2 Star – Page 3 – Public Intelligence Blog

Huge Mountain of Moose Manure, October 14, 2008

George Soros

I have lost patience for this kind of book. I recommend the other ten books instead (and the last two, which I wrote, are free online, so I am not pushing them for purchase)

1) Our economy went into the gutter when Senator Phil Gramm (R-TX), then Chair for Banking, slipped a 200+ page bill written by lobbyists into a must fund larger bill, with the result that no senators read it (as they did not read the Patriot Act), and it deregulated–completely–the financial marketplace, ending the walls between banking (which lends on tangibles) and investment (which speculates on intangibles).

2) DERIVATIVES is code for fantasy cash. I was not smart enough to see this myself, but Bogle, Soros, Buffet, Perot, Nader, they all saw it, they tried to brief it, and in the case of Nader, got laughed off the Hill. Sub-prime mortgages were the match that lit the fire, not the straw itself.

3) Goldman Sachs is forever, Washington's two criminal parties have been bought and paid for. Rubin did not bail out Mexico. He bailed out Wall Street's bad investments in Mexico. and Bill Clinton for sure understood this, and leveraged the whole thing the whole time with placement of his friends in Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae where they enriched themselves and contributed heavily to Clinton's Library and other endeavors.

The market did not fail. Congress failed. BOTH parties are criminal parties, and I am personally outraged that Americans are not burning tires in the streets demanding that at a minimum three other parties be heard by the public in these debates. Most of America is utterly clueless about the FACT that the League of Women Voters was replaced by a Republican-Democratic Presidential Debate Commission precisely to exclude Independent, Green, Reform, Libertarian, and other candidates.

With all due respect for their accomplishments, the two candidates for President today are relative puppets being managed by *clowns* who are owned by Wall Street carpetbaggers and the crooked parties that have effectively killed democracy in this once-great Republic.

I am, to be utterly candid, sick and tired of Soros telling us how smart he is when he actually does not care at all about the public interest. This is the last book written by Soros that I will waste my time on.

Other much more relevant books to our situation:
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Conspiracy of Fools: A True Story
The Informant: A True Story
The Global Class War: How America's Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back
Deer Hunting with Jesus: Dispatches from America's Class War
THE SMART NATION ACT: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)

I am ANGRY. Soros is part of the problem, not part of the solution. Simiarly, Buffet means well, but he is working this for himself, not us. It was idiocy to approve the bail-out. That should have been a freeze, a moratorium on all foreclosures (10,000 a day) as well as all evictions, a capping of interest at 10%, an emergency fund focusing on INDIVIDUALS, and a mandated public forum post-election with ALL relevant documents posted online for scrutiny (“put enough eyeballs on it, no bug is invisible”).

This election is so fraught with fraud on so many levels, that the financial crisis, in my judgement is the third and least of our problems. Electoral fraud and the criminal misbehavior of BOTH Republicans and Democrats is problem #1. The two dozen plus secessionist movements being led by Kirkpatrick Sale are problem #2 because they have LEGITIMATE GRIEVANCES. I was reflecting on this today, and realized that an honest man today has three choices:

1. Refuse to support our dysfunctional government and support secession.

2. Join a crime family and drop out of the fraudulent “legal” economy.

3. Be a gerbil, a farm animal, and let Wall Street–including the author of this book–enjoy life on our backs for a few more years.

I did not read this book, nor buy it. I do not do this often, but this seems as good a place to denounce Soros, the horse that brought him (Wall Street), and the morons in Congress that let these thieves run wild.

I expect plenty of reflexive negative votes but for those of you with an open mind, take the time to read the varied reviews of the ten books I recommend instead of this one, and trust your own judgment.

Mark Lewis had it right: these folks think nothing of “exploding the client.” That's us. This author was right up there with them, step by step, and did nothing for We the People–his best shot was to support the “least evil” (in his mind) party and to be silent as Bush-Cheney destroyed our military, our economy, and most grieviously, our global moral standing.

It's time we drop kick Wall Street into the ocean, introduce Open Money, and invest only in local tangible hard-money options. Ron Paul has it right–everyone else is a traitor to the Constitution and to the Republic–Paulson means well but he and all of these folks live in a “closed society” that is completely out of touch with OUR reality.

