cooperation, 7. What's Right Is Right — or at Least Normal: Morals and Norms in Cooperation, 8. For Love or Money: Rewards, Punishments, and Motivation, 9. The Business of Cooperation and 10. How to Raise a Penguin.

Positives:

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2012/08/192012/08/19

Review: The Age of Fracture

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Culture, Research

Daniel T. Rodgers

4.0 out of 5 stars An entire book without the words “corruption” or “paradigm failure”,August 19, 2012

I bought this book expecting it to be a six star special, and then was tempted to drop it to three stars for completely missing the point. I've settled on four. It is a brilliant work of scholarship that analyzes varying schools of thought without once connecting to either realities or fundamentals–ethics, for example. I do not mean to be cruel, nor hyperbolize for effect, but as I put the book down it occurred to me that this book is a most extraordinary discussion of the clothes not being worn by the Naked Emperor.

Since those who rave about this book are no doubt the norm — intellectual pedigrees without integrity in the holistic sense — let me preface by brief critical comments by bringing forth the importance of whole systems analytic models, and within those model, the importance of integrity. Integrity is not just about honor — one can be honest on the small things while totally lacking in holistic integrity or social integrity — the extremists within the two-party tyranny that has looted the US treasury certainly fall into this category. While this book speaks to the cost of cultural hegemony, and even the cost of class betrayal from the top down, it never gets to calling a spade a spade, a crook a crook, a failed paradigm a failed paradigm. Kuhn, Morgan, Fuller, and Ackoff would all be disappointed.

Chapter 1 Losing the Words of the Cold War seems oblivious to the military-industrial complex or the fact that both Kennedy and Khruschev had to deal with out of control generals as the greater threat, not one another. Alternative reading:

Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It

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2012/08/142012/08/14

Review: Resilience Why Things Bounce Back

4 Star, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research

Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy

4.0 out of 5 stars Kum Ba Ya Reaches Its Peak,August 14, 2012

This book was recommended to me by Dr. Patrick Meier, perhaps the greatest English-language convergence point for crowd-sourcing in all languages, crisis mapping, and sustainable resilience, but I have found it to be a real disappointment–this book is kum-ba-ya at its peak, perhaps one reason why some of the reviewers, themselves deeply rooted in the kum-ba-ya mind-set, have raved about the book.

NEWS FLASH: No matter how long you hold hands and hum and agree to collaborate and have deliberative dialog and collective inspiration and all that, you will never, ever, make progress without first getting a grip on reality. This demands a conscious effort to discover, discriminate, distill, and disseminate FACTS along with OBSERVATIONS and OPINONS, all time stamped with geospatial attributes. Kum-Ba-Ya–much like the US Government–is completely divorced from reality, and especially how others see us and now corporations and banks externalize costs to the future.

Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

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2012/08/122012/08/12

Review: The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Mike Lofgren

4.0 out of 5 stars 6 on Republicans, 3 on Democrats, 0 on the Other 50% of America's Voters,August 12, 2012

I read this book is in original incarnation, “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” (truthout, 3 Sep 2011), and have to give the author high marks for fleshing out his original litany of Republican felonies against the public. For that he gets a 6 — beyond five stars and long overdue. He is especially strong on showing how hypocritical, unintelligent, and generally unethical my former party has become. He barely earns a 3 on the Democrats, and this is a pity because his success on the Republicans really calls for a similar indictment for the Democrats by an insider.

Where I was most dismayed by the book is in the author's complete failure to grasp that the REASON the Republican and Democratic parties are so corrupt is precisely because they have excluded the Independents, Constitutionals, Greens, Libertarians, and Reforms from ballot access, while also disenfranchising them through gerrymandering–our corrupt Congress chooses its voters, not the other way around, which is why Peggy Noonan was able to supply Ronald Reagan with the killer saying, “there is less turnover in the US Congress than in the Soviet politburo.”

I've read the other reviews and decided the best thing I can do to encourage the general direction of this book (corrupt parties, corrupt government, time to flush) is list other books I have reviewed that strongly support this one but with more coherence in their chosen area of focus.

I begin with the two party tyranny. My own book I cannot link to but Amazon allows me to list it under my signature.
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

On the corruption of Congress:
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders

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2012/07/20

Review (Guest): Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World

4 Star, Information Operations

Michael Hyatt

4.0 out of 5 stars A few critiques, but overall, a solid book May 24, 2012

By Amy Andrews

While I've been a fan and follower of Michael Hyatt's blog for a long time, I did not receive a free copy of Platform. I confess, as much as I like his blog, I wasn't going to buy the book for two reasons:

1. Prior to the launch of Platform, he mentioned that much of the content was reworked material from old blog posts (which I assumed I had read previously).
2. Since I teach others how to start their own blog, I am already up to my eyeballs in information of this sort.

Therefore, I thought I would hold off and wait until I could get a copy at the library.

Incidentally, I bought the book the day it launched, swayed by all the 5-star reviews, enticed by the freebies he offered during launch week and intrigued by his launch process, which I wanted to watch firsthand (you just never know when that information will come in handy, you know). 😉

I have read the book in full.

Here are some of my thoughts, in no particular order:

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