1-7 Star Rating – Page 218 – Public Intelligence Blog

Read Hare's Review, Excellent Complement to Tarpley Book on Bush,

March 2, 2007

William John Cox

After reading Hare's review I do not have anything to add other than to say that this book is a wonderful compelemnt to “The Unauthorized Biography of George Bush” by Webster Tarpley, whose book on 9/11 I also recommend very highly.

As documented by this book, this attorney and author, George Bush is one of the most crooked, inept, and deceitful people ever to serve in the Presidency. By no means alone, he never-the-less takes mendacity to a new level, and this author is to be congratulated for his painstaking effort to document the facts–I only regret that we could not reach enough Americans in 2004 to prevent a second four years.

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2007/03/062009/12/04

Review: Priority One–Together We Can Beat Global Warming

5 Star, Environment (Solutions)

Viable Solutions Instead of Platitudes–In Public Service,

March 6, 2007

Allan J. Yeomans

This 492 page book is the work of a a seriious pioneer in Australia who decided that the public could use a serious book with serious solutions, instead of the range of platitudes, fear-mongering, or outright misrepresentation (energy companies like Exxon lying about the facts).

It is an over-size book that ships from the USA and reached me in a few days instead of the 4-6 weeks that Amazon shows. It is very well laid out, two-column, 12 chapters, listing 50 specific local, national, and global strategies that can be implemented today. I regard this book as the graduate school equivalent of “50 Simple Things You Can Do to Save the Earth.”

What I find especially powerful about this book is that it focuses less on the industrial undermining of the atmosphere, and more on agriculture, which suffers from a range of problems including top soil rather than deep root farming, very unwise use of toxic chemcials that pollute aquifers (while failing to separate animal feces from water feeding into spinach fields, as the US found to its horror recently).

The author also does a superb job of pointing out that global warming is an ENERGY problem as much as it is an emissions problem. It is down-right nuts for the US to contront Iran over the need for nuclear energy while pretending that the US is not the primary proliferator of both nuclear technologies and the weapons of death. Safe nuclear energy as well as many forms of renewalbe solar and wind energy, and portable energy such as hydrogen from water using a renewable energy to make it effective, are all with us now.

Bottom line: this book should be in every educational program that seeks to understand solutions, and this book should be required reading for everyone that respects “Inconvenient Truth.” This book is the book you read after you agree with Al Gore, and recognize that he is summarizing, very eloquently, the problem, without actually providing any solutions.

Winston Churchill, God-Father of the English-speaking peoples, is smiling down at Allan Yeomans, the author and self-financed publisher of this volume–he's fighting the real war for our future, rather than the false war against terrorism.

A book like this would normally sell for US$75 or so, but the author, as a public service, ordered it to be priced close to cost plus Amazon commision plus shipping from Australia, and only recently found a US distributor so the book could be listed in the world's single greatest library catalog, Amazon.com.

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2007/03/042009/12/04

Review: The Edge of Disaster–Rebuilding a Resilient Nation

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Security (Including Immigration)

Major Contribution That Congress is NOT Paying Attention To,

March 4, 2007

Stephen Flynn

This is a major contribution to national security & prosperity that is being actively ignored by Congress. We must all buy the book and force the issue. HR 1 from the House purports to implement the recommendations of the 9-11 Commission but does so in a shoddy, incomplete, and largely anti-democratic fashion, imposing the secret stovepipe model of one-way federal to state communications, without any respect (or understanding) of what this author recommends instead, which is to add the public to the loop, and also create localized means of facilitating communications among all the leaders–county government, law enforcement, business, academic, labor, religious, etc.

This book is every bit as good-even better–than the author's first book, “America the Vulnerable,” which I reviewed and rated very highly. I recommend that both be bought, and then waved in every public meeting possible.

The major leap forward in this book is the juxtaposition of localized resilience to disaster of any kind (not just terrorism), with the very pointed and strong dismay about how we are wasting $700 billion a year on a heavy-metal military to fight (and anger) people overseas, while spending less than $70 million a year on key infrastructure and homeland defense needs. While the Department of Homeland Defense now has roughly $36 billion a year (perhaps even more), they are giving waste, fraud, and mismanagement a completely new meaning, taking pathological irrelevance to new heights. This is especially true of their antiquated approach to intelligence and not sharing information nor being receptive to bottom up non-secret information.

I especially respect the author's detailed cataloguing of our infrastructure vulnerabilities that are of our own making. Badly patched dams, high-rises built on sand, hospitals with no excess capacity, power grids over 50 years old that a single tree can bring down, waterways that are broken, and that if broken any more cannot deliver coal to run power plants essential to Middle American commerce, the list goes on. Especially frightening in the concept of the firestorm, which I first encountered in the 1980's when a newspaper looked at the NYC water mains, most built in the 1920's (that's the nineteen TWENTIES). If they break in a certain way, and a fire starts, NYC gets burned to the ground.

