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.”
Andrew P. Napolitano
7 Stars — Documents Presidential Perfidy – Life Transformative for This Reason
I broke with the Republican Party over Iran-Contra and belatedly, the one trillion a year that Reagan started shamelessly borrowing to fund the dual welfare system — a dysfunctional military-espionage-industrial complex for the right, and a dysfunctional regulatory myopic and equally toxic individual welfare system for the left, all while ignoring banking and corporate predation. Fox News broke with me when I said, on live Fox, that the Global War on Terror was a fraud. Fox may be getting smarter, certainly this book causes me to reconsider where the right might be. I like the book very much. Although an Op-Ed book that lacks the eye candy (the Constitution as an appendix, and charts showing the specifics of Roosevelt's and Wilson's violations, maps of global and domestic depravities carried out in the public name and at the public's expense), this is a superb primer, a superb eye-opener, not just for the normal American with little time to read, but also, absolutely, for those like myself who read a great deal but may not have been well grounded in the areas where Judge Napolitano has spent hard time in the trenches.
I notice immediately that among his many books are two that resonate with everything that I and others do at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog (“The truth at any cost lowers all other costs”):
Constitutional Chaos: What Happens When the Government Breaks Its Own Laws
Lies the Government Told You: Myth, Power, and Deception in American History
This book is a measured and hence valuable overview of thirteen unconstitutional turns in our last century and a half. I thought, with all the other excellent reviews already up, that the best contribution I could make is single out the one where I learned the most, and then offer an additional recommended reading in each of eight other areas where the author has sharpened my understanding and heightened my patriotic anger.
EYE OPENER: I never gave much thought to the 17th amendment that took states' right away by taking away the role of the Senators as representatives of the State, instead turning them into the standard mob mouthpieces of the two-party tyranny. Now I am in Afghanistan, where a federal system has made corruption the central fact of life, destroyed the diversity and integrity of the provinces, and set the stage for another civil war when the US limps out. The older I get and the more I learn, the more I treasure grass-roots diversity down to municipal and county rights — NO from the bottom must trump “because I say so” from the top. I am adding reversal of 17th Amendment to my “to do” list at We the People Reform Coalition, joining my view that secession is the right of every state, and nullification in the public interest is the OBLIGATION of every Governor and state legislature.
Now here are eight of the thirteen chapters, each a lesson plan on its own, my only contribution here is to add a short blurb and one recommended additional reading for each of these chapters (I have reviewed each, my reviews are summary in nature for those who do not have the time or do not wish to purchase the books).
Rickard Falkvinge
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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”
John Nichols and Rbbert W. McChesney
4.0 out of 5 stars Sickening at Two Levels — Superb Indictment of Periphery, Completely Avoids Two Party Tyranny Issue, July 19, 2013
This book makes me sick at two levels.
Level 1: It is the best treatment available of what I and many others have been saying for years. My own treatment was provided in a Preface, “Paradigms of Failure,” in the book under my signature below, that also had a preface by Thom Hartmann, another by Tom Atlee, and a third, reprinted, from Senator Bernie Sanders. The entire book is free online, so I am not pimping it.
Level 2: The book is at best naive and at worst deliberately misleading in suggesting that Congress somehow needs to be “empowered” to resist. This is absolute and utter bull. I ran for President in 2012, accepted by the Reform Party, listed at Politics1, interviewed for On The Issues, and I ran for two reasons: to get all of the best ideas in one place (We the People Reform Coalition) and to test the boundaries of the two-party tyranny as immortalized in Theresa Amato's outrageously superb Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny. I specifically ran to be able to contact every single other Presidential candidate from the small parties, and to learn — as I did — that not a single one of them could overcome their ego (as Occupy could not overcome its mob) to come together in a demand for Electoral Reform from 2011 in time for 2012. That report to Hackers on Planet Earth and also published in Reality Sandwich is easily found online by searching for “How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny.”
Here is what this book does NOT tell you, and the reason it gets only four stars from me (it is superb in what it does tell you, but misses the key point): NINE TIMES the US Congress has been asked to pass legislation that would mandate — for federal elections only — that the six small parties blocked from ballot access (Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, and Socialist) — and Independent candidates — be guaranteed both ballot access and debate access. NINE TIMES, the last four sponsored by Ron Paul, the two-party tyranny has refused. They have a deal: they borrow one trillion a year in our name, one third of a federal budget that is documented to be 50% waste, and in return they share the right to loot the public treasury and pay off their voting blocks — corporate welfare and the banks for the Republicans, individual welfare for the Democrats. Obama is an anomaly — Wall Street bought the white half, the Progressives got the black half, and we all know how this turned out.
Robert Parry
5.0 out of 5 stars How we allowed the rightwing to get Away with falsely Re-writing American History, and thus steal the Nation's narrative, and wi, March 7, 2013
Herbert L Calhoun “paulocal” (Falls Church, VA USA) – See all my reviews
Sam Parry proves here in his book, “America's Stolen Narrative,” that he has his eye on the ball. For he sees that in large measure the decline in American civility, international prestige, much of today's governmental dysfunction, and the alarming and unaccountable shift to the right, has a lot to do with the way we have allowed the rightwing 24/7 media attack machine and the money that backs it, to get away with lying about and thus stealing and murdering our history.
By fiat they have been able to commandeer both the symbols of state and now through Gerrymandering, voter suppression and other such illicit stratagems, have also been able to take over the very machinery of government: Even when they lose elections and are out of power, as they are today, they still win as they are able to control the national narrative, the national agenda and has a newly elected President, with his national voter mandate so stymied that he cannot even make appointments or carry out the normal duties delegated to the presidency?
