Category: Culture, Research

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Worth a Look: Jesse Ventura on US Government

07 Other Atrocities, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Justice, 10 Security, 11 Society, 5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Corruption, Counter-Oppression/Counter-Dictatorship Practices, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Cultural Intelligence, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Government, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Officers Call, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)
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Former Minnesota governor, navy SEAL, and pro rassler Ventura has a new truTVshow investigating but not necessarily debunking conspiracy theories. This companion to the program, a sort of teaser, dissects such famed objects of unending speculation as the JFK, RFK, and MLK assassinations. Ventura concludes that none of those were twisted-loner crimes but rather resulted from conspiracies of varying vastness. Anent the 9/11 terrorist attacks, Ventura asserts that “our government engaged in a massive cover-up” and had “ties to the hijackers.” He ventures that “unanswered questions remain about how the towers were brought down and whether a plane really struck the Pentagon” and that the “Bush Administration either knew about the plan” or “had a hand in it.” Heady, paranoiac stuff, to be sure, but there are even more forthright charges regarding the assassination of Malcolm X, the Jonestown massacre, and the “stolen” elections of 2000, 2004, 2008, and, for that matter, 1980. Believable? Some of it. An action-packed read? You bet. –Mike Tribby

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Reference: The Pentagon Labyrinth

6 Star Top 10%, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, DoD, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Historic Contributions, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Media, Military, Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Monographs, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

The Pentagon Labyrinth

It is my pleasure to announce the publication of The Pentagon Labyrinth: 10 Short Essays to Help You Through It. This is a short pamphlet of less than 150 pages and is available at no cost in E-Book PDF format, as well as in hard copy from links on this page as well as here and here.  Included in the menu below are download links for a wide variety of supplemental/supporting information (much previously unavailable on the web) describing how notions of combat effectiveness relate to the basic building blocks of people, ideas, and hardware/technology; the nature of strategy; and the dysfunctional character of the Pentagon’s decision making procedures and the supporting role of its  accounting shambles.

Chuck Spinney
The Blaster

This pamphlet aims to help both newcomers and seasoned observers learn how to grapple with the problems of national defense.  Intended for readers who are frustrated with the superficial nature of the debate on national security, this handbook takes advantage of the insights of ten unique professionals, each with decades of experience in the armed services, the Pentagon bureaucracy, Congress, the intelligence community, military history, journalism and other disciplines.  The short but provocative essays will help you to:

  • identify the decay – moral, mental and physical – in America’s defenses,
  • understand the various “tribes” that run bureaucratic life in the Pentagon,
  • appreciate what too many defense journalists are not doing, but should,
  • conduct first rate national security oversight instead of second rate theater,
  • separate careerists from ethical professionals in senior military and civilian ranks,
  • learn to critique strategies, distinguishing the useful from the agenda-driven,
  • recognize the pervasive influence of money in defense decision-making,
  • unravel the budget games the Pentagon and Congress love to play,
  • understand how to sort good weapons from bad – and avoid high cost failures, and
  • reform the failed defense procurement system without changing a single law.

The handbook ends with lists of contacts, readings and Web sites carefully selected to facilitate further understanding of the above, and more.

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Review: The Clash of Ideas in World Politics–Transnational Networks, States, and Regime Change, 1510-2010

4 Star, Culture, Research, History, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Security (Including Immigration), War & Face of Battle
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John M. Owen

4.0 out of 5 stars Academic, Historical Focus on States

March 4, 2011

In comparison to Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order, which is receiving a 6+ from my (my top 10%), this is at best a 4 for the general public of which I am a part. It has its academic testimonials, in that world it seems to be a solid 5.

The author focuses on the period from 1510-2010 and on forcible regime change among polarized elites. While the author clearly states his intent to confront realism theory and to provide an alternative history over five centuries, the book leaves me bored and cold.

Ideas matter, the author tells us. He documents (most ably) three waves, three ideological struggles.