The author is gifted as both a former Coast Guard officer, and as a serious and articulate scholar that has done his homework. Especially valuable to me was his citation of a 2005 series of studies done by the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE), in which our Nation received 4 C's, 10 D's, and one Incomplete. That alone is grounds for the impeachment and dismissal of every Governor and every Senator and every Congressman. These people are not minding the public interest in a substantive sustainable way.

I have the word “holistic” written in my notes. This author provides in this book both a “big picture” and a whole range of vignettes that drive home the fact that the devil is in the details, and no one, at the Federal or the State levels, with a handful of exceptions, is actually minding the public interest.

He offers specific recommendations for the local level including improved webcam surveillance of ports and waterfronts, a bigger COPS II program, infrastructure committees with weight, a tax on the wealthiest beneficiaries of the public infrastructure, and his older recommendation from the first book, pushing cargo inspections overseas and incentivizing those that comply with Green Lanes that save hundred of thousands in ship and crew time.

Two success stories are Project Impact, and the Disaster Resistant Business (DRB) Program.

The Coast Guard is under-funded in all respects and I agree with this. As one who designed, with Norman Polmar and Ron O'Rourke, the 450-ship Navy for global coverage, I absolutely agree that we can afford to scrap plans for more nuclear carriers and B-2 bombers, and instead fund the resilience and disaster relief and waterway safety needs of the Coast Guard.

The author concludes that our top priority should not be a heavy-metal military global war, but rather a focus on being able to weather the age of terrorism (that I would add, Bush-Cheney have done more to exacerbate than anyone else–Cheney started this war, not Bin Laden, and Larry Silverstein murdered most of those who died at the World Trade Center, not Bin Laden. For these two individuals to not have been indicted, along with Rudy “scoop and dump” Guliani, tells me that our entire government is corrupt and inattentive to the public interest. It is time to either reconstitute the entire government, or break up into the “Nine Nations” and stop giving Washington money to waste on Dick Cheney's favorite crime syndicates).

The author ends very persuasively with the admonition that the Federal Government is totally out of date and unable to shift from stovepipe secrecy to networked information sharing and shared bottom up resilient decision making. He recommends that we begin at the home and neighborhood level, and then work up to the village, county, and state level. He does not suggest what can be done to beat the Federal government back into affordable utility.

Here is an abbreviated version of the ten recommendations at the end of the book:

1) Force Washington to build national resiliency at home
2) Put terrorism in the context of the other threats (see Wikipedia, “Ten Threats”)
3) Fix the infrastructure now
4) Inform the American people, they are our greatest asset
5) Tap the ingenuity and resources of the private sector
6) Do not underestimate the value of individual preparedness
7) Do not allow government to pretend the pandemic will not happen
8) Discourage construction along vulnerable coastlines and in flood plains
9) Properly fund and support local police and emergency responders
10) Promote the concept of resiliency as a global imperative.

The author's bottom line is clear: the Federal Government is in denial, and also ignorant. We can do better. Public anger needed NOW.

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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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2007/03/022009/12/04

Review: Nemesis–The Last Days of the American Republic

4 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback

Sorrows of Empire is Better,

March 2, 2007

Chalmers Johnson

I found this book to be disappointing. Sorrows of Empire, by the same author, is better than both this book, and his first book in the same theme, “Blowback.”

This is as good a current review as any, with respect to America's unilateral militarism and the corruption associated with the military-industrial complex. It ends appropriately with a focus on the lunacy of trying to “dominate” space, something the Chinese just demonstrated is impossible with their successful destruction of a satellite in space, from the ground.

The book, as some other reviewers suggest, very uneven. There are many other books I have read that go well beyond this one, such as Chomsky's books, “War is a Racket,” “The Cheating Culture,” “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man,” “The Soul of Capitalism,” and so on (see all my lists).

The final chapter highlights the recurring themes across the three books:

a) The use of Executive secrecy to avoid Congressional and public oversight

b) The illegal Executive “signing statements” and other renunciations of explicit legislative mandates

c) The degree to which special interests, and especially special interests from within the military-industrial complex

d) The vulnerability of the US economy, which now focuses largely on military production while out-sourcing most other manufacturing

e) The Enron-style accounting that characterizes the Pentagon, which in my personal view is a sophisticated means of stealing money from the indidividual taxpayer, and transferring it to the major corporations and the banks behind them

The book ends with a mix of resignation and hope. Americans can choose, in 2008, between Empire and Democracy. It is doubtful that Bush and Cheney will be impeached. The degree to which the public has ignored all the evidence commonly understood by the 9-11 Truth Movement, and all of the evidence about White House manipulation and fabrication of intelligence with respect to Iraq, Iran, and North Korea, is quite troubling.

