4 Star – Page 36 – Public Intelligence Blog

Strong Buy, Simplistic but Focused,

May 20, 2007

Kenneth J. Hagan

I think enough of this book by Hagan and Bickerton, both, significantly, respected professors in the US military war college system, to recommend it very strongly. It is simplistic, but in combination with the books I list below, it is quite striking.

Key points:

1. Wars have consequences, not only in the defeated region, but within the USA where the national and regional cultures (Nine Nations) can be conflicted.

2. War *alters* policy for all future generations.

3. America's wars have been engines of economic growth, but the authors fail to observe that the rich benefit while the poor die.

4. The post-war period is a continuation of the war and cannot be ignored. Both explicitly and implicitly, they crucify Cheney, Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, and Feith.

5. In every single case, the outcome of the war has been “far removed” from the stated objectives.

6. Each war brings with it repressive measures against those who dissent. I am reminded of Valley Girl Condi Rice suggesting that General Tony Zinni was a “traitor” for saying the idea of invading Iraq was idiocy. How now, cow?

7. War tends to loosen the bonds of traditional authority and undermine community.

8. Across our history, not just at our inception, Native Americans have lost big. Genocide was not only perpetuated in the wars of independence, but after the Civil War, when the US Army practices scorched earth war.

9. The most importance consequence of the war of 1812 was it total lack of achievement of ANY of its goals, together with an accentuation of sectional differences within the USA.

10. On page 47: “Enhanced chauvinism, ambitious jingoism, and patriotism [per Samuel Johnson, the last refuge of the scoundrel] were unintended consequences of the war. The slave trade continued.

11. The Indian Wars were deliberately genocidal.

12. In general, in its first hundred years, the USA was a belligerent against Canada, Mexico, and the Indian Nations.

13. The war on Mexico caused long-term host8ility and led to the civil war by aggravating differences between North and South (and one might add, Texas as the largest ego in the West). The war on Mexico was mostly fought and led by the South.

14. The Civil War was America's first ideological war.

15. The Emancipation Proclamation applied only to slaves in hostile states, not to Northern states.

16. Civil War extended the power of the Federal Government, which increasingly sold the American people out to special interests including European banks.

17. The authors provide a *fascinating* description of Abraham Lincoln's unprecedented abuse of presidential powers, including the suspension of habeas corpus, and I can now understand why “W” thinks he is following greatness by turning America into a police state.

18. Civil War introduced total annihilation (scorched earth) as an American “war of war.”

19. Spanish-American-Cuban-Filipino war is, in the author's view, most similar to the Iraq war in terms of the mendacity preceding and the insurrections following.

20. WWI, WWII, and the Cold War are discussed in terms that show the US to have been the more belligerent. Stalin learned not to trust the US, and this led to the ideological stand-off and the emergency of “fantasy war.”

21. In Korea, General McArthur exceeded his authority, the Chinese warned the US via an Indian who was blown off, and the game was on.

22. The US concurrence in the restoration of the French in Indochina (now Viet-Nam), and the conflicts that Johnson had in having to support being a hawk on Viet-Nam in order to have his “Great Society,” are covered.

23. The authors are *brutal* on the Bush Family, to the point that one is inspired to think of a lunatic asylum as the natural resting place for the whole lot of them.

24. According to the authors, Iraq is a “phony war” in every sense of the word except the casualties.

25. Iran is not in the index but the authors observe that US pressure on Syria to withdraw from Lebanon opened the door for Iran.

Bottom line: going to war does not solve problems, it creates more of them. The authors conclude that war is both folly and futile. I agree.

All Americans have a choice in 2008: they can continue business as usual, with the corrupt and inept Republican and Democratic “machines” that are “running on empty” and totally beholden to Wall Street, or Americans can reassert the fact that this is a Republic and the government as a whole can be fired for cause. See the books listed below. May God have mercy on our souls. It's time we started living up to our sacred responsibility as citizen-warriors, as Minutemen.

The authors lose one star to simplicty and an avoidance of both the intelligence availabale but ignored, and lack of couinter-vailing forces (e.g. Congress and the media inevitably fall for the Executive deceptions).

