1-7 Star Rating – Page 76 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/12/222012/12/22

Review: The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Rodrique Tremblay

5.0 out of 5 stars Humanist Manifesto Slams Religions, Foundation for Reflection, December 22, 2012

I bought this book on the recommendation of Pierre Cloutier in Quebec, and very deliberately as the first book to read on 22 December 2012 as Epoch B begins (see graphic above with book cover).

Across the entire book are what I now call E to the 5th: Empathy, Ethics, Ecology, Education, and Evolution. The bottom line of the book is clear: abandon religions as selective (and generally exclusionary) arbiters of morality, each severely hypocritical in having one morality for insiders and another for “others” (infidels, shiksas, whatever the name, moral disengagement is the rule and genocide is often the result).

When addressing really important books, I read the notes, bibliography, and index first. The notes are a second book — these are not normal cryptic notes, each note is a short exposition, and any reading of the book is incomplete without a reading of the notes. The bibliography is extraordinary, and my attention was immediately drawn to the authors honored with three or more books being cited: Karen Armstrong, Mario Bunge, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, A.C. Graylink, Robert Ingersoll, Immanuel Kant, Hans Kung, Paul Kurtz, John Rawls, Peter Singer, Baruch SPinoza, E. O. Wilson, and Robert Wright. Among them Kurtz, Singer, and Wright are central. Roughly 1,000 books are listed by title in the bibliography.

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2012/12/222012/12/22

Review: The Volunteer The Incredible True Story of an Israeli Spy on the Trail of International Terrorists

4 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Michael Ross and Jonathan Kay

4.0 out of 5 stars 50% Authentic, 25% Disinformation, 25% Unwitting, December 22, 2012

For those that do not know my background, I am a former clandestine case officer (spy) who has published widely on the craft of intelligence.

I received this book as a gift from the author, whom I have met, and whose talents in creating non-official cover and in teaching naive Americans how to create unofficial cover (something CIA cannot do), I believe in.

The book is 50% authentic and for that reason alone I recommend it be required reading for those being trained in the clandestine service. Although sometimes tedious, the level of detail that is provided is for me fully satisfactory and useful as a “drill” for appreciating the nature of a life under cover.

The emphasis on creating cover and sticking to cover even if you are certain you are going to die or be sent to a secret jail to rot for all eternity, is the key take-away from this book — with happy endings for those that stick to their cover.

Mossad is different from the clumsier Western services that live immunity rather than cover. Mossad is much more about direct action, from street-level surveillance and orientation photographs of specific human and organizational and potential sabotage targets, to placing beacons on ships smuggling arms so they can be sunk by unmarked aircraft or an Israeli submarine, or explosives on a car known to be enroute to a terrorist leader.

The observations on how the CIA and FBI cannot work together, even in counter-terrorism, are useful confirmation that little has changed since 9/11. The book first published in 2007, was updated in 2011.

From a counterintelligence perspective, the book provides a wonderfully clear picture of how long and how hard it would be to penetrate the Mossad with a false flag volunteer under control from the age of 18.

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2012/12/212012/12/21

Review: Economists and the Powerful: Convenient Theories, Distorted Facts, Ample Rewards

5 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Norbert Haring and Niall Douglas

5.0 out of 5 stars Too costly, consider reading the reviews and Inside the Book, December 21, 2012

Over-priced at $99, this book makes one simple point: economists are the sluts of the social sciences, in the pay of the wealthy, and they have prostituted their profession in the most indecent obscene manner possible. Others have made similar points, what we really have here are two forms of crime — petty crime — economists kneeling for hand-outs — and master crime — financiers looting entire national economies just because they can — because government has no integrity, the media (once capable of investigative journalism) has no integrity, and the academy (economists and everyone else) has no integrity.

There are some excellent reviews of the book outside Amazon, I am stunned to not see any here.

As an alternative to this particular book, excellent as it is, I recommend one DVD and two books:
DVD: Inside Job
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism

William Greider's book makes the telling point that while physical assets have appreciated five times in the past couple of decades, financial derivatives appreciated seventeen times. We now know that Goldman Sachs, Morgan, Citi-Bank, Bank of America, and a whole slew of other banks are guilty of LIBOR rate fixing, global-level fraud and theft, and so on. Yet no one has gone to jail except in Iceland.

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2012/12/212015/10/12

Review: Reducing Uncertainty: Intelligence Analysis and National Security

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Thomas Fingar

5.0 out of 5 stars World Class on Iran — And Sad Summary of Shallowness Everywhere Else, December 21, 2012

UPDATED 12 OCT 2015 to elevate to five stars in recognition of the author's extraordinary professionalism and honesty in assuring that the National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) for Iran done in 2007 documented its destruction of its nuclear weapons program and resisted all political pressures — both domestic and international — to lie (which is what George Tenet did to enable the elective war on Iraq).

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The book is a fast read with a poor index, and the best thing I can say about it is that the author is as good as it gets inside the secret analytic world, and his account is therefore the best available encapsulation of the US analyst in the secret world as virtual eunuch. Normally I do not review books that annoy me, but I make two exceptions, and this book qualifies on both counts: they are in the field to which I have dedicated my life; and there are ten other books that I feel merit being read with or instead of this book.

