5.0 out of 5 stars Perhaps the most important — certainly the most thought-provoking — book in years
October 22, 2009
Review by Jesse Kornbluth
Book by Stewart Brand
I was interviewing George Soros as the Dow rapidly shed 300 points and crashed through the 10,000 level.
“Is this it?” I asked.
Soros shrugged — a very calm reaction from an investor who might have seen his portfolio shrink by hundreds of millions of dollars in a matter of minutes.
I lost much less that day, but I had a different reaction — panic. The thing to do, I concluded, was to trade my beloved Classic 6 in Manhattan for a self-sustaining house in the country. Ten acres would suffice, as long as they had decent water, land suitable for a large garden and enough sunlight for the solar panels.
I bought a URL for the web site I planned to launch: […]. This was no back-to-the-land hippie retreat. I would be stepping into the smart future: small town/rural purity (Woodsmoke) with the 21st century benefits of a fast Internet (Broadband) and Amazon.com's free shipping.
Given all that, you will understand that I was quite stunned to read “Whole Earth Discipline: An Ecopragmatist Manifesto” — by Stewart Brand, creator of the 1960s and 1970s classic, the “Whole Earth Catalog” — and discover that the last place its author would have me go is back to the land.
REPOSTED to end Russian spammer constant hitting on former URL.
Best Possible Starting Point for Executives & Students
October 20, 2009
Seena Sharp
This book is a gem. It is a rare book that I would recommend equally to senior executives and students thinking about a career path, but this is such a book. I agreed to review this book for the publisher and received a free copy. I've known the author since the early 1990's when the U.S. Government first tried to learn how to do commercial intelligence, calling it Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). They still don't get it, for the same reason most executives don't get it: arrogance, ignorance, and a complacency that comes from having too much money and not enough accountability.Before laying down my notes, let me first place this book squarely in the top twelve books in English. This is the one I would recommend to anyone as a starter, followed by:
EDIT of 6 Sep 2010 to add comments on books once received.
I bought this book, a real bargain, at the suggestion of Dr. Walter Dorn, the “dean” of the peace intelligence scholars, who cites the book with great favor in his own forthcoming book, KEEPING WATCH: Monitoring and Technology in UN Peace Operations, which I am going through now in galley form.
Now that I am holding it in my hands, here are some comments.
1) Published in 1966, it is a phenomenal, an utterly superb, historical review of League of Nations, Latin American Union, and UN peace observation missions from 1920 to 1965. The book concludes with a major section on “Strengthening Peace Observations.”
2) Right away I decide to donate this book to the George Mason University library without marking it up, nor am I reading it, having seen enough to understand why Professor Dorn recommends it so highly as a historical reference work.
3) The book clearly needs a sequel, from 1966 to date, over 40 years of new conflicts and new peace missions, and I make mention of this hoping that someone reading this review will be inspired to take on the project with many collaborators.
I've been browsing this marvelous collection–559 pages–all afternoon, and the afternoon has been broken up frequently with outrageous laughter and occasional gasps of disbelief. This book, organized as it is, is vastly more important and easier to read than the original 2600 Magazine letters that I have been glancing at since first helping and joining this group in 1994.
Hats off to Wiley for having the brains to see the value, and the editorial talent to select, edit, and present so perfectly. This book, thick as it is, has exactly the right amount of white space, the selection and use of fonts is just right, and the index, while not as extensive as I would have liked, is adequate.
“Look Inside the Book” has been set in motion, in the meantime, here is the table of contents that runs from the early days in the 1980's up through today, with absolutely phenomenal selections that provide priceless insights into the mindsets of BOTH bona fide hackers AND the clueless wanna-bes.
1. Question Upon Question
2. Tales from the Retail Front
3. The Challenges of Life as a Hacker
4. Technology
5. Our Biggest Fans
6. Behind the Walls
8. A Culture of Rebels
9. Strange Ramblings
Easily half if not more of the value of the book is to be found is the witty, acerbic, funny, insightful, surprising comments of the author Emmanuel Goldstein (not his real name), who has single-handedly but with many willing volunteers created the legitimate means of enabling information sharing and sense-making among hackers, who I am often at pains to describe as being the same as astronauts and pioneers, pushing the edge of the envelope.
EDIT of 2 August 2010: However great the mind or the man, we all make mistakes. Paul Hawkins made his with Monsanto, I've made mine. ClimateGate established with clarity the fraud associated with both the fabricated science and the intended “sub-prime mortgaging” of the Earth's atmosphere. Maurice Strong and Al Gore are pushing fraud, not fixing. Mercury and sulfer and methane are bigger problems than carbon, and global warming is a small element–not even close to being the main event–within Environmental Degradation, threat #3 after poverty and infectious disease. It troubles me when people vote against the messenger–McKibben is a great man–he's also made a mistake. Get over it and do more reading, integrate more, and it will all come out fine.
