Smoke Book–False and Fed Documents to Obscure Reality
August 4, 2010
Lamar Waldron
I spent a good bit of time with this book today, getting more and more irritated as I went through it.
Here is my bottom line: this book in its earlier and current version may well be a CIA-facilitated and managed covert operation against the American people, along with the several other “new” books about “the Mafia did it.”
My own extensive reading suggests that JFK was indeed killed by CIA-trained and CIA-equipped Cuban exiles in a mushy combination of revenge for the Bay of Pigs (the exiles) and fear of a President that might put CIA, the “Secret Team,” and the military-industrial complex back in the box.
I was forced to buy this book as part of a twelve book review for an international organization, and even though it was a business expense, this kind of greed pricing makes me urge all authors to use Print on Demand services and bypass the publishers entirely. Having read the book now, I can assure the reader that this is worthwhile ONLY as a library book on loan. As an independent publisher myself, I could publish this book for $39.95, give Amazon its 55%, and still cover my costs and then some (sell one third of the print run, the rest is profit).
The book is very well put together, with 24 authors that together cover history, Islamic and Jewish water law, eight countries, and five regions, finishing up with the most valuable portion of the book, a discourse on trends with some excellent tables, but no visualization of note. “New Media” is going to bury publishers like this, they are ten years behind the meaningful presentation curve.
Two key points to place this book in context:
1) The law is chaotic, driven by corporate interests, and generally out of touch with reality and with science.
2) The law is unenforceable at the local level and I believe international law will soon be unenforceable at the national level.
The editorial intent is to focus on “issues of architecture, agency, adaptiveness, accountabily, access, and allocation.”
Despite the excellence of the individual contributions, I give this book a three for two reasons: the greed pricing that makes the book unaffordable to the Amazon reader; and the larger lack of context–this is a book about law for lawyers, not a book about where the law is right and wrong and where it should go. Useful as a starting point, this does not help as much as the first book I recommend above, which is also reasonably priced.
The editors have done an excellent job of summarization. In discussing the changing characteristics of governance (by many) as opposed to government (by one), they draw on the collection as a whole to list seven fragmentations:
01 Geographical fragmentation (goverance must be multi-level and multi-national)
02 Functional fragmentation (“world bodies” versus public interest bodies)
03 Resource fragmentation (dispersed actors that I note need harmonization through shared information)
04 Interest fragmentation (harder to reconcile)
05 Norm fragmentation (national, corporate, and social all in conflict)
06 Policy fragmentation (still struggling to find ways to share information and reach consensus)
07 Decision-making and implementation fragmentation (Epoch A going down, Epoch B rising)
The book tends to gloss over the reality that corporate interests are funding and driving the UN and other international water bodies, but I do find their short summary of the Dublin Conference useful and list the four principles here:
01 Notion of finite and necessary nature of water
02 Need for participatory approach at all levels of management
03 Central role of women in water management [rather strangely presented by authors as also tied to the need to recognize water as an economic good–vice a human right]
04 Establishment of multi-stakeholder forums
The authors discuss a theory of change and are very weak on this point. Ted Gurr and others do it better. Revolutionary change occurs across the political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic domains, and these are all deeply inter-connected with one another and with the psycho-social nature of the individuals, most of whom are being radicalized and will no longer tolerate colonial-era practices maintained by corrupt elites.
The conclusion is most helpful and tables are used to good effect.
Differential factors leading to difference water laws including water geography, economic dependence, history and hydro-politics, and importance to ecosystems.
Forces leading to converging [or not] domestic water law and policy include civilization, religion, conquests, communism, international codification, environmentalism, epistemic communities, and globalization.
Colonial influences interacting with tribal and religious derivations in the Middle East and Africa are dissected by this book but I cannot help feeling that this kind of effort deals with the elephant's shadow rather than the elephant itself. Never-the-less, a superb effort.
The table on page 399 on key water principles is very helpful and worthy of retension.
+ Water law principles include sovereignty, equity, and avoidance of harm.
+ Human rights principles include participation, conflict resolution, prior informed consent, and human rights generally.
+ Environmental law principles include environmental impact assessments, sustainable development, precautionary approach, polluter pays principle, decentralization, open international economic system, and notification (of accidents).
The table on page 400 addresses water principles from other sources of governance.
+ Water rights based on ownership, appropriation, and licensing
+ Sectoral approach to water; different laws relevant to water in different fields
+ Gender bias concerns: ownership and appropriation often only possible by males
+ Contextual governance
+ State regulation of contracts
The book concludes that the law needs to open up to other disciplines (see the Graphic on Web of Fragmented Knowledge); that institutions must change [or be replaced]; and that fairness must be a primordal attribute of water law.
Amazon limits me to ten links. ALL links are active at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
Misappropriated without Attrribution–Free Online, March 4, 2010
One Star for lack of ethics on the part of the publisher. Beyond five stars for content, free online as with all of Jack Davis's stuff. Upgraded to 3 stars for proper pricing (after Amazon's cut, publisher only makes roughly 3 dollars per book, which is totally fair).