American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
The Nine Nations of North America
None So Blind: A Personal Account of the Intelligence Failure in Vietnam
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The American Way of War: A History of United States Military Strategy and Policy
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
Who the Hell Are We Fighting?: The Story of Sam Adams and the Vietnam Intelligence Wars

2007/05/162009/12/04

Review: The Weather Wizard’s Cloud Book–A Unique Way to Predict the Weather Accurately and Easily by Reading the Clouds

4 Star, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Sailing

Superb, portable, and incomplete,

May 16, 2007

Louis D. Rubin Sr.

I bought this book in preparation for an advanced mariner's meteorology course, and could not have made this comment without having first gained that higher level of knowledge.

This is a suberb book with two major flaws:

1) It sticks to the two-dimensional depiction of weather that is common to the average person. Although there are a couple of illustrations showing altitude, the author could easily have put in a few pages on the rotation of the earth, the 500 mb level, and how weather on the surface cannot be understood without underestanding what is happening at the 18,000 level. As my instructor put it, the high-level troughs are the chicken that hatches the surface level (scrambled) egg.

2) It provides the pictures of the clouds, but missed the key chance to break down the names into the original latin meanings, to create a matrix of high (Cirro), medium (alto), and low (strato), with substantive meaning including layer (stratus), curly (cirrus), stacked in a vertical heap (cumulo-cumulus), and delivering rain (nimbus).

Add this little matrix above, and read “Mariner's Guide to the 500-Millibar Chart” by Joe Stenkiewicz and Lee Chesneau, and Google for <Lee Chesneau> to find his web site, and you'll have all you need to move to the better three-dimensional interactive viewing of weather and weather charts.

I also recommend Understanding Weatherfax

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2007/05/162009/12/04

Review: Understanding Weatherfax

4 Star, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Sailing

Really great book, part of the whole picture,

May 16, 2007

Mike Harris

I bought this book in preparation for an advanced mariner's meteorology course, and could not have made this comment without having first gained that higher level of knowledge.

This is a suberb book. It provides superb information about the weather fax, including an excellent and easily portable manual for the various symbols. It has two areas for improvement:

2) It does not make the connection, at least that I could see, between the vital importance of making your own observations at 00 and 12 Zulu, so that when you finally receive the weather fax six or seven hours later, you can compare reality with what was provided. This also applies to forecasts–you can keep them, compare your own observations as the time passes, and get a sense of the difference.

Add the above, and read “Mariner's Guide to the 500-Millibar Chart” by Joe Stenkiewicz and Lee Chesneau, and Google for <Lee Chesneau> to find his web site, and you'll have all you need to move to the better three-dimensional interactive viewing of weather and weather charts.

I also recommend The Weather Wizard's Cloud Book: A Unique Way to Predict the Weather Accurately and Easily by Reading the Clouds

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2007/05/052009/12/04

Review: At the Center of the Storm–My Years at the CIA

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Corruption, Crime (Government), Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Iraq, Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), War & Face of Battle

Deceptive Beginning, Vital Middle, Disappointing End,

May 5, 2007

George Tenet

This is a very good book. There are some extremely important nuggets in here that essentially put the final nail in Dick Cheney's coffin while certifying the importance of holding Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Feith, and Cambone accountable for their high crimes and misdemeanors. Condi Rice continues to be depicted, in this book and others, as a zero in the sense of having been ignored, sidelined, or run over by Dick Cheney and his minions.

The book loses one star for a lack of prior context. George Tenet was Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI) for many years, and then Intelligence Director for Bill Clinton. He avoids any mention of his long-standing role in helping dismantle the very IC he ended up leading, and he is terribly deceptive when he says he asked for more funding for anti-terrorism, but fails to mention his inability to redirect funds within the $35-40 billon he had at the time. Today the IC has $60-70B and we are no safer–these clowns cannot even put together a consolidated accurate terrorist watchlist five years after 9/11.

