Culture, Research – Page 8 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/10/052014/10/05

Review: The Big Disconnect – Why the Internet Hasn’t Transformed Politics (Yet)

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Censorship & Denial of Access, Civil Society, Culture, Research, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics

Micah Sifry

5.0 out of 5 stars Should Be Top Ten Book Across All Progressive Communities, October 5, 2014

This is one of the most useful important books I have read in the past couple of years, and I am stunned that the publisher has failed to properly present the book for purchase on Amazon. This book should be one of the top ten books across the progressive communities of the world.

I rate this book at SIX STARS, which puts it into the top ten percent of the 2000+ non-fiction books with some DVDs (139) I have reviewed at Amazon. This is an *amazing* book of passionate informed truth-telling and in my view, it should be the starting point for a totally new conversation among all progressive minds going into the future.

I read this book on the way back from The New Story Summit as hosted by the Findhorn Foundation in Scotland. While the book is deeply supportive of my own views on the desperate need of the distributed progressive community for tools and methods that bring together all minds and all information into a coherent whole, attending the summit and listening to the leaders of major progressive organizations including the Global Eco-Village Network and Transition positioned me to better appreciate this book by Micah Sifry.

QUOTE (34): “…has not made participation in decision-making or group coordination substantially easier.”

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2014/09/122014/09/13

Review: Death of a King – The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Biography & Memoirs, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), True Cost & Toxicity

Tavis Smiley

5.0 out of 5 stars OK to Challenge Racism and Poverty — NOT OK to challenge militarism and the national security state, September 12, 2014

The publisher has done a rotten job of summarizing this book. Here, paraphrasing the author as he just spoke on the John Stewart show, is the bottom line:

The minute that Dr. King turned against militarism and denounced the USA as the greatest purveyor of violence upon the world, he was first marginalized and then assassinated. “The System” was fine with Dr. King focusing on racism, and even poverty, but it would not tolerate for one moment his questioning the military-industrial complex and the national security state.

The author — whom I found to be very inspiring, coherent, and concise — a brilliant articulator of the key points in the book — goes on to have a conversation with Jon Stewart about how the USA simply cannot handle truth-tellers in relation to “big money” matters such as elective wars (racism and poverty being “little money” matters, and deliberately so).

Dr. King was ultimately assassinated by a US Army sniper on detail to the FBI and under the personal direction of J. Edgar Hoover. The story is told in An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King and has also been documented and validated in a judgment by a federal court awarding the King family the single dollar in damages they requested.

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2014/07/122014/07/12

Review: 935 Lies – The Future of Truth and the Decline of America’s Moral Integrity

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Censorship & Denial of Access, Communications, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Future, Impeachment & Treason, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Charles Lewis

5.0 out of 5 stars Title Short-Changes Value — This is One of the Most Important Books of Our Time, July 12, 2014

I'm not thrilled with the title because it implies to the browser that the book is about the 935 now-documented lies that led to the war in Iraq, and that is not the case — those lies are simply one of many evidentiary cases spanned a much broader spectrum. As the author himself outlines early on, the book is about a retrospective review of the struggle for truth from the lies that led to Viet-Nam to date (less 9/11); a concurrent review of the corruption and diminuition of commercial journalism; and finally, the future of the truth.

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2014/07/012014/06/30

Review: The Road to Innovation

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Culture, Research

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Stars — The First Book to Connect All the Dots, June 29, 2014

I have decided to rate this book at “beyond five stars” for two reasons: first, because of all the books I have read on innovation, transformation, change management, and so on, this is the first one that I have found to be all inclusive — this is a capstone book, a stand-alone gem; and second, because this is the book I wanted to write in 1994 and could not. I have been waiting for a book such as this, not only for myself, but as a gift to top leaders who realize their organizations are broken and need a “booster shot” to get going on house cleaning followed by radical innovation.