This product was misappropriated from Jack Davis, dean of the intelligence analysis scholar-practitioners. While materials created within the US Government by US Government employees are generally not copyrighted because the taxpayer funded their creation, they are a) available free online; and b) generally considered off-limits to sleaze-bag publishers that troll for stuff (this happens to all of us, in my case with my monographs for the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), all free online).
It's nice that Jack's work is respected and made available on Amazon, a truly global service.
It is very troubling that Jack Davis, who just asked me to find out who did this, has not been contacted by the publisher and offered both courtesy copies of his own work, and some modest recognition.
As a former spy who has spent the last 21 years in commercial intelligence, i expected much more from this film with its great actors but I was very disappointed. Had it not been in front of me on background as I edit my new book I would have turned it off completely on more than one occasion.
The ending is sort of clever and I will not spoil it, but there are no clues at the beginning so the movie more or less ends with “fooled you, didn't I, but your going to have to take my word for it.” And about that pink elephant that I am keeping away from your front lawn….
Over-all, this is a cluttered mess.
There are still no really great commercial intelligence films, nor should they be, because those who spend heavily on commercial espionage lack both ethics and brains. 95% of what you need to be a successful ethical commercial intelligence practioner is openly available and your customers should be providing you with the rest, i.e. what they want that no one else has thought to give them.
I was watching David Walker as he served nine of his fifteen years at Comptroller General, with light-weight whimpers to Congress until he finally got Peter Peterson to bail him out of government and give him a chunk of cash for making movies and writing a book and creating a web site that very few serious under 40 pioneers pay attention to.
I was thrilled to see him tell Congress in 2007 that the US was bankrupt–both Senator McCain and Senator Obama could have cared less–and so he walked quietly back to his holding cell at the General Accountability Office (GAO). His “loyalty” to impeachable masters is just as troubling to me as the loyalty of our military leaders during the neo-con rampage.
This book loses one star for the publishers arrogance and ineptitude in failing to use all of the tools Amazon provides, so that readers like myself who read a great deal and do not buy books on whim, can actually look at the table of contents. If you want a sense what the author has to say, see the Wikipedia page on the US Federal Budget where the author's fingerprints are elegantly visible.
If and when the publisher acts more responsibly and provides Look Inside the Book information as well standard entries via Amazon Advantage (about the book, about the author, editorial reviews), I will buy the book, read it, and review it.
The book loses a second star for being wildly praised by all the unethical losers that got us into this mess in the first place by sacrificing their ethics and selling the two party system out to Wall Street. Bill Bradley in particular is a major disappointment, he slunk off to Allen and Company where George “Slam Dunk” Tenet is also in hiding, and they have profited handsomely for betraying the public trust for over a decade. Edumund Burke said “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing.” Even better is the following from Chief Justice Louis Brandeis:
I read a lot, and quite by accident (or courtesy of Dick Cheney who drove people back to books looking for answers) I am the top Amazon reviewer for non-fiction. I would have bought this book, along with the book I did buy today, Jeremy Rifkin's The Empathic Civilization: The Race to Global Consciousness in a World in Crisis but one look at the price and a one word decision: NO.
This book is CRIMINALLY priced. As a publisher myself, I can assure one and all that in lots of 1,500 in hard cover, it costs at most two cents a page including color cover and graphics. Using the Amazon on demand printing option, the cost is even less. Authors must STOP allowing publishers to price their precious work beyond the reach of most people with a brain. I offer all my books free online as well as via Amazon.
and many more. Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, provides easy access to all of my reviews (over 1,500) in each of 98 reading categories including Catastrophe & Resilience, Cosmos & Destiny, and so on.
If the author will post this book free online, or if the publisher can be shamed into pricing it at under $35, I will buy it and review it.
I would normally have bought this book, I used past Mandate for Change books to devise the twelve core policies for Earth Intelligence Network (Agriculture, Diplomacy, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Health, Justice, Immigration, Security, Society, Water), and I was very intrigued by the title but there are three strikes here:
1) Publisher has not done their job in posting table of contents and other descriptive materials.
2) The book is way too expensive, it costs a penny a page for books in lots of 2,500 or so, the publisher is being greedy and not serving the public interest–the author should go with Amazon's books on demand or post the book free online.
3) No other comments? It would appear neither the existing Administration nor anyone else cares about what's in this book. I would, if it were better documented and more reasonably prices.
Strike three, this book is OUT.
BUT: If anyone has this book and wants to share the Table of Contents, I would be very interested, my contact information is on the About page of PBI/PIB.
To access my other 1,500 or so reviews, 99% non-fiction, in 98 categories, use Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, where all reviews lead back to Amazon pages for the respective books.
Smoke Book–False and Fed Documents to Obscure Reality
Misappropriated without Attrribution–Free Online, March 4, 2010