2009/07/032009/12/04

Review: Tried by War–Abraham Lincoln as Commander in Chief

2 Star, Impeachment & Treason, Secession & Nullification

Conventional History Oblivious to Constitutional Facts, November 16, 2008

James M. McPherson

I will not buy this book, nor should any citizen that actually wants to understand the truth of our history after 1860 when states' rights were unconstitutionally destroyed by force. They are emergent again, praise God.

Lincoln did not have the right to conscript forces or to wage war on those States that exercised their continuing right of secession. A “Civil War” is a war between two parties for the whole. The war was an illegal war by the North against the undiminished right of every state in the United STATES of America to secede, and that is why Dick Cheney loves Lincoln so much. Lincoln is the president that suspended habeas corpus, unleashed immoral capitalism on the south at a time when slavery was already on its way out (the South itself ended importation of slaves upon withdrawing), and needlessly slaughtered an entire generation of fighting men of honor on both sides, one side fighting for its honor, the other because they were incited and lied to for financial gain by the few.

The author is a distinguished historian, but he offers up conventional history that fails to actually inform the public. President-elect Obama would do well to read the books on secession I list below (or my reviews), in as much as he will be facing multiple crises of both nullification and secession in the near term at the same time that certain States sponsor referendums that demand that their Senators and Representatives refer all votes to public ballot in the home state–thus do we break the backs of the two criminal parties that have betrayed the public trust.

I made the same mistake as this author in my own (high school) advanced placement study of the causes of the “Civil War” which should more properly be called the War Against Secession. Below I offer up ten books, each of which has a summative review of mine offered in the public interest.

NEWS FLASH for Barack Obama: we are NOT “one nation” or even “one people. We are 50 sovereign states that signed a compact to create a federal corporation to administer services of common concern, and that enterprise is now corrupt to the core (dysfunctional and overstretech executive, Congress in violation of Article 1 and corrupt, judiciary clueless about our Constitutional legal roots and states rights) and run amok. I desire to keep the USA together and restore the Constitution as well as the effective representational balance of power among the three branches of the federal corporation, but no one, including “the one,” can do that without three Deputy Vice Presidents (my own preferences in parenthesis):

DVP for Education, Intelligence, and Research (Colin Powell)
DVP for National Security (Hillary Clinton, John McCain, Sam Nunn)
DVP for Commonwealth (Hillary Clinton, Ralph Nader or Cynthia McKinney)

and four reforms implemented immediately:

1) Electoral Reform
2) Governance Reform
3) Intelligence Reform
4) National Security Reform

For details see Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography). As with all books I sponsor, it is also available free online.

It is time for every American to stop digesting and regurgitating pabulum, and begin thinking independently. CNN turned out to be hot air and low theater. They bluster and pretend, and not once did they challenge either candidate to produce a balanced budget, name a cabinet in advance, or address any of the ten threats or twelve polices with any coherence. All of our institutions are broken. Lincoln is an example of what NOT to do. I support the right of secession as a means of demanding truth and reconciliation. Our federal government is out of control. Leadership of genocide and slaughter and regional looting is not something we should be proud of, nor is it something to emulate today.

Books on secession relevant today:
Constitutional History of Secession
Is Secession Treason?
Secession: How Vermont and All the Other States Can Save Themselves from the Empire
One Nation, Indivisible? A Study of Secession and the Constitution

Books on History Lost and Fogged:
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (Nation Books)

Books on Current Government and Two-Party Spoils System Corruption:
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders

2009/07/032009/12/03

Review: The Accidental Guerrilla–Fighting Small Wars in the Midst of a Big One

2 Star, Insurgency & Revolution

Accidental American Accidentally Rediscovers Old Knowledge

June 21, 2009

David Kilcullen

The author is an accidental American given access to top secret information and inner circles much more appropriate to Ralph Peters, Steven Metz, Max Manwaring, Gunny Poole, and many others who knew all this–and have sought to teach all this in speaking truth to power–for decades. Someone liked him, he was given temporal admission to the closed circle, and this book is what he knows and what they hear.

While the author provides a commendable view for one man in isolation, he is wrong on multiple points, e.g. ethnographic studies are not about ethnic studies, but rather about deep local studies that contribute to a mosaic of global understanding that is more nuanced than top-down generics; CIA did not coin the term Irregular Warfare, the French study in 1999 was long preceded by Policing the New World Disorder: Peace Operations and Public Security, etc.) This author joins the crop of new-bees who rediscover old knowledge. Sadly, this book is probably a measure of where the Secretary of Defense is going to take the Quadrennial Defense Review in 2008, and that makes me want to gag.