The bottom line on the author is that he is a big-hearted staffer, not a leader and not a strategic thinker. He was a place-holder in a job that two presidents saw fit to relegate to losers–a mouse, a pit-bull, and a turtle.

He takes credit for months of redesign dialog but fails to point out that there was no substantive contact with iconoclasts, published author-practitioners. I am especially angry that he placed Buzzy Krongard in as Executive Director. In my view, Krongard was there to look out for Wall Street interests and ensure Brown and Root did not get caught smuggling drugs into the USA through New Orleans and heavy equipment being returned to the USA “for repairs.” I've come to the conclusion, after thirty years in this business, that there are four CIA's: 1) White House sychophants; 2) Wall Street support via Carlyle Group and a small network of retired intermediaries; 3) the “front” of earnest people working out of official installations, incapable of actually doing serious spying (I was part of this group); and finally, a multinational “dirty deeds” arm that does terribly immoral and illegal things with Saudi money, Egyptian sodomy of children (photographed so as to force them to spy on their fathers), and so on.

In many ways, this book is a capstone account of the death of US secret intelligence. It's gone. The DNI, DCI and USDI are earnest men, but they will fail because they simply do not comprehend the “paradigms of failure” (essay online) and are not willing to contemplate a clean-sheet fresh-start. On page 26 the author confirms that “time and technology [have] passed us by.”

As fascinating as his claims are of ramping up on Bin Laden, I go with Michael Sheuer's damnation as published by the Washington Post. Condi Rice blew off warnings, Dick Cheney focused on energy conspiracies with Enron and Exxon, and the plain truth is that the CIA refused to read the book by Yossef Bodansky or view the PBS broadcast in 1994 by Steve Emerson. They closed themselves off from open sources (called “Open Sores” within the now near-moronic secret world).

The middle of the book is sensational. Chapter Thirteen on “The Threat Matrix” and the succeeding chapters in Part II of the book are superb and contain many nuggets that restored much of my respect for the author.

The author damns Cheney on page 138 for taking over the National Security Council and it is clear that if there is one person to be impeached for high crimes and misdemeanors, it is not the President, but rather the Vice President.

On page 317 he tells us that “Policy makers have a right to their own opinions but not their own set of facts.”

He slams Rumsfeld for blocking several 737's full of State people and language-qualified individuals specifically trained and organized to get the post-war reconstruction off to a good start. He does not mention Rumsfeld's idiocy in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3,000 Taliban and Al Qaeda people from Tora Bora, but he does mention that General Tommy Franks refused to put the Rangers in Bin Laden's path, claiming he needed weeks to set it up (this is of course baloney, they could have been air-dropped in 24 hours with a 3-day resupply 24 hours after arrival).

He defends himself on the “slam dunk” as applying to the presentation plan for the UN, not the intelligence. I want to believe this, but the fact that he took imagery and other materials to the first NSC meeting, significantly on Iraq rather than terrorism, gives me pause. I certainly do believe that Dick Cheney hijacked the White House and closed out the entire policy process, but George Tenet, Colin Powell, and our generals all failed us by not resigning and screaming out at the top of their lungs against the high crimes and misdemeanors they witnessed Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, and Steve Cambone commit, day after day.

He lays bare Cheney's misbehavior in stating on 26 August 2002 that “there is no doubt” on Iraq's having weapons of mass deception but very strangely does not mention that both Hussein's son-in-law who defected to the US, and every one of the 25+ line crossers that Charlie Allen sent in, all said the same thing: kept the cook books, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional ego's sake.

He slams Paul Bremer for de-Bathification and confirms that “Iraq came at exactly the right time for Al Qaeda.”

The author avoids major criticism of Stephen Cambone, Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence, but he reveals the DoD operations against Iran. He tells us about Chalabi hoaxing DIA for millions, and that President Bush ordered Chalabi off the payroll.

He confirms Paul William's view on Al Qaeda having nuclear capabilities.

Pre 9/11 air travelers believed “be calm, see Cuba” when hijacked. Pre 9-11, and today still, our senior government executives are still confusing loyalty with integrity. We can do better. We need, right now, a “Smart Nation.”