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2014/05/102014/05/10

David Swanson: Understanding Afghanistan – New Book No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes

5 Star, Culture, Research

Everybody's Got Afghanistan Wrong

I've just read an excellent new book by Anand Gopal called No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War Through Afghan Eyes. Gopal has spent years in Afghanistan, learned local languages, interviewed people in depth, researched their stories, and produced a true-crime book more gripping, as well as more accurate, than anything Truman Capote came up with. Gopal's book is like a novel that interweaves the stories of a number of characters — stories that occasionally overlap. It's the kind of book that makes me worry I'll spoil it if I say too much about the fate of the characters, so I'll be careful not to.

The characters include Americans, Afghans allied with the U.S. occupation, Afghans fighting the U.S. occupation, and men and women trying to survive — including by shifting their loyalties toward whichever party seems least likely in that moment to imprison or kill them. What we discover from this is not just that enemies, too, are human beings. We discover that the same human beings switch from one category to another quite easily. The blunder of the U.S. occupation's de-Baathification policy in Iraq has been widely discussed. Throwing all the skilled and armed killers out of work turned out not to be the most brilliant move. But think about what motivated it: the idea that whoever had supported the evil regime was irredeemably evil (even though Ronald Reagan and Donald Rumsfeld had supported the evil regime too — OK, bad example, but you see what I mean). In Afghanistan the same cartoonish thinking, the same falling for one's own propaganda, went on.

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2014/04/292014/04/29

Review: STOP, THIEF! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), History, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Justice (Failure, Reform), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Peter Linebaugh

5.0 out of 5 stars David Bollier's Review is Better, This Is My Attempt, April 21, 2014

I was very impressed by David Bollier's review of this book at his web site (look for < “Stop, Thief!” – Peter Linebaugh's New Collection of Essays > and am encouraging him to port that excellent review here to Amazon. Indeed, after working my way through the book myself, I consider myself unable to do proper justice to this deep work that integrates history, poetry, political economy, anthropology, and sociology among other disciplines. Hence I hope others will write substantive summary reviews and I again recommend Bollier's review above.

Three thoughts keep recurring as I went through this book of original current essays and presentations:

01 Holy Cow. This guy is DEEP and BROAD in terms of arcane as well as popular sources, delving down into little known poems, essays, public statements, etcetera. This book is the one book version of the Durant's Story of Civilization applied to one topic, the commons.

02 Holy Cow. This is what my top political science professor was trying to explain when I was in college in 1970-1974 – yes, a half century ago — and I was just not smart enough, patient enough, to appreciate it.

03 Holy Cow. This book is not just subversive, it does a magnificent job of head slapping every politician, economists, talking head, and other pretender who presumes to talk about public welfare without for one instant understanding that wages are a form of slavery and disconnection of humanity from everything else. Lionel Tiger makes related points in The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System but this book — if you focus and do not get lost in the poetry and minutia of exemplar citation — beats the commons versus capitalism drum along every possible note on the musical scale.

Among my high-level notes:

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2014/04/282014/04/28

Review (Guest): Governing the Commons – The Evolution of Institutions for Collective Action

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Economics, Environment (Solutions), History, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Elinor Ostrom

4.0 out of 5 stars Addressing the Collective Action Problem August 2, 2007

By Matthew P. Arsenault

Ostrom attempts to refute the belief that only through state and or market-centered controls can commonly pooled resources (CPRs) be effectively governed. Ostrom writes, “Communities of individuals have relied on institutions resembling neither the state nor the market to govern some resource systems with reasonable degrees of success over long periods of time” (p. 1). Governing the Commons sets out to discover why some groups are able to effectively govern and manage CPRs and other groups fail. She tries to identify both the internal and external factors “that can impede or enhance the capabilities of individuals to use and govern CPRs.”

The first section of the book examines both state-controlled and privatization property rights regimes, and illustrates failures in both regimes; namely, that central authorities often fail to have complete accuracy of information, have only limited monitoring capabilities, and possess a weak sanctioning reliability. As such, a centralized governing body may actually govern the commons inaccurately and make a bad situation worse. In the case of privatized property rights regimes, Ostrom illustrates two main points: 1) it assumes that property is homogenous and any division of property will be equitable; and 2) privatization will not work with non-stationary property (fisheries, for example).

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