Review: The Outlaw Sea–A World of Freedom, Chaos, and Crime (Paperback)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Crime (Organized, Transnational), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

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4.0 out of 5 stars Replays Atlantic Monthly But Pleasantly Surprising,

December 18, 2005
William Langewiesche
This is not the book I was expecting. Normally it would only have gotten three stars, for recycling three articles, only one of which was really of interest to me (on piracy), but the author is gifted, and his articulation of detail lifts the book to four stars and caused me to appreciate his final story on the poisonous deadly exportation of ship “break-up” by hand. It is a double-spaced book, stretched a bit, and not a research book per se.

Two high points for came early on. The author does a superb job of describing the vast expanse of the ungovernable ocean, three quarters of the globes surface, carrying 40,000 wandering merchant ships on any given day, and completely beyond the reach of sovereign states. The author does a fine job of demonstrating how most regulations and documentation are a complete facade, to the point of being both authentic, and irrelevant.

The author's second big point for me came early on as he explored the utility of the large ocean to both pirates and terrorists seeking to rest within its bosom, and I am quite convinced, based on this book, that one of the next several 9-11's will be a large merchant ship exploding toxically in a close in port situation–on page 43 he describes a French munitions ship colliding with a Norwegian freighter in Halifax. “Witnesses say that the sky erupted in a cubic mile of flame, and for the blink of an eye the harbor bottom went dry. More than 1,630 buildings were completely destroyed, another 12,000 were damaged, and more than 1,900 people died.”

There is no question but that the maritime industry is much more threatening to Western ports than is the aviation industry in the aftermath of 9-11, and we appear to be substituting paperwork instead of profound changes in how we track ships–instead of another secret satellite, for example, we should redirect funds to a maritime security satellite, and demand that ships have both transponders and an easy to understand chain of ownership. There is no question that we are caught in a trap: on the one hand, a major maritime disaster will make 9-11 look like a tea party; on the other the costs–in all forms–of actually securing the oceans is formidable.

Having previously written about the urgent need for a 450-ship Navy that includes brown water and deep water intercept ships (at the Defense Daily site, under Reports, GONAVY), I secure the fourth star for the author, despite my disappointment over the middle of the book, by giving him credit for doing a tremendous job of defining the challenges that we face in the combination of a vast sea and ruthless individual stateless terrorists, pirates, and crime gangs collaborating without regard to any sovereign state.

I do have to say, as a reader of Atlantic Monthly, I am getting a little tired of finding their stuff recycled into books without any warning as to the origin. Certainly I am happy to buy Jim Fallows and Robert Kaplan, to name just two that I admire, but it may be that books which consist of articles thrown together, without any additional research or cohesive elements added (such as a bibliography or index), should come with a warning. I for one will be more alert to this prospect in the future.

Having said that, I will end with the third reason I went up to four stars: the third and final story, on the poisonous manner in which we export our dead ships to be taken apart by hand in South Asia, with hundreds of deaths and truly gruesome working conditions for all concerned, is not one of the stories I have seen in article form before, it is a very valuable story, and for this unanticipated benefit, I put the book down a happy reader, well satisfied with the over-all afternoon.

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Review: Character Is Destiny–Inspiring Stories Every Young Person Should Know and Every Adult Should Remember (Hardcover)

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs

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4.0 out of 5 stars Righteous Good Stuff, Best with a Grain of Salt,

November 24, 2005
John McCain
I admire John McCain, his honorable service, and his character, which appears strong and constant. This book leaves me with mixed feelings. On the one hand, it is a fine selection of representative short stories, and anything which furthers enduring values, and especially the Golden Rule (do unto others as you would have them do unto you) is of urgent meaning to a country that suffers from what authors now call a “cheating culture.”