On Intelligence: Spies and Secrecy in an Open World
Intelligence Failure: How Clinton's National Security Policy Set the Stage for 9/11
Bin Laden: The Man Who Declared War on America
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
A Pretext for War: 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies
Osama's Revenge: THE NEXT 9/11 : What the Media and the Government Haven't Told You
The True Cost of Conflict/Seven Recent Wars and Their Effects on Society
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest

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2007/04/012009/12/04

Review: Second Chance–Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

4 Star, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Strategy

Erudite, State-Centric, Useful Observations in Isolation,

April 1, 2007

Zbigniew Brzezinski

Edit of 30 Mar 08 to add links.

I struggled with this book. In the context of all the other books I have read, I was hoping for something a big more fullsome and balanced. This is an erudite state-centric report card on three President's that only a Washington insider would write, and and that most who are not Washington insiders will find daunting.

It is an essay without references. It is also a partisan work, one that recognizes the American political, economic, and social frameworks are broken, but one that assumes the Democrats will have a second chance in the aftermath of the atrocities and high crimes and misdemanors characteristic of the Bush-Cheney regime. In my view, the only thing worse for America than imperial Republicans is inept Democrats. The party “machines” have got to go. (Cf. Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It; The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy); and Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders.

The book ends with a proposition for a joint legislative-executive global policy planning council, with a shared common staff. This is a variation of the strategic body General Tony Zinni discusses in his most recent book, The Battle for Peace: A Frontline Vision of America's Power and Purpose.

I put the book down feeling empty–indeed–with some dispair. Is this all there is? No big ideas such as the restoration of the US Information Agency and the creation of an Open Source Agency as called for on page 413 of the 9-11 Commission. No mention of a miniscule tax on every Federal Reserve transactiion, allowing the elimination of all individual income taxes. No mention of the 5 billion at the bottom of the pyramid, of the ten high-level threats, twelve policies, and eight other major players. No mention at all of the military-industrial complex and the heavy metal military that Presidents from both parties have been all too willing to go along with. No mention of the two trillion a year illicit economy (in the context of a 7-9 trillion total global economy), see Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers, and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy.

No mention of the fact that it was this author who gave the Pakistani's a bye on their nuclear plans, or the direct connection between Iranian funding of the Pakistani program, and their probable possession of a nuclear tipped Russian Sunburn missile (carrier killer, zig-zags at 2.2 Mach).

America needs a transpartisan government that ends the winner take all approach to leadership, and that starts with a balanced sustainable budget. The Comptroller General has declared the USA to be insolvent. It's going to take a lot more than high-sounding platitudes to get America back on track. There are 27 secessionist movements, Vermont's being the most powerful, for good reason: it is time to dissolve this government, and the two political “gangs” that share the spoils that are not theirs to give, in order to restore the Republic of, by, and for the people. The image I have loaded gives a sense of what I was hoping to see. Joe Nye comes closer with his Soft Power ideas. World War III is about two things: unleashing the innovative energy of the five billion in extreme poverty, and spreading the gospel of tolerance and diversity. Both demand $3 billion a year for a massive global free online educational network in all languages, accessible via low-cost cell phones.

If America gets a second chance, it will be from the bottom up. The existing political enterprise is worse than dead, it is a rotting carcass that needs to be burned. Brzezinski addresses the superficial outcomes of a grotesqley flawed and out-dated system (Kissinger did well on this in Does America Need a Foreign Policy? : Toward a Diplomacy for the 21st Century but then he's also done it wrong, see The Trial of Henry Kissinger. America and the world are too complicated to be run by one white man and his cronies, all controlled by corporations that internalize profit and externalize social cost. If we do not focus on a revolution in the minds and hearts of all humanity, neither our diplomats nor our warriors will be able to stop the immolation of the planet.

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2007/03/222009/12/04

Review: Rumsfeld–His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Government), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), War & Face of Battle

Damns the Man, Ignores the Dead and Wounded,

March 22, 2007

Andrew Cockburn

Having read most of the books about the last eight years and the various debacles imposed on the world and on America by Cheney-Bush (see my lists on Iraq After-Action Reports and on Evaluating Dick Cheney), much of this book was not a surprise, but I would also be quick to say that there are a number of gems here not found elsewhere.

