The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
Huh?
By Mark Mazower
Financial Times, 25 October 2013
The Confidence Trap: A History of Democracy in Crisis from World War I to the Present, by David Runciman, Princeton, RRP£19.95/$29.95, 408 pages
Nation of Devils: Democratic Leadership and the Problem of Obedience, by Stein Ringen, Yale, RRP£20/$35, 264 pages
Andrew J. Bacedvich
A disturbing but vitally necessary read. Take note, Mr President, and Congress too
By Timothy J. Bazzett on September 10, 2013
Andrew Bacevich's latest offering, BREACH OF TRUST, is going to make a lot of people squirm – if people read it, that is. Because in this book he tells us flat out that an all-volunteer army in a democratic society simply does not work, and that the present system is “broken.” It is bankrupting our country, and not just financially, but morally. He tells us that Iraq and Afghanistan, two of the longest and most expensive wars in U.S. history, have evoked little more than “an attitude of cordial indifference” on the part of a shallow and selfish populace more concerned with the latest doings of the Kardashians, professional superstar athletes or other vapid and overpaid millionaire celebrities, reflecting “a culture that is moored to nothing more than irreverent whimsy and jeering ridicule.”
Bacevich cites General Stanley McChrystal, former commander of all U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, who spoke about having “skin in the game,” meaning that when a country goes to war every town and city should be at risk. McChrystal went on to say the unthinkable: “I think we'd be better if we actually went to a draft these days … for the nation it would be a better course.”
Horrors! That dreaded “D” word finally uttered aloud. Well, I'd say it's about damn time. And Bacevich agrees, noting that in his many speaking engagements over the past ten years “I can count on one hand the number of occasions when someone did NOT pose a question about the draft, invariably offered as a suggestion for how to curb Washington's appetite for intervention abroad and establish some semblance of political accountability.”
Edgar Morin
7 Stars Life Transformative Foundation Work for Everything Else
This is a remarkably coherent book about the most important topic for all of us, the matter of complexity and more to the point, thinking about complexity. I certainly recommend it most strongly, along with two other books by the same author that I have reviewed:
Homeland Earth : A Manifesto for the New Millennium (Advances in Systems Theory, Complexity and the Human Sciences)
Seven Complex Lessons in Education for the Future (Education on the Move)
The Foreword by Alfonso Montuori is easily the equal of the main body by Edgar Morin, and I am totally awed by the mastery demonstrated in Montuori's synthesis and framing of Morin's work. I venture to say that I would not have gotten as much from the main body without the structure of the Foreword.
Montuori, always drawing on Morin, emphasizes a number of core concepts that I note down:
01 We must abandon the architectural or machine metaphor that assumes a foundation or base for what is actually a complex complete whole that can be viewed from any point.
Rickard Falkvinge
– – – – –
My last comment first: this book ends beautifully, and I am personally deeply inspired. Rickard Falkvinge has been and will continue to be a change agent, and this book is a form of persistent, ubiquitous sharing of insight that could help accelerate and broaden the emergent public bottom up demands for clarity, diversity, integrity, and sustainability.
Swarm Management: After four years of work, the leadership book Swarmwise is finally published. It is a book filled to the brim with the experience from leading the Swedish Pirate Party from zero into the European Parliament, spreading the movement to 70 countries, and most importantly, beating the competition on less than one percent of their budget – being over two orders of magnitude more cost-efficient. It is available as a paperback and a PDF, with more formats to come.
Yesterday afternoon, I hit the “publish” button, and as of this morning, the book is available on Amazon (US, UK, DE, FR). It is also available as a PDF for free sharing (download and torrent). This is the culmination of four years of work, after I decided to write down and share my experiences with forming, leading, and winning with a swarm-style community.
The book doesn’t go into theoretical detail, psychology, or deep research papers. Rather, it is very hands-on leadership advice from pure experience – it covers everything from how you give instructions to new activists about handing out flyers in the street, up to and including how you communicate with TV stations and organize hundreds of thousands of people in a coherent swarm. Above all, it focuses on the cost-efficiency of the swarm structure, and is a tactical instruction manual for anybody who wants to dropkick their competition completely – no matter whether their game is business, social, or political.
Continue reading “Rickard Falkvinge: New Book Swarmwise Now Available”
Radley Balko
5.0 out of 5 stars A must read! July 1, 2013
In his new book, Rise of the Warrior Cop, author Radley Balko provides a detailed history of our decline into a police state.
He works his way through this history in a sound way describing police raid upon police raid gone terribly wrong, resulting in a useless loss of life. He discusses police agencies that serve populations of only 1,000 people but receive federal funding for military-type weapons and tank-style vehicles. We have also seen a total disregard for “The Castle Doctrine” which has been held dear by our citizens since the colonial days. The “Castle Doctrine” is the idea that a man's home is his castle and a warrant signed by a judge is necessary to enter and search the “castle.” Balko cogently explains the reason for all of this: The war on drugs and the war on terror are really wars on our own people.
A profession that I was once proud to serve in has become a militarized police state. Officers are quicker to draw their guns and use their tanks than to communicate with people to diffuse a situation. They love to use their toys and when they do, people die.
Joseph G. Bock
5.0 out of 5 stars Pioneering Work, Deserves a Great Deal of Attention, April 29, 2013
I am shocked that there are no reviews of this book. Brought to my attention by Berto Jongman, one of the top researchers in Europe with a special talent at the intersection of terrorism and related violence (e.g. genocide) and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), he knew this is an area that is of very high interest to me.
The book passed my very first test, with more than ample references to Dr. Patrick Meier, a pioneer in crisis mapping, SMS translations and plotting by diasporas, and humanitarian ICT generally. I strongly recommend his blog and expect him to produce a book of his own soon.
The primary focus here is on social media via hand-held devices. It assumes a working Internet and does not have a great deal of focus on the urgency of achieving an Autonomous Internet, and more fully exploiting Liberation Technology and Open Source Everything (OSE), the latter my special interest along with M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making).
Use Inside the Book to see the chapters and appendices. The author makes clear two major points early on:
01 Grassroots is where its at, not top down macro
02 Technology alone is not enough, organizing — the hard long road of grassroots organizing — is essential.