Where my mind wanders away from giving this book five stars is in the “white lie” and “lie by omission” arena. As we all now recognize that Karl Rove cheated John McCain out of the South Carolina election, and that Dick Cheney lied to Congress and the public and John McCain probably knew it, I come down wondering to myself why McCain chose to lie down for the extremist Republicans when he would not do so for his Vietnamese torturers? Why did he not declare himself an Independent, join with John Edwards, and found a new party?

Also, since Senators are too busy to write books, this book was clearly written by Mark Salter. Why not have him be the author, with John McCain writing the Foreword? Another little “white lie” that troubles me.

This is a fine book. It can and should inspire others. However, it should also inspire Senator McCain himself to look deeply, and decide if–as Eisenhower once was forced to decide–is he an American first, or a Republican first? From where I sit, he is sacrificing the Republic's character to preserve an inherently evil aspect of the extremist Republican party.

Character is easy to demonstrate against an obvious enemy. It is more difficult to display when you are betrayed by our own, the enemy is within your close circle of political alliances, and you are forced to choose between We the People, and the entrenched interests that own Congress and the White House.

Character is indeed destiny, and I for one pray that John McCain will rise above the Republican Party and focus on being an American first. John McCain and John Edwards, with a coalition cabinet declared in advance–that would be character. Anything else is business as usual.

This book comes at a good time, and its greatest value may be in giving John McCain, as prompted by Mark Salter, an opportunity to review the cards he holds and the cards he wishes to discard from his very full deck.

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Review: The Future of Work–How the New Order of Business Will Shape Your Organization, Your Management Style and Your Life (Hardcover)

4 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Future

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4.0 out of 5 stars Light, Western-bias, but worthwhile,

November 11, 2005
Thomas W. Malone
The bottom line in this book is on page 33, with a table showing how the cost of moving a page of text around the world and to an infinite number of people has gone from astronomical to zero. In the author's view, this changes everything.

The book is somewhat shallow, written for undergraduates, and very western in bias–as I ranted to Interval in 1993 (“God, Man, and Interval” easily found via Google), until these benefits can reach every impoverished individual in the world, so that they can begin using information access to create wealth, then we are simply in isolation.

Interestingly, the zero cost of communications comes at the same time that we pass the “peak oil” point and the end of cheap oil, the end of free water, and the rise of pandemic disease.

In that vein, I give the author high marks, taking the book to 4 stars from 3, for his emphasis on values. There is an ethical underpining to this book that is helpful. There is a broad literature, some recognized by the author, others not, that suggests that we made a very serious mistake when we disconnected work from kinship, and commoditized the human employee. The gutting of the pension funds and the destruction of local production in the face of Wal-Mart using cheap oil to ship US jobs overseas are just the latest examples of how our loss of perspective and ethics at the top of the food chain has hurt our economy and our people.

I believe that the author is on target with his emphasis on communications, but he does not address the other half of the equation, “sense-making” or collective intelligence. For that aspect I recommend Howard Rheingold's “Smart Mobs,” and Tom Atlee's “The Tao of Democracy.” General Alfred M. Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, drove this point home to Congress in the late 1980's when he said that the Marine Corps, alone among the military services, had communications and intelligence under the same flag officer “because communications without intelligence is noise, and intelligence without communications is irrelevant.” You need both.

One important point the author does not cover since he avoids addressing the needs of the Third World is this: the Department of Defense has enormous stores of abandoned communications satellite “residual capability,” that last 10-20% of a satellite that has been junked in favor of a newer fancier model. My Air Force colleagues tell me that a national project to make that capability available free could support T-1 connectivity across Africa, South Asia, the Caribbean, Central America, and South America.

Unfortunately, the U.S. Government is not yet in the information age, and not yet able to realize that it is Internet connectivity to all, not guns over all, that will bring peace and prosperity to the Earth. I do believe this author understands that, and I hope he expands his vision to embrace intelligence, and global access.