Of special interest to me were the reality that the lies and fantasy on the Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq were a replay of the Team B lies about Soviet weapons successfully carried out under Reagan. This cabal has a clear pattern of believing that any lie is acceptable, that Congress is to be ignored, that there is no constraint on Executive power.

Gems:

Rumsfeld started talking about bombing Iraq before 3 pm on 9/11.

Rumsfeld built the force that he fought with, back when he was first secretary of defense.

Sadaam Hussein was the only Arab leader that welcomes Rumsfeld in the 1990's.

Novak was a willing accomplice in destroying CIA under Reagan with Team B lies, and again in destroying Plume today.

Rumsfled liked Doug Feith *because* of Feith's notorious stupidity.

Chairman of Joint Chiefs of Staff was widely viewed as an “abused puppy” avoiding confrontation with Rumsfeld.

CIA won the Afghan war, but Rumseld claimed it for himself. No mention that I noticed of Rumsfeld's disterous mistakes in allowing Pakistan to evacuate 3000 Tlaiban and Al Qaeda, and in refusing to but a Ranger battalion in Bin Laden's path when CIA had “eyes on” for four days (see my reviews of “First In” and “JAWBREAKER” as well as various books on my Iraq After Action list).

After a while I tired of this book. I thought to myself that the author has done a good job on destroying Rumsfeld, but there is a great deal of context that is missing, including Cheney's more active role behind the scenes, and virtually no mention of the thousands of US dead and 75,000 amputees that Rumsfeld created for no good reason.

My bottom line: Rumsfeld was put at Defense because the first candidate irritated the President, the President was a fool and wanted to appoint someone his father hated, and Dick Cheney was happy to have his former mentor over at Defense, which Cheney, as a more recent Secretary of Defense, no doubt felt he could manage from the White House. America chose to allow this cabal to steal two elections in a row, and to go to war on a web of lies denounced in advance by General Zinni,at OSS.Net, and in many other places. SHAME ON US. Rumsfled is our child, and we have to live with what we have wrought on the world.

Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil
First In: An Insider's Account of How the CIA Spearheaded the War on Terror in Afghanistan
Jawbreaker: The Attack on Bin Laden and Al-Qaeda: A Personal Account by the CIA's Key Field Commander
The One Percent Doctrine: Deep Inside America's Pursuit of Its Enemies Since 9/11
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency

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2007/03/022009/12/04

Review: The Google Story–Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time

4 Star, Information Society, Information Technology

Useful Insights, Not the Whole Story,

March 2, 2007

David A. Vise

EDIT 10 Dec 07 to point to “Google 2.0: The Calculating Predator.” Costs $675 for an online copy, causes panic behind the scenes on Wall Street. Google for my review book review by the same title.

This book is as close to the “authorized biography” as one can get. Engineers and investors and competitors should go instead to “The Google Legacy” by Stephen E. Arnold, sold only by Infonortics UK (online). End users and third party developers are better off with any of the 50+ other books that focus on penetration testing, analytics, Google Earth, etcetera.

The book purports to be a revelation of secrets, but that is simply not true. This is a compilation of what anyone could have put together from enough coffee house conversations.

What jumps out at me is Google's potentially crippling addiction to advertising revenue, its failure to offer sense-making and visualization, and its extraordinary good luck in being able to draw the best talent from NASA, Microsoft, Bell Labs, etc.

I am impressed by what Google is doing in becoming a multi-lingual service, and eager to see when they can start offering multi-lingual search with translation on demand for micro-cash.

There is no denying the brilliance of the founders in using links as a form of citation analysis, but as anyone who has compared the results from a professional set of sites via Deep Web Technologies, with a Google search, the former is 10 to 1000 times better on any given serious topic.

The book is useful for insights into the founders, and especially Larry Page. One learns of his interest in transportation analytics, and in molecular biology and genetics.

