Education (General) – Page 6 – Public Intelligence Blog

Gary Weiss

5.0 out of 5 stars Ably Researched and Presented Inspection of One Side of America — the Part Without a Soul,March 20, 201

First off, this is not a “sneering” book, this is a solidly researched and ably presented inspection of Ayn Rand, key people in the Ayn Rand “movement” of Objectivism, and on balance the author is both sympathetic and critical — it takes intelligence and integrity to carry this off, those that lack either or both of these qualities should not buy the book. For the rest of us, it is a small piece of the puzzle, a small but most cogent explanation of why the 1% really do look down on the rest of us, and have neither God nor guilt about greed. HOWEVER, I must emphasize that one of the author's findings is that it is not just the 1% that buy into this whole market laissez faire posture, but a good number of the “little people” who have no idea what a philosophy can or should be.

George Soros nailed it with his essay on “My Philanthropy” subsequently a major portion of the book, The Philanthropy of George Soros: Building Open Societies. Blasting what he calls “the Enlightenment fallacy” he points out that all men are not rational, not necessarily good to one another, and not at all equipped to address the public interest in isolation.

Having seen the negative reviews, I was very pleasantly surprised right off by the author's introduction of his own book. I read a great deal — in 98 categories best understood by accessing all my Amazon reviews via category at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. I was immediately put at ease — serious author, serious approach to the topic, a good plan, and an undeniable commitment to the public interest.

I have to point out that one reason I was interested in this book was because Ayn Rand is reputed to be a favorite among Tea Partiers who want less or no government, and despite the long standing conflicts between Objectivists (code for anything goes, survival of the fittest, altruism is for wimps) and libertarians (themselves so focused on Liberty they cannot get a grip on the rest of the Preamble to the Constitution of the USA, i.e. little things like general welfare, domestic tranquility, and justice. Which is to day, both the Ayn Rand People and the Libertarians — Ron Paul, I am talking to you and still waiting for a courteous answer to my two letters in January — fail on three out of four Constitutional fundamentals. So does Barack Obama! What I have learned from all of my reading and observation is that the two-party tyranny is godless and amoral, all posturing aside. Ayn Rand fits right in.

The author has done his homework–more than his homework. With due credit to biographers of Ayn Rand (this book is not a biography, it is a tour of Ayn Rand Nation as the title says) he resurrects people who were “buried” or shunned, exiled, reviled, or with great fanfare “ignored” by Ayn Rand.

I learn things I did not know in this book — her opposition to World War II (“let the Germans and the Russians kill each other off”); her favoritism toward Israel (in sharp distinction to the Libertarian ire and refusal to bow to Israeli influence) — her prediction of the 2008-2012 (and soon the 2013-2014) huge financial crash. She nailed it. Government debt in any form that is cumulative and passed off to the future will eventually destroy the nation. The author points out that no one from the Ann Rand Institute realizes she said this, and they have consequently failed to promulgate this one bit of getting it right decades in advance.

Of course Michael Lewis said the same thing in Liar's Poker, and both John Bogle and William Greider have spoken to the issue in their respective books The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism and The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy, and while it may be that the author goes a bridge too far in laying all of our failures of character and culture at the feet of Ayn Rand, she does seem to fill a very large hole in people's heads and souls — empty spaces without her.

What really jumps out at me as I pass the midway mark is how unethical and ignorant top figures in the upper reaches of US finance are — Henry Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Pernanke, John Mack, the Wells Fargo guy, etcetera. They lack intelligence and they lack integrity and they survive on being part of the club, of being reliable to the few at the expense of the many. It makes me sick to contemplate the depravity of the collective US public mind, that it cannot see these people for the charlAtans and postuRers and cheats that they actually are.

It also merits observation that the 1% are so far removed from the Ayn Rand circles as to make her a peasant on a stump, spouting ideas into the ether and completely irrelevant to what some call “deep secrecy” and the manner in which a few banking families (including those in China and Indonesia and India) manage all. This is a side show, not the main event. The named individual in US finance–as greedy and treasonous as they might be, are bit players in a much larger drama.

Throughout the book Barack Obama and his Administration are present as the anti-thesis of Objectivism, and I remind myself over and over again that it is truly a shame that what we have right now in our government is a combination of irresponsible entitlement socialism and irresponsible economic and military fascism. Only in America. Hence, absent a deep understanding of the fact that CORRUPTION is the common ingredient for the two-party system that excludes all other nationally accredited parties from the ballot, and that legalizes crime as a matter of routine (Matt Taibbi is still the best on this, see my summary review of Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History), it is safe to say that both Objectivism and the mix of socialism and fascism now represented by Barack Obama (as the puppet in chief) are identical: amoral, atheist, and absent any coherent strategic analytic model that can actually connect to reality or project future outcomes.