. . . . . . .
I was so annoyed with the narrow first third that glorifies the likes of Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, and Larry “women can't think like scientists” Summers that I was actually contemplating three stars. This is a weakly researched book that buys into the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Maurice Strong carbon fraud, while ignoring the vastly more intelligent findings of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, in which Environmental Degradation is #3 and more broadly defined.
Any book that quotes the discredited James Hansen of NASA and that builds a case around Op-Eds and undocumented assertions is a stain upon scholarship, and the first third of this book falls into that sinkhole. Despite many references to the Copenhagen summit, there is not a word in this book about ClimateGate (see the Rolling Update at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog) and therefore I find this author guilty of active misrepresentation bordering on a lack of integrity in this specific instance. The author is spending too much time with newspapers and not enough time with books representing the distilled reflections of others.
Having said that, and deducted one star for the lapse, I find the balance of the book absorbing, fascinating, and rich in gems of insight and fact. It should be read in conjunction with:
My criticism and praise of this important work are based on the above and the other 1,600 non-fiction reviews I have posted to Amazon, all more easily accessible in 98 reading categories at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Network.
Recommended by a very broadly read and traveled person from the Southern Hemisphere.
You do NOT have to log in. Takes over a minute to start, click further along on the bar to hurry the start, after first clicking on the Play triangle.
This is a world-class film, exquisitely produced and thoughtfully scripted. This is the real deal and is consistent with everything that has been poking into the public consciousness for decades.
US started trying to shoot them down in 1952–this is about as smart as the Spanish declaring any indigenous peoples who did not speak Spanish to be heathens subject to enslavement. Lost so many pilots the order finally rescinded in 1954 or so.
Many excellent interviews with a range of serious people.
The Roswell alien crash was directly associated with US early nuclear endeavors probably being “scouted” by concerned aliens.
Most disturbing is the lengths that US and UK governments went to drug and otherwise disorient and silence direct witnesses who were not “cleared” to be aware of extra-terrestial matters.
Brazilian and Russian reports suggest alien activity in “containing” effects of early nuclear explosions.
Mexico is so focused that a two-hour prime time show covers UFOs once a week.
Norway has world's only full-time UFO spotting and assessing station (Hessdalen)
Excellent discussion of both alien collection (e.g. two ton slab of earth cut and lifted with no evidence of heavy equipment) and alien concern over Homo Sapiens combination of nuclear weapons, violent nature, and early space exploration. Specific discussion of alien interventions to cause offensive missile malfunction as well as “shut down” of missiles on alert….
Relationship of media to intelligence explored in a very negative manner–fast forward to 9/11! National Enquirer bought out by CIA front company to sensationalize and marginalize extra-terrestial material.
Bleeding-edge thinking is that Homo Sapiens is a hybrid possibly altered from earliest days of emergence. Covers abductions, surgical procedures, samples with focus on reproductive organs. Babies, toddlers described in various forms of human to alien mixtures. Abductees who have children see the children abducted in turn, as if the aliens are doing generational studies.
As many as 60 distinct alien “types” are believed to exist, playing many different roles across many different types of human groups and activities.
“Truth Embargo” implemented 62 years ago is coming to an end. Classification is an obstacle, and especially so in NASA of all places. The truth will come out. This is the story of the Millenium. It will change virtually every paradigm across every science *and* (even more importantly) our cosmic/social paradigms.
A “must see” film.
Countries Opening Their UFO Files to Public: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay
Review Deleted By Amazon, Reconstructed from Memory
July 20, 2010
C. D. B. Bryan
I read and reviewed this book when it came out in hard-copy, and I continue to be very annoyed with Amazon for its policy of deleting best in class reviews from the past so as to encourage new reviewers–they would be better off deleting the least useful review, but they seem motivated by a desire to give the new reviewers a chance to achieve rankings (hence, deleting least useful reviews does not meet the need, but deleted high value reviews of high performance reviewers does).
What I remember most clearly from the book is CONSISTENCY. Across all the encounters, all the accounts, all the investigations, there was a distinct, scientifically-validated consistency in all of the descriptions, effects, etcetera. This was the first book I was able to find that combined reputable scientific inquiry with a massive cross-section of stories from around the world, and that impressed me greatly.
Best Possible Starting Point for Executives & Students
Seminal Work Cited by Dr. Walter Dorn
Starts Weak, Ends Strong, Not the Whole Picture