I was surprised to learn that Jeff Bezos helped the founders in the beginning, but now I have the impression that Google does not play well with others, even those that helped them get started, and that is a shame.

“The Google Legacy” does a much better job on the technical strengths of Google (see also the briefing by Stephen E. Arnold in the Archives at OSS.Net), but this books does note the strength of Google in combining software innovation with scalable economic hardware.

Anecdotes include how Google Doodles emerged, the early use of focus groups, and the hiring of a brain surgeon to be the network manager. There is adequate mention of the 20% free play rule, but insufficient discussion what has emerged from that.

On page 143 the author, no doubt misled by whoever he interviewed, claims that “CIA agents use Google to track terrorist groups.” Baloney. Google has a “secret” relationship with CIA (the Office of Research & Development), and a test was done that produced a handful of “hits” all of which were worthless and most of which were severely dated.

Gmail foundered on privacy issues, as did Google's desktop search. The author is incorrect when he says that Google has added sufficient security. The fact is that the US Government is still finding restricted documents leaking out whenever they install Google Enterprise. I for one would never trust Google on my small business machines.

The author describes the division of responsibility among the founders and the CEO: Eric is operations and finance; Serge is policy, politics, and people; Larry is hiring, priorities, and physical space.

While the author describes the Google digital library projects, he fails to satisfy. .

Google's idea for satisfying publishers by using the content only to entice the reader to buy the book is either idiocy, or a subterfuge. Presumably Google knows that synthetic information is free of copyright, but they seem loath to take the easy step of offering footnotes or micro-text extracts for micro-cash. In this regard, they really should be merging with Amazon and the Internet Archive (Brewster Kahle) to create a world library that can be translated into all languages on demand, given for free to the five billion poor, and monetized by using Doug Englebart's Open Hypertextdocument System (OHS).

The book ends with a few pages of “tips” on how to use Google that are nowhere as good as Nancy Blachman et all “How to Do Everything with Google,” or Arno Reuser's briefing at OSS.Net on the open source intelligence system of the future.

I end the book with a small diagram that is NOT in the book, it is my own intellectual property, but it is a useful means of evaluating why Google is not as good as it could be. On a compass, SEARCH is West; SENSE-MAKING is North, SHARE is East, and Saving the World is SOUTH. Google sucks at three of the four, and that may be their epitaph.

I asked a very smart person why Google does not play well with others and is so slow to reach out (see the two images I have loaded to the book on Wikinomics) and he had a direct answer based on direct experience with the founders: “Young guys who made their first 100 million on their own ideas are not really interested in ‘not invented here.'” That's a real shame. If Google were to focus on rapidly offering the eighteen desktop functions that were defined by CIA in 1986 (CATALYST, see OSS.Net), using Drupal 5.0 as the foundation, in close alliance with STRONG ANGEL, not only could we bury Microsoft and ORACLE, but we could save the world in the time allowed, which is to say, in the next fifteen years.

Larry Brilliant (Director of Google.org) points out that pandemics have killed over 20 popes, kings, queens, and prime ministers. Google has the opposite problem–it's not willing to gain control of the planet by giving up control of the hub. I know for a fact that India is thinking about how to displace Google (even if their chief R&D guy is there–who knows, he may have gone native again), and I am earnestly dismayed that Google, Wikipedia, the Internet Archive, and Amazon as well as IBM, CISCO, and Yahoo cannot get together with an anti-trust waiver similar to what was granted to the MCC with Bobby Inman and Doug Lenat. Time is a'wasting and time is the one thing we cannot replace nor buy.

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Category: 4 Star

Review: Unintended Consequences–The United States at War

Review: The Weather Wizard’s Cloud Book–A Unique Way to Predict the Weather Accurately and Easily by Reading the Clouds

Review: Understanding Weatherfax

Review: At the Center of the Storm–My Years at the CIA

Review: Second Chance–Three Presidents and the Crisis of American Superpower

Review: Rumsfeld–His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

Review: The Google Story–Inside the Hottest Business, Media, and Technology Success of Our Time