As someone who has spent the past decade reflecting on the urgency of demanding BOTH intelligence AND integrity from all eight tribes at all levels (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit) I am charmed by the author's skewering of Alan Greenspan, in a chapter centered on Greenspan, Greenspan's notions of integrity (not), and how much damage Greenspan did to the US with his ignorance and lack of integrity in the holistic sense. I myself fell prey to the Greenspan myth, and while I do not go back and rewrite my reviews, there are several back a few years that I now realize were written from a less than fully informed perspective. I continue to learn, and this book is one I strongly recommend — it is about Ayn Rand Nation, but in passing, it is about what the USA is or is not. For the complete opposite, see my summary of the phenomenal book by Kevin O'Keefe, The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation's Most Ordinary Citizen.

QUOTE (235): Greenspan could seek to escape reality, but his words and his actions could not be so neatly erased. The fact was that Rand had failed. Her ideas had collided with the real world, a world in which monomaniacal selfishness is not beneficial but harmful, in which businessmen are driven by the scent of money to ast recklessly, and in which capitalism requires government oversight lest capitalist excesses hurt the financial system and society as a whole.”

The author concludes along these lines, but here I believe he misses a very important point. I continue to rate the book five stars because there are too many negative reviews that have no foundation in fact. This is a worthy book for anyone with both intelligence and integrity. It's not about capitalism and it's not about government. It's about education. Since Carnegie and Rockefeller were allowed to standardize what John Gato calls Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher's Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling the USA has become an idiot nation, beating the creativity out of kids, still offering today rote instruction that is a hundred years out of date. My youngest is about to “test” out of high school after the 10th grade and spend two years working and traveling–Fairfax County has a good reputation within the nation of inattentive idiots [I certainly include myself in that group], but between its neo-Nazi zero tolerance for youthful indiscretions and its inbred mediocrity of programming, I cannot in good conscience force my son to waste his next two years in the wasteland called “high school.” We lost sight of what it means to be a citizen — a responsible citizen with an obligation to apply their intelligence at all times with integrity, irrespective of which tribe they work for…. my long-term ambition remains to that of integrating education, intelligence, and research, creating a Smart Nation, in which all the bureaucracies are euthenized, and we allow our natural creativity and deeper instincts of community to come forward.

A few other books within my limits:
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
Ecological Economics, Second Edition: Principles and Applications
The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism

For a complete overview of books by others exploring both the negative and positive of our situation, search for these two lists or find them at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog under books; each review leads back to its Amazon page:

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)

Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)

This book is a mirror. Look into it.

Robert Steele
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust 2

AA Mind the Gap — Vote and/or Comment on Review

2012/03/202012/03/20

Review: Need, Speed and Greed – How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness, and Tame the World’s Most Wicked Problems

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Vijay V. Vaitheeswaran

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond 5 Stars, Quick & Dirty Bright Light of Convergence,March 20, 2012

This book was brought to my attention by Michel Bauwens, founder of the P2P Foundation and chief editor of its wiki. I follow him through Scoop.it and act instantly on his suggestions.

The ideas in this book are not new. Stewart Brand (mispelled in the index) and Paul Hawkins / Lovins were 40 years ahead of us all on co-existence, then Howard Rheingold, then Kevin Kelly and Tom Atlee, and finally J. F. Rischard and myself among many others. I link to relevant books by them below. The foundation for this book is C.K. Prahalad's The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits, perhaps combined with Clayton Christensen and Michael Raynor's The Innovator's Solution: Creating and Sustaining Successful Growth –the intersection of the five billion at the bottom having four times the aggregate annual income of the billion at the top, and five times the brainpower and entrepreneurial energy, is a convergence point.

Where the author gets such high marks from me is in the timing and the melding. If the rest of us have been piling up kindling ever so slowly, trying to spark a fire the hard way, one spark at a time, this author and this book are an entire matchbox cast into the middle of the tinder.

Continue reading “Review: Need, Speed and Greed – How the New Rules of Innovation Can Transform Businesses, Propel Nations to Greatness, and Tame the World's Most Wicked Problems”

2012/02/182012/02/18

Review: The Information Diet – A Case for Conscious Consumption

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Communications, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Media, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Clay Johnson

5.0 out of 5 stars Gift Book, Gift Idea, Gift Economy, Get a Grip,February 18, 2012

I received a copy of this book as a gift, and gladly so since the top review at this time is unfairly dismissive while also confessing that the reviewer only read the first third of the book (but evidently not the preface (first page) that states plainly (first sentence, actually), “The things we know about food have a lot to teach us about how to have a healthy relationship with information.”