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Review: Spychips–How Major Corporations and Government Plan to Track Your Every Move with RFID (Hardcover)

4 Star, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Privacy

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4.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Review, Somewhat Hyped, Tries to Scare,

October 30, 2005
Katherine Albrecht
This is a tremendous, absolutely superb example of what “citizen intelligence” can mean in the world today. Two individuals have come together to thoroughly investigate the RFID (Radio Frequency Identification) marketplace, and they have published a book that is nothing short of brilliant in its detail, its notes, its photos, and its objectives.

They have even embedded in the book the fundamentals of mass psychology, and found two “hooks” for spreading fear of RFID among Jews (calling it the modern equivalent of the Yellow Star, which makes light of the Holocaust in this context) and fundamentalist Christians (calling it the Mark of the Beast that preceeds the apocalypse, also a step too far, in my view). My goodness-a two-woman CIA/Special Operations PSYOP unit!

On balance, the book is a superb technical review of what is possible and what is planned, and it is also seriously oversold and out of context. There is no question but that many companies, aided by the US Government, are planning for very intrusive tracking of individuals and their purchases. At the same time, the book ignores what is called a “path loss” obstacle (need for short-range transmitter to plugged in receiver), they ignore the ready availability of counter-measures (including aluminum foil, which they do mention in passing), and they fail to understand the severe challenges to massive data mining.

The book is somewhat out of context. While it enjoyes a superb Foreword from one of my five hacker/snowcrash heros, author Bruce Sterling, and it is full of unquestionably serious information, it is also oblivious to books like “The Long Emergency,” or “PowerDown,” and hence it fails to see that while RFID may be a pervert's dream and a Hitler-esque opportunity, the coming Great Depression is likely to bury most RFID applications as unaffordable.

There is much that is good about RFID that the authors leave unsaid. As companies like BreakAwayLtd.com advance reality games, RFID could allow citizens to understand how many child labor hours went into a product, or how much cheap oil was wasted on a product, or–as WIRED Magazine noted a few issues ago–actually tell a potential buyer “If you eat me I will kill you.”

The authors have performed a brilliant public service–I am absolutely totally admiring of what they have done–but the book must be understood to be somewhat unbalanced. Apart from not discussing the good of RFID as a logistics and cost of goods/return on investment capability, the authors also do not discuss the greatest danger within RFID data, that of ignorant programmers and stupid assumptions.

They do a very fine job of discussing how RFID can lead to a depersonification of services–a “smart” medical cabinet replacing a nurse, for example.

Throughout the book they offer quotes from great works or great speakers that are very good contributions to their work, and they also do a superb job of summarizing the RFID industry's spin and slur defenses against the kind of fact-finding and public disclosure that this excellent work embodies.

They conclude that the US Senate and the US Executive have “sold out” to the RFID industry, but that the consumer taxpayer can indeed stop RFID in its tracks by boycotting. They offer a thoughtful list of possible actions by any individual at the end of the book, and if they have one lament, it is that the RFID industry may be right about anticipating the “apathy” of the citizen taxpayer, and being able to implement it vision of persistent surveillance of all individuals and all things.

As an intelligence professional, long critical of the excessive investments in satellite collection (for example, the moronic current new system that will cost $9 billion and not add any substantive new capability), I have a note to myself that RFID is the private sector's tarpit–RFID is to industry what secret satellites were to government: a sucking chest wound into unreal amounts of cash will go, with little to show for it beyond the the logistics routing function.

The authors accept financial contributions but are not a 501c3. I believe that the best way we can honor them and help them is by buying their book. I have done so. Very worthwhile.

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Review: Global Outrage–The Origins and Impact of World Opinion from the 1780s to the 21st Century (Paperback)

4 Star, America (Anti-America)

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4.0 out of 5 stars Misleading Title, Difficult Read, Useful Observations,

October 25, 2005
Peter Stearns
The title is misleading–Global Outrage is a bit strong–the book is actually a very long narrative about the emergence of “world opinion,” a phrase that appears innumberable times on every page. it is therefore a difficult read with no illustrations, charts, or tables. Somewhat tedious.