The author's facile explanation of “the accidental guerrilla” is that we are intruding in our Global War on Terror (GWOT), the locals are resisting our intrusion rather than being “insurgents,” and they are fighting to be left alone. I have a note: “weak on history, weak on internal sources of disorder [see the image on predicting revolution], completely ignorant of the larger picture of unilateral militarism, virtual colonialism, and predatory immoral capitalism.”

What I got out of this book:

+ Distinguishes between human and national security, implies correctly that USA and most still focused on state on state security and oblivious to the ten high level threats to mankind [which, I might add for the author's edification, are outlined in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change.]

+ Four models for thinking:
– Backlash against globalization
– Globalized insurgency
– Civil war within Islam
– Asymmetric warfare

On the latter, while the author has two insights: that cost asymmetry matters and that US will not develop because the military-industrial complex cannot profit from low-cost capabilities development, it infuriates me to find no reference to any of 20 or more pioneers of the asymmetric challenge from General Al Gray in 1988 to all of the speakers at the Army Strategy Conference in 1998. See my articles, “The Asymmetric Threat: Listening to the Debate”, and it's 10-year reprise, “Perhaps We Should Have Shouted: A 20-Year Retrospective”.

I am especially annoyed by the failure to acknowledge and integrate anything at all by Max Manwaring or Ralph Peters, thus confirming my own view that this book is an immaculate conception of what passes for thinking at the high table, and totally disconnected from larger reality. Cf.
The Search for Security: A U.S. Grand Strategy for the Twenty-First Century
Uncomfortable Wars Revisited (International and Security Affairs Series)

On the first, I am totally amazed that anyone could earn a PhD and observe that globalization has created haves and have-nots, without any reference to solid literature such as:
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)

There are many other books the author has not had an opportunity to explore, in the comment I provide URLs for Gray, the two articles mentioned above, and an annotated bibliography leading to 500+ non-fiction books about reality organized into 20 or so categories.

The author has a diagram of the four phases of Al Qaeda operations: infection, contagion, intervention by others, and rejection by locals of foreign intervention.

There are some false notes, e.g. one explanation mounted for villagers joining the Taliban to pin down a US force, “Do you have any idea how boring it is to be a teen-ager in Afghanistan?”

I agree with the point on page 44, that insurgent successes seem as much due to inattention and inadequate resourcing on our part as to talent on theirs. Of course Charlie Wilson and Steve Metz said this first. Cf.
Iraq and the Evolution of American Strategy

The author's assessment of the Taliban as the most competent tactical enemy faced by the US anywhere is interesting, along with his ground observations on use of snipers, prepared positions, and scouting-intelligence.

He largely ignores the Pakistani support for the Taliban, taking it as a given, and the involvement of Karzai and his brother in the drug trade. He does agree with the author of Descent into Chaos: The U.S. and the Disaster in Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia with respect to Karzai compromising himself and his government.

For anyone who has actually studied real-world conflict and especially revolutionary conflicts, this is a very annoying book that can be summed up with “Focus on the population, not the enemy; good governance works.” Duh.

The author appears unwitting of the fact that SOF went into Afghanistan in the first place with a tribal map from the Royal Academy in Sweden that was color-coded and backed up by current research, or that SOF is really beginning to excel at social network analysis and that company commanders are creating intelligence cells out of hide to do more of that.

I would recommend the book for its description of the “dialog of the deaf” where US officers speaking fast English show powerpoint slides to Afghan leaders, who then respond with a range of questions and complaints and observations that must be translated, neither side “getting” what the other was seeking to communicate.

The author is still a command and control loyalist: he says on page 150 that the fundamental problem is one of control–of people, terrain, and information. Sorry, but wrong. Sun Tzu today would say that “to gain control one must give up control,” and he would refer the aspiring commander to the concept of Epoch B leadership (see image posted above).

He itemizes the mistakes in Pakistan without mention of their British training:
01-Focus on enemy vice population
02-Large-scale-operations
03-Statis-garrison-posts
04-Overextended-active, reserve-deficiency
05-Inetic-overall
06-Discounting of local-assets
07-Lack-of-helicopters
08-Lack-of-mine-protected vehicles
09-Desire to copy US (?)

