1-7 Star Rating – Page 62 – Public Intelligence Blog

Will and Ariel Durant

7 Stars, Life Transformational, So Fundamental as to be Priceless, October 10, 2013

When I donated my 2500 volume library to George Mason University (down from 5000 in earlier years), this is one of a tiny handful of books I held back, along with Buckminster Fuller's Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure.

This edition is the FIRST edition. The reprinted currently in stock version The Lessons of History is more readily available, but if you can get the first edition, it is priceless at multiple levels.

This is the first book that I discuss in my national security lecture on the literature relevant to strategy & force structure. It is a once-in-a-lifetime gem of a book that sums up their much larger ten volume collection which itself is brilliant but time consuming. This is the “executive briefing.”

Geography matters. Inequality is natural. Famine, pestilence, and war are Nature's way of balancing the population.

Birth control (or not) has *strategic* implications (e.g. see Catholic strategy versus US and Russian neglect of its replenishment among the higher social and economic classes).

History is color-blind. Morality is strength. Worth saying again: morality is strength.

They end with “the only lasting revolution is in the mind of man.” In other words, technology is not a substitute for thinking by humans.

See my various lists. Other books I recommend:

The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Age of Missing Information
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Integral Consciousness and the Future of Evolution
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition

And of course the nine books I have published, all but the last free online as well as within Amazon.

Robert Steele
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

2013/10/092014/10/29

Review (Guest): The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education

6 Star Top 10%, Economics, Education (General), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Charles Hugh Smith

Publisher's Overview: With the soaring cost of higher education, has the value a college degree been turned upside down. College tuition and fees are up 1000% since 1980. Half of all recent college graduates are jobless or underemployed, revealing a deep disconnect between higher education and the job market. It is no surprise everyone is asking: Where is the return on investment? Is the assumption that higher education returns greater prosperity no longer true? And if this is the case, how does this impact you, your children and grandchildren? We must thoroughly understand the twin revolutions now fundamentally changing our world: The true cost of higher education and an economy that seems to re-shape itself minute to minute. The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy clearly describes the underlying dynamics at work – and, more importantly, lays out a new low-cost model for higher education: how digital technology is enabling a revolution in higher education that dramatically lowers costs while expanding the opportunities for students of all ages. The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy provides clarity and optimism in a period of the greatest change our educational systems and society have seen. The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy offers everyone the tools needed to prosper in the Emerging Economy.

>Smith has the genius to find the words to distill observations which become clear to all By Graham H. Seibert TOP 1000 REVIEWERVINE VOICE on October 4, 2013

Smith has the genius to find the words to distill observations which become clear to all when he reduces them to the succinct text that others seem not to have managed.

Smith opens with the observation that education is a dinosaur of an industry. It is delivered the same way it was in Aristotle's day, by assembling the students in the physical presence of a teacher. That was necessary when there were no books, and when books were too expensive for individuals to own. The reason that the situation perpetuates itself has more to do with the rich benefits which accrue to teachers and administrators in the University itself rather than any benefits to the students.

Education is a protected cartel. The right to accreditation is controlled by the state, and it is doled out to institutions which conform to the traditional mold. All participants in the industry have an interest in and its perpetuation, except students. Students are powerless and not very well informed, so the system continues as it is.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): The Nearly Free University and the Emerging Economy: The Revolution in Higher Education”

2013/10/062013/10/07

Review: Say It With Presentations

4 Star, Best Practices in Management, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Intelligence (Public)

Gene Zelazny

4.0 out of 5 stars Fundamentals Most Ignore A Bit Too Generic, October 6, 2013

I was lent this book by a colleague. Here is some context for my appreciation of the book:

01 The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (C/JCS) once BANNED all powerpoint presentations, for two reasons. First, because they had become “death by powerpoint” monstrocities in which intellectually limited people tried to substitute technology for thinking and color for precision of thought; and second, because more often than not, something would go wrong with the computer and the briefing officer would be found to be empty-headed. Too often (and I include myself) powerpoint presentations have been an aid for the BRIEFER, rather than a visual map for the DECISION-MAKER.

02 Presentations as most understand them are didactic tools (I talk you listen) instead of socractic tools (I spark, you engage, we create new understanding). Yes, one good visual can equal 10,000 words, but every visual past one radically loses value in a downward spiral. Less is more.

Presentations are not charts — they are different, a point the author addresses by publishing a separate book, The Say It With Charts Complete Toolkit, Cd-Rom.

Presentations are also not visualizations, an area where Edward Tufts is a leading light, a mind whose two books below I highly recommend:

Envisioning Information
The Visual Display of Quantitative Information

Presentations are a tool for thinking and a tool for inspiring human engagement, on this point I have been guided by Howard Rheingold and his books and web blogging, see for instance, Tools for Thought: The History and Future of Mind-Expanding Technology from the 1980's and the more recent Mind Amplifier: Can Our Digital Tools Make Us Smarter? (Kindle Single).

Put as simply as I can, a presentation is a tool for thinking — one third of the value is in the thinking and doodling and exploration of alternative paths leading to the presentation; one third of the value is in the final product that can inspire others on its own and as a tool, and the last third of the value, almost never achieved, is in the reaction, engagement, inspiration, and collective intelligence that the presentation might elicit.