Removing one star, then, the book is never-the-less quite interesting in its topic, which the author says has not been systematically reviewed in the past, and its findings. The author reviews the early days of anti-slavery, women's rights, labor rights, child labor, and the environment, concluding with the new campaigns against McDonald's wrappers, sweatshops, and Central American death squads.

Among the gems that made the purchase and the effort worthwhile:

1) World opinion, when it does mobilize, is generally right.

2) World opinion is insufficient to deter a great power such as the USA from its chosen course, but it can impose great and lasting costs on that power as time goes on.

3) World opinion is equally helpless against local customs and conditions, including the economic need for child labor and the deep cultural attachment to female mutilation in some regions.

4) World opinion is a force that rises and ebbs, whose tools and techniques change across issues and times, but it is a constant force in that it exists and it can have an impact.

5) World opinion has been reduced in force by the demise of the U.S. Information Agency and the once powerful labor unions whose AFL-CIO did so much to nurture labor rights around the globe. I had two thoughts as I contemplated this observation: first, that the US and the multinationals were short-sighted in ending the one and crushing the other–it is only now that we appreciate the intangible power for good they both represented; and second, as we grapple with the needs of Public Diplomacy and Strategic Communication, it is clear we need to reinvent both.

6) The book excels at pointing out across several examples that world opinion is powered by information sharing. The most important information sharing is from the bottom up–from those who are persecuted to the outside world, and then back again in the form of petitions, letters, emails, etc. Information sharing is also important across national and cultural boundaries, helping raises expectations and standards as well as the costs of non-compliance with expectations.

7) Finally, “world opinion” is put forth by the author as the means by which humanity agrees on common standards and expectations that co-exist with regional and cultural differences, and provide a shared vision for humanity.

I found the author's concluding suggestions quite relevant to the global Information Operations campaign that the USA is about to embark upon: he suggested that we need to research as deeply and broadly as possible where popular opinion rests on a wide variety of issues, and use that as a benchmark for evaluating the acceptability and sustainability of governmental politices as well as corporate practices; and we should, at least once a decade, examine the organizations, tools, and techniques of “world opinion” to see who they are changing, and if they are changing in the composition of constituencies or the focus of effort.

Concluding, the author is slightly optemistic about “world opinion” being a countervailing force against both militant Americans and radical Islamists, but he notes that “world opinion” is by no means a steady or assured power, only one that will have some form of influence, always varied.

This is an academic work, with a good index, notes, and recommended readings for each chapter. It can be tough going, but all things considered, a useful reading on that intangible power called “world opinion.”

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Review: The Long Emergency–Surviving the Converging Catastrophes of the Twenty-First Century (Hardcover)

4 Star, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

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4.0 out of 5 stars Fuel Drop + Climate Change + Disease + Water Drop = Great Depression. ,

October 24, 2005
James Howard Kunstler
This is a brilliant piece of work, indeed so compelling that after glancing at it over morning coffee I set aside a work day and simply read the book. I take away one star because there is no index, no bibliography, and the author is very poor about crediting his sources. On page 163, for example, his observations about 300 Chinese cities being water-stressed, and about the Aral Sea disappearing, appear to have come directly from Marq de Villier's superb book on Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource but without attribution. This should have been footnoted.

Having said that, I consider the book itself, despite its run-on Op-Ed character, to be a tour de force that is very logically put forward. Indeed, although I have seen allusions elsewhere, this is the first place that I have seen such a thorough denunciation of how cheap oil underlies everything else including suburbia and Wal-Mart cf. Wal-Mart: The High Cost of Low Price. I am also quite impressed by the author's logical discourse on how communities have sacrificed their future coherence and sustainability for the sake of a few dollars savings on Wal-Mart products.

There is a great deal in the book that is covered more ably and in more detail by the other 600+ books I have reviewed at Amazon, and indeed, replicates much of what I write about in The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption but, I have to say, with a different twist that I admire very much.