Five classes of threat facing Europe:
01-terrorist-cells
02-subversive-networks
03-extremist-political-movements
04-insurgent-sympathizer-networks
05-crime/terrorism overlap

Nothing on corruption, incompetence, failure to assimilate, waste, even organized crime and rotten education.

I have no argument with the author's basic premise, spelled out on page 263:

“…concepts such as hybrid warfare and unrestricted warfare make a lot more sense than traditional state-on-state, force-on-force concepts of conventional war.”

I agree with the author when he says counterterrorism is not a strategy, proposed an ARCADIA Conference, salutes the limits of our influence, and describes the emergence of an anti-Powell doctrine.

He makes eight recommendations:
01-political-strategy
02-comprehensive-approach
03-continuity of key personnel and policies
04-Population-centric
05-cueing and synchronization
06-close-genuine-partnerships
07-emphasis on building local security forces
08-region-wide approach

He says that ambiguity arises because the conflict [GWOT] breaks existing paradigms. Quite so, but for 20 years no one in Washington has been willing to listen to thousands saying this over and over.

His conclusion:
01-develop-new-lexicon
02-get-grand-strategy-right
03-rebalance-instruments-of-national-power
04-identify-the-new “strategic services” [not mentioned: Civil Affairs, Air Peace, Open Source Agency, Multinational Decision Support Centre]
05-develop-strategic-information-warfare

I put this book down with great sadness. Those who provided jacket blurbs did so with good intentions, but the conclusion that I come to is that this “closed circle” neither reads nor learns. The author is an accidental guru as well as an accidental American.

I regret Amazon limits me to 10 links, see 2008 Chapter: Annotated Bibliography on Reality for 500+ relevant works including The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State.

2009/06/182009/12/04

Review: The Cure for Our Broken Political Process–How We Can Get Our Politicians to Resolve the Issues Tearing Our Country Apart

2 Star, Democracy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Minor Contribution, Disappointing, Weak in Many Respects, June 18, 2009

Sol Erdman

This book, which has no notes, no bibliography, and no mention of the League of Women Voters, the Presidential Debate Commission, campaign finance reform, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, Cynthia McKinney, the Liberty Coalition, the National Coalition for Dialog and Deliberation, Reuniting America, or transpartisan post-partisan non-partisan anything, can be summed up in two sentences:

1. Where you live and who you are are no longer synonymous and therefore single-representatives for single districts, howeever the districts are designed, will no longer do.

2. Personally Accountable Representation (PAR) will solve everything, restore sight to the blind, hearing to the deaf, and intelligence to the politicians.

This book is, in a word, disappointing. There are so many other books that integrate so much more in the way of integral consciousness, deliberative dialog, and so on, that I cannot in good consciousness recommend this book to anyone.

I have no doubt the authors are skilled mediators, but this book is both historically and intellectually weak–very weak. The authors tried to write a comic book that tells a story while teaching, which is great if they are trying to reach those voters who on the one hand, know nothing and cannot think and on the other are willing to spend money on a book. This is a primer for a demographic that does not exist, but as my purchase well illustrates, the book does find buyers.

Oddly enough, as the book started with a discussion of the importance of ackowledging the legitimate concerns of the other, I struggled to repress my gag reflex, and was reminded of the twelve principles of spirituality, below is the twelve line summary I created from the two-page version created by guru Will Keepin of the Satyana Institute.

Twelve Principles
01 Motivation based on love
02 Non-attachment to outcome
03 Integrity is one's protection
04 Integrity in means and ends
05 Do not demonize adversaries
06 Embrace any enemy within We
07 Work for the world, not self
08 In serving world, we serve Us
09 Feel the pain of all in the We
10 Engage with love, not anger
11 Rely on faith in the larger We
12 Let the heart guide the brain

Laminate those into an id card holder with the hole on the end, as I have, and you have a much better value for your time and money.

The book tells the story of a first-time Congressman who learns right away that he has to spend all his time campaigning, cannot vote against anyone else's bills, must use taxpayer funds to get re-elected (e.g. pork for the district, the frank on mail, and so on.

It is at the end of this section that I am shaking my head and regretting being so impulsive in my selection on the basis of the hugely clever and largely misleading title.

Proportional representation, preferential voting, three-member districts, and the magical formula that will power large cars, sterilize entire buildings with a single breath (PAR) and that is it.