Continue reading “Review: Say It With Presentations”

2013/10/012013/10/01

Worth a Look: Routledge International Handbook on Hate Crime

5 Star, Justice (Failure, Reform), Worth A Look

Routledge International Handbook on Hate Crime

Edited by Nathan Hall, Abbee Corb, Paul Giannasi, John Grieve

Routledge – 2014 – 624 pages

FORTHCOMING 15 May 2014

This book brings together many of the world's leading experts, both academic and practitioner, in a single handbook that examines key international issues in the field of hate crime. Collectively, this represents the first single text to provide a detailed picture of the hate crime ‘problem’ around the world and will serve as the definitive publication in this area.

Broken into four parts, this book covers theory, concepts and history; the international geography of hate; key issues in hate crime; and international efforts to combat hate and hate crime.

Recommended by Berto Jongman

If You Cannot Wait, Available Now:

2012 Hate Crimes: Causes, Controls, and Controversies, 2nd Edition

2003 Spaces of Hate: Geographies of Discrimination and Intolerance in the U.S.A.

2003 Hate and Bias Crime: A Reader

2001 In the Name of Hate: Understanding Hate Crimes

2001 From Hate Crimes to Human Rights: A Tribute to Matthew Shepard

2013/09/292014/03/26

Review (Guest): The Blood Telegram – Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide

Gary Jonathan Bass

Enabling Pakistani Genocide, September 29, 2013

Herbert L. Calhoun

Although the two superpowers managed to avoid a cataclysmic disaster during the almost 40 years of the Cold War, the same could not be said of the many states “standing-in” as their ideological proxies. The list of nations suffering various degrees of irreparable damage as a result of the “Cold War” is almost unending. Among them, one would be remiss not to include Cuba, Angola, Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, Indonesia, Nicaragua, Grenada, Chile, Guatemala, just to name the ones that come immediately to mind. Two other such nations were India, a Russian ally; and Pakistan, a U.S. ally. Both suffered immeasurably in the genocide exposed here.

As the author tells the story, Pakistan just happened fortuitously to get tripped into a genocide that cost more than a million (mostly Hindu) lives, merely by being in the path of destruction that rippled across the geopolitical landscape called Nixon-Kissinger Cold War realpolitik.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): The Blood Telegram – Nixon, Kissinger, and a Forgotten Genocide”

2013/09/28

Review: Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Sherman Kent

5.0 out of 5 stars Seminal Work for the Middle Period of Intelligence, September 28, 2013

The history of national intelligence in terms of spies, satellites, and secrets can be concisely separated into three eras: the era of secret wars, the era of strategic analysis, and the era of open source intelligence.

Sherman Kent was without question the dean and the prophet for the second era, and this gem of a book remains a standard in the field and required reading for any intelligence professional (collector, analyst, or other). He did not realize his vision because the clandestine service (of which I was a member) took over the CIA and subordinated the analysts, and because in so doing, the CIA lost touch with most of the open source world.

Today Kent is succeeded by Jack Davis, whose term “analytic tradecraft” can be used to find his collection of memos on the web, and by the CIA University. However, the secret world is now under attack by the emergent World Brain, in which Collective (Public) Intelligence utilizes open sources of information to create Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that is better than secret information, cheaper than secret information, and more useful than secret information because it can be shared broadly.

Those whose sense of self is defined by the secret world will have difficulty adjusting to this, witness the continued references in the secret world to “Open Sources.” Max nix. The war is over, and Kent's vision will ultimately be realized in the third era, the era of open sources.

Consider also:

Continue reading “Review: Strategic Intelligence for American World Policy”

2013/09/24

Berto Jongman: Al Shabaab in Somalia

01 Poverty, 05 Civil War, 07 Other Atrocities, 09 Terrorism, 5 Star, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Worth A Look

Since early 2007 a new breed of combatants has appeared on the streets of Mogadishu and other towns in Somalia: the ‘Shabaab', or youth, the only self-proclaimed branch of al-Qaeda to have gained acceptance (and praise) from Ayman al-Zawahiri and ‘AQ centre' in Afghanistan. Itself an offshoot of the Islamic Courts Union, which split in 2006, Shabaab has imposed Sharia law and is also heavily influenced by local clan structures within Somalia itself. It remains an infamous and widely discussed, yet little-researched and understood, Islamist group.

Hansen's remarkable book attempts to go beyond the media headlines and simplistic analyses based on alarmist or localist narratives and, by employing intensive field research conducted within Somalia, as well as on the ground interviews with Shabaab leaders themselves, explores the history of a remarkable organisation, one that has survived predictions of its collapse on several occasions. Hansen portrays al-Shabaab as a hybrid Islamist organization that combines a strong streak of Somali nationalism with the rhetorical obligations of international jihadism, thereby attracting a not insignificant number of foreign fighters to its ranks. Both these strands of Shabaab have been inadvertently boosted by Ethiopian, American and African Union attempts to defeat it militarily, all of which have come to nought.

See Also:

Qwant: Al Shabaab Across the Board

Al Shabaab Tweets [Account Suspended]

Category: 1-7 Star Rating

Review: Lessons of History (First Edition)