I find the author's exploration of how cheap fuel led to wasted water, helping create cities and mega-agricultural endeavors that reduced our water at the same time that we consumed centuries worth of unrenewable fossil fuel, quite alarming.

I sum the book up on page 180 by writing in the bottom margin: “Fuel Drop + Climate Change + Disease + Water Drop = Great Depression.”

I disagree with those that consider the book excessively alarmist, and agree with those that find fault with the author's documentation. An index and an annotated bibliography would have doubled the value of this book. The author is clearly well read, logical, and articulate–an unkind person would say that he has also been lazy in not substantiating his arguments with what intelligence readers value most: an index and a good bibliography that respects the contributions of others to the argument.

The author in passing makes a good argument against our current educational system, and I for one believe that we need to get back to a system of life-long education accompanied by early apprenticeship and real-world employment and grounding for our young people. What passes for education today is actually child care, and the smartest young people, like my teen-ager, consider it to be nothing more than a prison.

On balance, a solid 4, a solid buy, and worth its weight in gold if you act on his advice and begin planning an exit strategy from those places likely to run out of water, fuel, and transport options in the next 20 years.

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Review: My FBI–Bringing Down the Mafia, Investigating Bill Clinton, and Fighting the War on Terror (Hardcover)

4 Star, Biography & Memoirs

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4.0 out of 5 stars 5 for Khobar, 3 for Omissions or Misdirection, 4 on Balance,

October 23, 2005
Louis J. Freeh
This book needs to be taken with a heavy dose of salts, for there are portions that are misleading. I refer particularly to the statements with respect to computing power. What the author does not tell us is that Congress *did* give the FBI a ton of money for computer upgrades, but he allowed his Assistant Directors to steal most of it for other projects, and then failed miserably in contracts management with beltway bandits who knew they would not be held accountable for failure. Freeh also avoids telling us that during most of his tenure, and up until very recently (this is less his personal problem than an inherent pathology in the FBI culture) more intelligence people QUIT every month than could be hired. The FBI environments are not well-suited for objective intelligence analysis or counter-intelligence, and certainly not for counter-terrorism either.

The books gets four stars over-all because of one exceptional aspect: the authoritative account of what we knew about the Iranian responsibility for Khobar Towers, when we knew it, when the President (Clinton) knew it, and when Lake and the others knew it. For this alone Clinton, Albright, and Lake, in particular, should be held accountable, for that specific attack on U.S. soldiers was the opening shot in the Iranian covert war against the United States. The Clinton team chose to focus on Saudi contributions to the Clinton library rather than defending America, setting the stage for equal dereliction of duty by the Bush team.

Freeh's book does earn four stars from me, and merits special recognition as a small part of the mosaic of truth that is emerging long after the 9-11 cover-ups and the complete refusal of Washington stake-holders to acknowledge any of the recommendations of either the Aspin-Brown Commission or the 9-11 Commission or the Weapons of Mass Destruction Commission. In the former case (Aspin-Brown) legitimate and heavy recommendations were made and ignored. In the latter cases, the recommended reforms are lipstick on the pig. Nothing has changed, we will get hit again.

I recommend that Freeh's book be read together with Stansfield Turner's very new publication, “BURN BEFORE READING,” because the two together persuade me that intelligence, like Justice, needs a Supreme Court and leaders appointed for life that are beyond the manipulative powers of the White House or the pork barrel politics of Congress. The Bush White House, like the Clinton White House, but for different reasons, chose to betray all Americans and ignore the clear and present danger of the Iranian attacks on the U.S., the Saudi support for global radicalization of Islam, and the Pakistani nuclear program. Today, Hamas and Hezbollah–creatures of the Iranians–not Al Qaeda–are the greatest threats to the destabilization of South Asia, Latin America, and portions of Africa, and despite the heroic efforts of the Special Operations community, it is not possible for them to be successful in the absence of honest adult leadership in Washington that demands a 24/7 full court press from ALL the instruments of national power.

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