Having just reviewed The Telescreen: An Empirical Study of the Destruction and Despiritualization of Consciousness, and so many other books here at Amazon, I easily connect the point in last night's reading: that food, medicine, education, and the media are all “co-conspirators” in dumbing down a human population whose brains started out as enormous pools of potential creativity, to this book. The information — and the food and the medicine and the tabloid garbage we are ingesting — is killing us.

What the first reviewer completely misses is that this is the first manifesto, beyond The Age of Missing Information, to actually focus on how out of control our relationship is to the world of information. As a lifetime professional in these matters I can state clearly that not only are governments substituting ideology for intelligence and corruption for integrity, but so are all the other communities of information (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government / non-profit. We live in a totally corrupt world where — right now — banking families (Rothschild et al) own the banks and the banks own the two-party tyrannies (or the outright dictators) that own government, and they own the the corporations, with the 99% being expendable fodder for 1% theft from the commonwealth. This book is a cry from the heart, and an eloquent one at that.

Continue reading “Review: The Information Diet – A Case for Conscious Consumption”

2012/01/302012/01/30

Review: Anyone That Works for a Living and Votes Republican is an Idiot

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Civil Society, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Cosmos & Destiny, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Clyde Coughenour

5.0 out of 5 stars Alternative Perspective, Very Naive on US Reality, January 30, 2012

I *like* this book. I've been running for the Reform Party nomination for President (there were three of us, now there are two, and I might drop out soon if I get a federal job and the Hatch Act kicks in). I mention that mostly to emphasize that everything I have learned in the six weeks I've been registered with the Federal Elections Commission (FEC ID C00507756) is relevant to the second half of my review. This book came to my attention via a press clipping service that helps me follow any mention of a third party — this book calls for a new third party Of, By, and For Workers — we used to call that Communism (just kidding), but seriously, the last part of my review is a pitch for what workers should do if they really want to take charge, as workers finally did in Norway and Sweden (it took them 25 years).

I would normally rate this book at four stars, there is a lot missing, but I have to say that in terms of earnest honest patriotic down-to-earth common sense and indisputable pro-labor attitudes, this book is solid, so I am putting it at five stars and linking below to some books that add the missing “weight” to this read. My reviews of all of the books I list are summary in nature, to help those with little time or little money.

The book is scattered, providing snapshots of all of the issues, showing very clearly where neither party, but especially the Republicans, can be trusted to look out for workers. Politics is theater–nothing is decided in the open, the real deals are behind closed doors and the taxpayer ALWAYS loses. I certainly give the book high marks for distilling a very complicated corrupt mess into a simplified structure, and I totally agree with the author that there are no reliable statistics from the government or corporations, but let me give you three that matter:

Continue reading “Review: Anyone That Works for a Living and Votes Republican is an Idiot”

2012/01/21

David Swanson: War and Being and Nothingness

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Future, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

War and Being and Nothingness

The best book I've read in a very long time is a new one: The End of War by John Horgan. Its conclusions will be vigorously resisted by many and yet, in a certain light, considered perfectly obvious to some others. The central conclusion — that ending the institution of war is entirely up to us to choose — was, arguably, reached by (among many others before and since) John Paul Sartre sitting in a café utilizing exactly no research.

Horgan is a writer for “Scientific American,” and approaches the question of whether war can be ended as a scientist. It's all about research. He concludes that war can be ended, has in various times and places been ended, and is in the process (an entirely reversible process) of being ended on the earth right now.

The war abolitionists of the 1920s Outlawry movement would have loved this book, would have seen it as a proper extension of the ongoing campaign to rid the world of war. But it is a different book from theirs. It does not preach the immorality of war. That idea, although proved truer than ever by the two world wars, failed to prevent the two world wars. When an idea's time has come and also gone, it becomes necessary to prove to people that the idea wasn't rendered impossible or naïve by “human nature” or grand forces of history or any other specter. Horgan, in exactly the approach required, preaches the scientific observation of the success (albeit incomplete as yet) of preaching the immorality of war.