Here are the eight electoral reform points from Ralph Nader as refined by Jim Turner and myself (and in need of input from unified independents, e.g. on ballot initiatives, local voting processes, etc.)

Phase I to be mandated for 2010 Election
+ Holiday Voting
+ Honest Open Debates
+ Expanded Debates
+ Instant Run-Off

Phase II to be mandated for 2012 Election, Districts Redrawn by 11/2009
+ Full and Balanced Representation
+ Tightly-Drawn Districts
+ Full Public Funding of Diverse Candidates
+ No Legislation Without Consultation

If the above is a PhD, and it hardly qualifies, then this book is barely second grade for those who are challenged in more than one respect.

I put the book down with the final comment, “YUK.” The authors are process obsessives, all they care about is finding a solution that everyone can agree on, without regard to the substance of the matter. While they make passing reference to research and data, the fluff at heart is in the book itself: no notes, no recognition of all the hard work of others, no clue on the 1960's, the 1970's, the 1980's, I even wondered if they had been born by the 1990's, which is of course unfair, but this book has been a skewer in my side and annoying to boot.

Vastly better books include (I am limited to ten, for all the rest see my Annotated Bibliography at oss.net/PIG, just add the www, each book listed has a link right back to Amazon):
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography)
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover))
Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life
The Cultural Creatives: How 50 Million People Are Changing the World
The Clustering of America
The Nine Nations of North America

2009/05/302009/12/04

Review: The Next 100 Years–A Forecast for the 21st Century

2 Star, Future

Glib, Unprofessional, Splintered, Not Even Good Fantasy, May 30, 2009

George Friedman

I actually bought this book anticipating a very positive review (see my review of the author's original first-rate book:
The Future of War: Power, Technology and American World Dominance in the Twenty-first Century I did that after berating him over an idiotic STRATFOR comment on torture and rendition being “understandable,” something better understood by searching for the Op Ed by someone else on “The Banality of Evil.”

This book is a tragic mess. I actually wonder if the author wrote it, or if this is staff work and part of marketing for STRATFOR, which despite its mixed track record and lack of sourcing or analytic coherence, appears to be a success as an online opinion feed and rapid response “go fer” service.

There are no other books mentioned in this long essay; no notes; no index, no nothing–just one long essay that is completely lacking in any kind of strategic analytic framework.

Here are some of my flyleaf notes:

China not expanding into Siberia? This is completely at odds with the reality that China has a massive and aggressive program to move immigrants into Siberia at the same time that Russian occupation of the southeastern region of Russia is dropping.

Mexico defeated? Although later in the book the author provides a graphic that shows Hispanics largely dominating back up to the Hidalgo-Guadalupe line that pioneers of Spanish heritage developed in the first place, he reeks of the conventional wisdom that Mexico was “defeated” by the USA rather than attacked and pushed out. As a friend of mine related, when he asked his grandfather when the family immigrated, the answer was: “we didn't–they moved the border on us.”

America Centric. This book–whoever wrote it–is so out of touch with global realities and so blindly America-centric that I really have to wonder if this is a serious offering. While it was no doubt written in pieces over time, probably beginning in 2007, it reflects ZERO insights or after-the-fact acknowledgement of all that has happened since Business Week ran the cover story in October 2007 on the coming recession, or the very obvious fact that the eight demographic actors (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards such as Congo, Malaysia, South Africa, and Turkey) will define the future, not the USA, which has lost its integrity and its intelligence (I will respond to comments on this point, see the seven books I have sponsored).

Humanity. There is none in this book. The author appears to be primarily a techno-state geek and still thinks in terms of trends at the macro-organizational and macro-technology level. I have a note, “No humanity in this book.” There is ZERO understanding of political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, or even techno-demographic and natural-geographic. While the author(s) have a stab as geographic erudicity, it is pathetic. Robert Kaplan does it better in “The Revenge of Geography,” from which I extract the following righteously intelligent observation by Kaplan:

BEGIN KAPLAN. These deepening connections are transforming the Middle East, Central Asia, and the Indian and Pacific oceans into a vast continuum, in which the narrow and vulnerable Strait of Malacca will be the Fulda Gap of the 21st century. The fates of the Islamic Middle East and Islamic Indonesia are therefore becoming inextricable. But it is the geographic connections, not religious ones, that matter most. END KAPLAN.

That one sentence is better than this entire book.

There are a few small elements of the book that were worthy of noting.