First wave 1520-1650, Catholic Church versus monarchs

Second wave 1770-1850, Monarchs versus republicans/constitutionalists

Third wave 1919 to date, Export of fascism, communism, and liberal democracy

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Review: Long Strange Journey–An Intelligence Memoir

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Censorship & Denial of Access, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Disease & Health, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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Patrick G. Eddington (Author)

5.0 out of 5 stars6+ Deep Moral Practical Look at Loss of Integrity Across US National Security

February 28, 2011

FINAL REVIEW

It is difficult for any intelligence book to make it to my 6+ category, or top ten percent. What brings this book to the very top of the heap is the skillful weaving of a constant appraisal of the moral in tandem with the practical. Sight unseen I knew this book would be a five, but it jumped to six when I read it from the back to the front and saw:

Page 354: The Agency has become inbred, ossified, parasitic…a prescription for the abuse of individual rights and fatally flawed analyses of the world-at-large that have plagued CIA over the past 30 years…

In the same concluding chapter he slams Congress for not demanding full access to classified information and the Congressional intelligence committees for serving as controllers of Congressional access rather than oversight bodies, with a particular disdain and disinterest in whistle-blowers; the Pentagon for infecting its own troops with alleged medicine that cause neurological problems, and for consistently covering up and lying to one and all about the causes of Gulf War syndrome; and the US Government generally for isolating “military medicine” from civilian medicine to the point that the troops are guinea pigs for bad science, and then victims of cover-ups that would not be countenanced outside the Pentagon.

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Review (Guest): Seeing Like a State–How Certain Schemes to Improve the Human Condition Have Failed

5 Star, Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Military & Pentagon Power, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

Professor James C. Scott (Author)

5.0 out of 5 stars Structural Dysfunctionalism

November 18, 2001

ByMichael Biggs (Oxford, United Kingdom) – See all my reviews

James Scott is known for portraying the moral world of peasants, showing how they have resisted the encroachment of capitalism and the state. Now he investigates the other side: the experts, bureaucrats, and revolutionaries whose grandiose schemes to improve the human condition have inflicted untold misery on the twentieth century. Seeing Like a State can be read, along with Foucault's Discipline and Punish and James Ferguson's The Anti-Politics Machine, as a classic of ‘structural dysfunctionalism.' The point (put metaphorically) is not merely that the cure for social ills has proven inadequate-but that the disease inhered in the diagnosis, and that failure will continue so long as the doctors prevail.

The dysfunction, Scott argues, derived from three modern conditions.

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Review (DVD): Inside Job

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Justice (Failure, Reform), Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Reviews (DVD Only), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page

Matt Damon (Narrator)

5.0 out of 5 stars 6+ Truth Not Reaching Most Americans

February 28, 2011

AFTERTHOUGHT: What Wall Street greed did to the economy with the aid of its corrupt US Government enablers, the US Government did to US society and to global stability, spending trillions a year on the wrong things for the wrong reasons. See my chapter on “Paradigms of Failure” in the book (both here at Amazon and free online) ELECTION 2008: Lipstick on the Pig.

The other reviews are very good and I strongly recommend that whether or not you buy or rent the DVD (or watch it in a hotel as I have just done), that you read all the reviews, especially those that provide summary detail.

For myself, this movie is most extraordinary for the manner in which it pieces together the story to include very compelling interviews with many of the culprits including professors of economics who themselves were corrupted. Those who declined to be interviewed, including Laura Tyson, Paulson, Geithner, Greenspan, Summers, and a few others, are the worst of the culprits.

Compellingly–and consistent with all my reading on the two-party tyranny and the corruption of the US Government–the film is especially strong in showing with absolute clarity that the Obama Administration has been, if anything, more of a Wall Street front than any prior administration. “Nobody's gone to jail.” Worse, there have been no serious investigations. The US Government is NOT representing the public interest.

My focus with this review is to point to ten books that I have reviewed in summary form:

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Review: Toward Wiser Public Judgment

4 Star, Civil Society, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Education (General), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Politics
Amazon Page

Daniel Yankelovich (Editor), Will Friedman (Editor)

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Mainstream View, Not Enough, Out of Touch With Alternative Models

February 28, 2011

I have spent eleven years being mentored on the topic of public co-intelligence and citizen wisdom by Tom Atlee, author of The Tao of Democracy: Using co-intelligence to create a world that works for all and Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, poems and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change; by Jim Rough, author of Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People; by Peggy Holman, author of The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems and the more recent Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity; and many others whose works I have reviewed here at Amazon, with a special nod toward Harrison Owen, with whom I lunch regularly to keep my sanity, he is the author of a number of books, including Open Space Technology: A User's Guide and more recently, Wave Rider: Leadership for High Performance in a Self-Organizing World.

It is in that context that I recommend this book as a superb example of mainstream thinking, while also respectfully observing that this approach is both inadequate, and out of touch with the alternative Epoch B bottom-up models that have been proven not only recently, but centuries ago within indigenous societies, as documented by, among others, Charles Mann in 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.

For this review, I decided to consult my mentors, and with their permission, offer two of their comments as a collective review–wisdom of the very crowds the authors of this book think they can help be wiser.

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