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2007/03/022009/12/04

Review: Painful Questions–An Analysis of the September 11th Attack

6 Star Top 10%, 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs

The Author Hits It Out of the Park–Video is Spectacular,

March 2, 2007

Eric Hufschmid

This is one of the best 9-11 books (with its own video) and I am persuaded by this author and others that 9-11 has not been properly investigated, and that there has been a major cover-up. The video is very powerful, very detailed, very thoughtfully narrated, and carries this book and this author to the very top of the list of reasoned and thus authoritative contributions.

Unlike the other 9/11 books I have reviewed, this book, which is letterhead size, is a brilliantly compelling collection of color photographs, color diagrams, thoughtful calculations, and plain text in two columns. The book and the DVD represent, in my opinion, the single best personal effort, and the single most credible case, to the effect that 9-11 was a huge scam on the American public.

The book, and the DVD, are *exhaustive*. There is no better word.

I especially like the author's discussion of the Oklahoma City bombing as a preview of a diversion (the truck bomb versus two airplanes) combined with controlled demolitions. Unexploded bombs are reported to have been found at the Federal Building, with news clippings. The author also covers the destruction of a wedding hall in Israel, and the downing of an Egyptian airplane, as rehearsals for 9-11.

I personally believe that the WTC were brought down by controlled demolitions planted by order of Larry Silverstein, but I am not certain if his action was done in partnership with Rudy Guliani and Dick Cheney, or on his own. The author does not mention the aspestos problem facing Larry Silverstein, for that I recommend viewing the DVD “Loose Change” as well as “9/11 The Press for Truth.”

I also believe that the evidence strongly suggests that the Pentagon was hit by a missile fired by the US, and that there has been a massive cover-up.

I am relatively certain that 9-11 was allowed to happen, and that the majority of those who died–over 80%–died by order of Larry Silverstein, with or without the explicit protective consent of Dick Cheney.

I am quite certain that the 9-11 Commission was a deliberate cover-up, and that Controlled Demolition, all of the WTC security people, the insurance executives, and key Pentagon officials have not been properly investigated.

One day these monsters will be held to account. I have to say, on the basis of all that I have read, viewed, and thought, that it is not Bin Laden that has brought down the Republic, but rather Dick Cheney. Our most fearsome enemies are domestic, not foreign.

Bottom line: the political leadership of America can not be trusted and are almost certainly guilty of high crimes and misdemeanors (see my lists on holding Cheney accountable, and on impeachment guides for citizens).

For those skeptics that continue to believe their government, see the points made in my reivew of the below superb revisionist history:
Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History

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2007/03/022009/12/04

Review: 9-11 Descent into Tyranny–The New World Order’s Dark Plans to Turn Earth into a Prison Planet

5 Star, 9-11 Truth Books & DVDs

Important Pieces of the Puzzle,

March 2, 2007

Alex Jones

I agree with those that suggest that the author goes over the top sometimes, but I will also be quite explicit in saying that I think Alex Jones is a very important part of the patriotic truth movement, and all that he does is in my view at least 80% vital to improving public intelligence in the public interest.

This book plays out a theme that relates the bombing of the Federal Building in Oklahoma with 9-11, and I read through it at the same time that I was watching the DVD “Painful Questions” which actually had news clips about additional unexploded bombs being found in the Federal Building after the fact.

I am increasingly frustrated as I read so many of these books, each with vital tid-bits, many of which I can see correlating with one another, but yet no one anywhere has cut the spines off all these great books, digitized them, and created a visual diagram that makes sense of all this.

One thing I am certain of: the White House and Larry Silverstein are both hiding information from the public, and one day we will have proof of the degree to which elements of our own government allowed 9-11 to happen and went the extra step of helping to murder thousands of Americans solely and exclusively to manipulate a mandate for combining a police state at home with a unilateral ;militarism-terrorism abroad.

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Category: 1-7 Star Rating

Review: You’re Not Stupid! Get the Truth–A Brief on the Bush Presidency

Review: Priority One–Together We Can Beat Global Warming

Review: The Edge of Disaster–Rebuilding a Resilient Nation

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

Review: Nemesis–The Last Days of the American Republic

Review: Painful Questions–An Analysis of the September 11th Attack

Review: 9-11 Descent into Tyranny–The New World Order’s Dark Plans to Turn Earth into a Prison Planet