1. The author is convinced that Poland will invade Russia from the west while Japan invades Russia from the east. I take the first seriously and the second–as someone who spent a third of their life in Asia–with shocked amusement.

2. The author believes there will be a Russian-Turkish war over Central Asia. I find this worthy of future alertness and reflection.

3. The author believes that Russia's being “landlocked” in the east (the part that I have suggested the Alaska Independence Movement and Christian Exodus both seek permission to develop as part of the Russian strategy to slow the calculated Chinese creep north and northeast), and I have a note to myself: Vladivostok? Global warming? NW Passage?

4. Five cycles of the West. The book identifies five cycles, from founders to pioneers, pioneers to small town America, small town to industrial, and industrial-suburban to migrant class, and I just shake my head. I know some, but not all, of the rest of the world, and this is so grossly generic and US-specific as to make me cringe.

5. China is Japan on steroids. Wow. Can anyone be this ignorant of cultural and historical reality? Even if intended as a throw-away line on industrial prowess, this thought is so ill-conceived as to be frightening in its ignorance. Incidentally, China did not sign the post war treaty and they still have a right to claim reparations from both Japan and the USA (see Gold Warriors by the Sterlings).

6. Space, the final frontier. The book stresses space in a techno-geek sort of way, and I pretty much give up on the book at this point. There is nothing in here about RapidSMS, cell phone and renewable energy lighting up the Southern Hemisphere, etcetera.

The author(s) have been very lazy in this book, to the point that I wonder if organizational un-intelligence has blinded them to their own arrogance in thinking that such an essay, absent both an analytic framework and respect for the vast non-fiction literature covering every aspect of all that this book ignores, would be well received. Evidently they are right, the book ranks well, but that may say more about the marketing than the book. I am sure the author(s) would be delighted to be as wealthy as Bill Gates, using first-rate marketing to sell second-rate thinking.

For one analytic framework that is properly holistic in thinking about both the next 100 years and what we as a collective can do about it, visit Earth Intelligence Network (501c3 Public Charity).

I list nine better books below (and include the author's first book above as a much better book):
1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus
FOOTSTEPS INTO THE FUTURE (Preferred Worlds for the 1990's)
The Road to 2015: Profiles of the Future
The Nine Nations of North America
Next Global Stage: The: Challenges and Opportunities in Our Borderless World
The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable
The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World
The Future of Life
Earth: The Sequel: The Race to Reinvent Energy and Stop Global Warming

There are so many others, but Amazon limits me to ten links and the books above are drawn from my futures shelf, one of 85 categories in which I read.

2008/01/222010/01/04

Review: The Fifteen Century War, Islam’s Violent Heritage

2 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Religion & Politics of Religion, Strategy, War & Face of Battle

January 22, 2008

Morgan Norval

This is a cute sophmoric book that plays to those who can understand simplistic solution, single-point fear mongering, etcetera. While I am sympathetic to the basic premise (the Spanish finally had to issue the Expulsion Edicts to rid themselves of an unassimilable religion persistently seeking to overthrow the state), this book is too narrow to be truly useful at a strategic level. See Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 and Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.

It ignores Catholic genocide, the Catholic crusades against Islam, the high culture of both Arabic Islam and Persian Iran that preceeded European culture, eteceta.

It ignores the present day Jewish genocide against the Palestinians as well as Jewish theft of water from the Arab aquifers (the Arabs are not blameless, far from it).

Most importantly, it ignores India's success (second largest Muslim population outside of Indonesia) as well as the success of Malaysia, Turkey, and Indonesia among others, and it fails to distinguish between Islam and dictatorships or peverted roylaty such as the Saudi's to whom the US Governmetn has prostituted the Republic while they spread virulent Wahhabiism all over the world.

Bottom line: a clever book for simple people.

See instead (my reviews summarize the books if you do not wish to buy):
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Religion and Global Politics)
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right
Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction

2007/02/182009/12/04

Review: The Future of American Intelligence

2 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Very Poor–Old, Tired, Out of Touch,

February 18, 2007

Peter Berkowitz

Although I respect Retired Reader very much, and have found his reviews to be very accurate, I take a special interest in the intelligence discipline and the price was right for simply taking a look directly even knowing more or less what I was buying into.