Continue reading “David Swanson: War and Being and Nothingness”

2012/01/162012/01/16

Review: The Military Industrial Compex at 50

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), History, Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

cover military industrial complex — Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars America Desperately Needs More Illumination Such as This January 16, 2012

I received a review copy of this book [note to publishers: always ask first] and was glad to be offered a chance to read something as important as this. America desperately needs more illumination on the corruption in our government, and the evil done in our name without our permission but very much at our expense.

As a career veteran of the national security community–the Marine Corps and the Central Intelligence Agency–followed by seventeen years teaching 90 governments — 66 directly — how to get a grip on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that provides 95% of what we need to know at 2% or less of the cost of what we spend now on secret intelligence–I am well-qualified to read this book from a patriot's point of view.

A strong national defense capability does NOT exist in the USA today. Posturing fools such as Senator Rick Santorum have no idea what they are talking about when they seek to discredit those of us who do. The infantry, four percent of the force, takes eighty percent of the casualties and receives ONE PERCENT of the Pentagon budget. Within the other 99%, half–at least–is fraud, waste, and abuse that makes America weaker, not stronger.

This book, edited by David Swanson, is a very good deal at $25. Its 368 pages include chapters from thirty other authors besides the editor, and include contributions from Ray McGovern and Karen Kwiatkowski, whose work I have admired in the past. If there were one flaw in the book, but not so serious as to lose a star, it would be its isolation from the pioneering work done by Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney, and Winslow Wheeler, with a genuflection toward John Boyd, the real pioneer of smart sufficient national security.

What is uniquely valuable about this book, something I have not seen elsewhere, is its provision of a holistic examination not just of the military-industrial process and fraudulent, wasteful, abusive bad design, bad performance, and bad cost, but of the costs that the military-industrial complex imposes on all of us and our economy and our society. This is a world-class book that should be translated into other languages to help others avoid our long-running mistakes.

Here are the blinding flashes of solid insight that stayed with me and merit the broadest possible public understanding:

Continue reading “Review: The Military Industrial Compex at 50”

2011/12/302011/12/30

Review: Never Allow a Crisis to Go to Waste

5 Star, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Country/Regional, Crime (Government), Democracy, Education (General), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform)

cover never allow a crisis — Amazon Page

Bart DePalma

Brilliant on the problems, missing the reality of the two-party tyranny,December 30, 2011

I received this book as a gift, along with Capitalism 101. Of the two I prefer this one.

On the positive side, both books represent a growing body of citizens who understand that big government is very much alike to central government, and both are forms of fascism / socialism that are bad for the majority.

On the negative side, neither book seems to appreciate the fact that the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democratic Party.

Being already predisposed to agree with the author on the fundamentals, I found the book interesting but disconnected from a great deal of what I have been working on, including transparency, truth, and trust. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt; both have been busy borrowing a trillion dollars a year in our name while seeking to regulate our lives into misery.

There is a place for limited government, and a vital role: keeping business honest. Trust lowers the cost of doing business. The two-party tyranny has corrupted America, turned America into The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.

The books well researched with many interesting notes, and it has an index [the same is not true of Capitalism 101, which is more like a bunch of personal stories bundled together.]

Where I have a problem with books like this (agreeing with the author on the basics) is in the denial of the raw fact that the Republicans have done as much if not more than the Democrats to loot the Republic, they just work in a different way. It was a Republican, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who as banking chairman put in 200 pages of lobbyist written deregulation five minutes before the bill was to be voted on, and it was the other 99 Senators, from BOTH parties, who lacked the integrity to cry foul. It is the Republicans that started the practice of borrowing a trillion dollars a year so they could earmark their way to personal wealth at our expense, charging 5% for each allocation of the public's money to projects we do not need and cannot afford.

We live in a two-party tyranny, and the first thing my fellow lovers of liberty have to get a grip on is that BOTH the Republican AND the Democratic parties are corrupt, have sold us out, and cannot be trusted with the White House in 2012. One reason I am running for the presidential nomination within the Reform Party is because I have concluded that there is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful that cannot be fixed by flushing BOTH parties down the toilet, uniting the Independents, moderates from both parties, the Greens, Libertarians, Constitution, and others in a massive rebirth of a Republic that is Of, By, and For We the People.

So this book, and the Tea Party, are welcome voices, but both need to get a grip on reality: BOTH parties are corrupt, BOTH parties have enabled Wall Street corruption AND Welfare / Socialism corruption. I share the author's view that three fifths or more of the federal government should be shut down, and I advocate a balanced budget and true cost economics as a means of getting all of us back in harmony with reality and one another.

See other books I have reviewed:
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq

Category: Education (General)

Review: Ayn Rand Nation – The Hidden Struggle for America’s Soul