The substance first. I was a member of the national-level Foreign Intelligence Requirements and Capabilities (FIRCAP) committee for several years,and I truly appreciated the following quote at multiple levels:

QUOTE (51): Requests and requirements have to be prioritized, and the IC has a rather elaborate process to review and rank order the approximately 9,100 cells in the matrix created by arraying roughly 280 international actors against thirty-two intelligence topics that have been grouped into three categories by the National Security Council.

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2012/12/152012/12/15

Review: Against Security: How We Go Wrong at Airports, Subways, and Other Sites of Ambiguous Danger

4 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities

Harvey Molotch

4.0 out of 5 stars Theatrically Naive in Its Own Way But Recommended, December 15, 2012

I'm the former spy and honorary hacker who sounded the alarm on cyber-security in 1994 and who questioned every aspect of the Department of Homeland Security, pointing out that the joint fusion centers would be a waste of money and that, I quote “50% of the dots will be bottom up dots and we have no way of ingesting them.” I am also an arch critic of the National Security Agency, which processes less than 5% of what it collects and is generally incompetent at 163 of the 183 languages that matter–it's also largely useless and very late on out of the way threats like Benghazi.

What the author does not realize is that DHS and especially the TSA are not about security. They are a combination of employment programs to reduce the stress of 22.4% unemployment, and an alternative pork fest now that Pentagon pork is starting to wind down. “Top Secret America” is less about invading the privacy of all US citizens, or theater, and more about continuing to spend money in insane ways that reward the industrial complexes and the banks at our expense. The leadership of DHS is not stupid — they simply do not have a mandate to actually perform in the public interest. The US Government spends money the way the RECIPIENTS of our tax dollars want it to spend money, NOT on what is in our best interests.

The author may also not realize that there are rogue elements within the ultra-secret side of the US Government that are out of control and willing to kill Americans on American soil (as well as overseas) to further perpetual war. There are also evangelicals and pentecostals who are in alliance with Israel, itself famous for false flag attacks on US aircraft and barracks as well as the occasional really outrageous act such as their attack on the USS Liberty. The FBI appears to have done some spectacular work clamping down on a handful of military officers who have been trying since 2007 to fake an attack by Iran on a US naval vessel.

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2012/12/142012/12/14

Review: Poor Economics – A Radical Rethinking of the Way to Fight Global Poverty

4 Star, Economics, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo

4.0 out of 5 stars Serious Economics Poorly Presented, December 14, 2012

I have no doubt that among economists this book merits all the praise it has received; I do NOT recommend it for the general reader, indeed, I do not recommend it at all unless it is assigned reading, in which case my recommendation is moot. The book is neither as radical as its title pretends, nor as detailed as I was hoping for–how, exactly, do the one billion poor spend their 99 US cents a day? I bought the book because I am thinking about how to persuade Sir Richard Branson that he should sponsor “The Virgin Truth” [one pager concept has been posted online]; go “all in” on all the Opens including Open Base Transceiver Station, Open Spectrum, Open Software, etcetera [topic of my most recent book], and give each of the five billion poor free cell phone access and free education “one cell call at a time” as conceptualized by the Earth Intelligence Network. For me, this book is a four and not light reading. All text, few charts, no lists, no comparatives, no visualization.

The authors take one really brilliant idea and then talk around it, and that is why they lose one star. The brilliant idea is that we really do need to understand at a micro level how the just under one billion extreme poor spend their 99 cents a day (the other four billion less poor live on $2 to $20 a day), and how they make their choices, choices that often reject tiny investments in prevention (chloriating their water, for example) with the result that they end of losing work and spending more on remediation after the fact. YES! I agree. They then proceed to answer, at best, 20% of the question.

The big take-away for me–I was absolutely delighted to see this smessage repeated throughout the book–was how a tiny bit of information can make a world of difference, both in the choice that an individual poor person makes, and in the eradication of corruption once detailed numbers are published about what *should* have reached each schoolhouse in any given district. In other words, and this is NOT the key point of the book, but rather my key point: without changing a single institution, without redirecting a single dollar, the simple implementation of an information transparency regime changes everything. Now THAT is a book I hope these two authors will write soon, and that book will probably join my 10% “Beyond 5 Stars.” [I read in 98 categories, just one of them fiction, access all my reviews and their Amazon pages by category at Phi Beta Iota, here are just two: Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design (206); Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class (253).

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2012/12/102012/12/10

Review: Altar Stone – An Alan Llewellyn Novel

5 Star, Fiction

Walt Breede

5.0 out of 5 stars Revenge of the Nuns December 10, 2012

I absolutely recommend this book be read after the first one, Snow on the Golden Horn, see my disclosure and commentary there as well, and then move on, as I will when it comes out, to Sanity Check, not yet available for purchase. The author, a retired naval officer as am I, tells me three more are in various stages of production. I can certainly testify to two things: 01) everything in this book is based on the real world and 02) he writes a tremendous story line.

Catholics may resonate more with the good and evil nuns in this story, but if you have ever laughed as a nun joke, I am pretty sure you will be engaged.