Category: Culture, Research

Posted on

Review (Guest): No More Secrets – Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Budget Process & Politics, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy
Amazon Page

Hamilton Bean

5.0 out of 5 stars The Folly of Secret Intelligence,July 28, 2011

By  Retired Reader (New Mexico) – See all my reviews

Ever had someone try to undercut your position by alluding to “secret” information whose details, alas, cannot be shared but allegedly trump your arguments. How much worse when it is the government who is seen to bully its own citizenry in this way?

The hallmark of our free society is the First Amendment, which stipulates that “Congress shall make no law…abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press…” Had it occurred to the framers that the Executive Branch would acquire equivalent law-making powers–Executive Orders with the “force of law”–they likely would have constrained that branch of government similarly …and perhaps an activist judiciary, as well.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): No More Secrets – Open Source Information and the Reshaping of U.S. Intelligence”

Posted on

Review (Retired Reader): Solving the People Puzzle — Cultural Intelligence and Special Operations Forces

4 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Best Practices in Management, Culture, Research, Force Structure (Military), Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret)
Amazon Page

Dr. Emily Spencer (Author)

4.0 out of 5 stars Intelligence Support for Speical Operations Forces,August 15, 2011

This book provides an excellent description of the personal, organization and mission of what are called Special Operations Forces (SOF) and their relationship to conventional forces. More importantly it introduces the concept of `cultural intelligence' as the precise type of intelligence information that SOF unit need to successfully execute their missions.

Cultural Intelligence which Spencer refers to as “CQ” (to avoid confusion with Counter Intelligence (CI)) is a combination of ethnography, sociology, and psychology. As Spencer makes clear successful counter-insurgency operations (COIN) and counter-terrorism (CT) programs depend on understanding the cultural environment in which they are conducted. That is it is necessary to understand the underlying social structures, beliefs, and motivations of the populations constitute what she refers to as the Contemporary Operating Environment within which SOF missions are conducted. This important insight is one of those concepts which appear obvious, but only have somebody has developed it.

Continue reading “Review (Retired Reader): Solving the People Puzzle — Cultural Intelligence and Special Operations Forces”

Posted on

Review: Sacred Economics – Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page

Charles Eisenstein

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond 5 Stars, an Integrative Pioneering Work,August 13, 2011

Sacred Economics is the second book in the new Evolver Editions imprint, following Jose Arguelles Manifesto for the Noosphere. Other books in the first season include What Comes After Money, The Secret Tradition of the Soul, The Four Global Truths, The Electric Jesus, Star Sister, and Nothing and Everything.

I read a lot, and the one word that really describes this book is “integrative.” The author describes, in three parts, what is wrong with what he calls the “economics of separation,” today's money and financial network economy that lacks soul or spirit; its alternative, the “economics of reunion” in which all forms of transaction have memories, gifts and reciprocal gifts and localized forms of exchange rule, and economics is fully integrated with society to produce social and cultural dividends. The third and last part closes the circle with a hundred-page discourse (double-spaced large print, this is not a hard book to read) on how to live within the new economy in which gifting, community, and beauty are integrated.

Throughout the book the author evolves his core point: money is “hard” and nurtures external diseconomies, including grave destruction of cultural and social intangible value-gradually the author builds up to his conclusion, that beauty is a tangible value, that relatedness is a tangible value, and that in the past century or two we have stripped so much value from what it means to be human as to have become less than human, less than we can be.
Continue reading “Review: Sacred Economics – Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition”

Posted on

Review (Guest): Deep Green Resistance – Strategy to Save the Planet

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Secession & Nullification, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
Amazon Page

Derrick Jensen (Author), Aric McBay (Author), Lierre Keith (Author)

About the Authors

Activist, philosopher, teacher, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent, DERRICK JENSEN holds degrees in creative writing and mineral engineering physics. In 2008, he was named one of the Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” and in 2006 he was named Press Action’s Person of the Year for his work on the book Endgame. He lives in California.

Writer, activist, and small-scale organic farmer ARIC MCBAY works to share information about community sufficiency and off-the-grid skills. He is the author of Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life after Gridcrash and creator of “In the Wake: A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization.”

LIERRE KEITH is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of two novels, as well The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She's also been arrested six times. She lives in Humboldt County, CA.

5.0 out of 5 stars finally, a book to meet the scale of our predicament,June 7, 2011
By  Owen Lloyd (Eugene, OR) – See all my reviews

What is different about Deep Green Resistance is that it is the first book that offers a solution that is scaled to the size of our predicament.

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Deep Green Resistance – Strategy to Save the Planet”

Posted on

Review: Family of Secrets – The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)
Amazon Page

Russ Baker

5.0 out of 5 stars Tough reading, desperately needs charts and graphs and a proper web site,August 4, 2011

I sat down to write a review and realized that the top review is a very good summary, and has a number of comments that provide specific new information and also recommend two other books, so what I have decided to do, as a direct complement to the top review by Richard Cumming, is provide links to the other books mentioned in the comments, and then add some of my own. I strongly recommend all the comments on the review be read.

The book desperately needs social networking graphics and its own web site. Although the author, who sent me the book, has a web site by the book's title, it is focused on video clips and is not an extension of the book. Public intelligence is now at a point where all that needs to be known is large known, but it cannot be aggregated and made sense of for lack of a public intelligence ability to do data mining and data visualization in a very structured continuous manner.

Continue reading “Review: Family of Secrets – The Bush Dynasty, America's Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years”

Posted on

Review: Pathology of Power

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)
Amazon Page

Norman Cousins

5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Detailed Exposure of Power Killing Intelligence, July 30, 2011

This is a new edition of the book, and so very timely. If I had the money to give one book to every American, this would be it, followed by TYRANNICIDE The Story of the Second American Revolution and my all time God Bless America favorite, The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen.

Here is the author's opening statement:

“Connected to the tendency of power to corrupt are yet other tendencies that emerge from the pages of the historians:

* The tendency of power to drive intelligence underground;

* The tendency of power to become a theology, admitting no other gods before it;

* The tendency of power to distort and damage the traditions and institutions it was designed to protect;

* The tendency of power to create a language of its own, making other forms of communication incoherent and irrelevant;

* The tendency of power to spawn imitators, leading to volatile competition;

* The tendency of power to set the stage for its own use.

Continue reading “Review: Pathology of Power”

Posted on

Review: Measuring Evolution

6 Star Top 10%, Atlases & State of the World, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Science & Politics of Science, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
Amazon Page

David Loye

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Plus — Simple, Sensible Revolutionary, July 26, 2011

I am astonished that there are no reviews of this book. I first learned of it from my reading of A Democratic Approach to Sustainable Futures: A Workbook for Addressing the Global Problematique, and now I have discovered other books by this author, among which I would quickly point to

Bankrolling Evolution: A Program for a President
Darwin's Lost Theory of Love: A Healing Vision for the 21st Century
The Healing of a Nation

This book is very fairly priced, and while it may come across to superficial reviewers as too simple or shallow, I find it to be engrossing. This is a really big idea ably presented, with very brief overviews of prior science, examples of organizational applications, and addendums including a pointer to The Darwin Project.

Continue reading “Review: Measuring Evolution”