This is a very sad little book. It is the last gasp of the old dogs and the new neo-con puppies trying desperately for relevance in a world that has passed them by. The only two guys in this book that actually know what they are talking about are Reuel Marc Gerecht, former case officer, whose chapter could have been done in two lines:

1) Cut intelligence budget by three quarters, “giving money to CIA is like giving crack to a cocaine addict;” and

2) End official cover and go to a very small cadre of truly extraordinary non-official cover officers.

and Kevin O'Connell, who has the most coherent topic overview.

I will take each of these five shallow and largely out of touch (which is to say, witless about the much larger literature outside the neo-con self-licking self-absorption cone).

The Era of Armed Groups by Richard Shultz. I have to say first that Shultz is a phenomenally good academic, and his edited work “Security Studies for the 21st Century” remains a standard for the field. His chapter in this volume is 20 years too late. I will mention only one seminal work: General Al Gray, then Commandant of the Marine Corps, “Global Intelligence Challenges of the 1990's” as published in the American Intelligence Journal, Winter 1988-1989. General Gray and I (as the senior civilian founder of the Marine Corps Intelligence Command in 1988) championed this for four years inside the US Intelligence Community, from 1988-1992, and from the National and Military Intelligence Boards down, *no one wanted to hear it.*

Truth to Power? Rethinking Intelligence Analysis by Gary Schmidt. This has a core idea that is correct, that further centralizing both intelligence and homeland security is the *last* thing we should be doing, but it is completely lacking in any understanding of the 18 functionalities needed for desktop analysis such as conceptualized by Diane Webb in 1986, it does not understand the NIMA Commission Report of 1999 on the paucity of funding for integrated and distributed sense-making and broad sharing, and it completely misses the true breadth of multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain information sharing and shared analytic endeavors.

Restructuring the Intelligence Community by Gordon Lederman. This is an especially pathetic piece of work by the young man that was purportedly responsible for Open Source Intelligence reflections on the 9-11 Commission, where Lee Hamilton understood the issue from the Burundi Exercise when OSS.Net beat the entire US Intelligence Community overnight on the topic of Burundi, with just six phone calls. This young man is regurgitating portions of the 9-11 Commission report while neglecting the extraordinary failures of that Commission across a number of fronts. This particular chapter is the last gasp on top of the last Commission from the era of the walking dead.

A New Clandestine Service by Rauel Marc Gerecht. Gerecht could still be saved, he just needs new company. He packs the two ideas mentioned above into 35 pages. There is no mention of the five-part plan for saving the Clandestine Service by limiting new hires to one-fifth, and spreading the other four fifths to mid-career US citizen hires who have already created their cover and regional access (and are 4-level language qualified before being considered); mid-career third country principal agents; mid-career rotationals from other countries for regional Stations focused on targets of mutual concern; and straight one-time “it's just business” approaches to businessmen for specific tactical technical or other accommodations.

The Role of Science and Technology in Transforming American Intelligence by Kevin O'Connell is not bad as a superficial overview, and with more detail, more charts, and better documentation, could actually become useful. He was the staff director for the NIMA Commission, and while he is astonishingly superficial here (“data mining” are the only two words in his chapter covering what can be better understood by looking at the charts I have posted on Amazon for the book, “Wikinomics: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything,”), he does address some challenges. His most important idea, which I credit to Jim Clapper and Mike Hayden, is that of Horizontal Integration–I did not see any mention of the equally important point made by Mike Hayden to the Intelink Conference in Boston a couple of years ago, which is that all dots must start connecting to one another from the moment they are ingested, not just in the finished production phrase. In general, however, he completely misses the reality that the US Intelligence Community is inside out and upside down (see the Forbes article on “Reinventing Intelligence”) and the next President will be well served by reducing secret intelligence to $15 billion a year, while re-directing the rest of the money to Digital Natives, Serious Games, and the Way of the Wiki (the title of my next book on intelligence).

Bottom line: This book is not worth buying unless you want to understand just how impoverished the extreme right and the neocons are with respect to the most important topic of our time, NATIONAL intelligence. You would be much better off using my lists at Amazon, and systematically reading my summative reviews of the thoughts of vastly more competent authors with vastly more diverse and nuanced views. This book is NOT about the future of American intelligence, which will be NOT Federal, NOT Secret, and NOT expensive. This book is the dying breath–an accurate representation–of the good-hearted but myopic bureaucrats that got us to today because they could not think for themselves, and were stuck in the military-industrial system, running on auto-pilot with no end in sight.

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Category: 2 Star

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