Riveting–Great Actors, Great (Real) Settings, An Absorbing Delight
May 6, 2011
There are other summary reviews, so this is primarily a marker to add this DVD to the other 125 that I recommend for smart people looking for only the very best. Phenomenal and heart-warming.
Here are ten other “life at the top” DVDs that I recommend in addition to this one (to see all 126, visit Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, go all the way to the bottom of the middle column under Reviews (I read in 98 categories so it is a long column), and click on Reviews (DVD Only).
Paul's Greatest, Most Daring Book Yet A. Maheshwari April 19, 2011
Ron Paul continues the noble tradition of founders and thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, James Burnham and Patrick Buchanan in social-political conditions of the 21st Century. The book is written in lucid, vital and free flowing style without any convoluted jargon. I purchased the kindle edition and finished the book in 3 hours with several re-readings of some chapters/paragraphs.
The stage is set in contemporary America, and the intended audiences are likely the young indoctrinated subservient Americans, victims of Washington DC. This book could be the conservative bible for next two decades to effect political renewal of a tired, beaten and declining America. It deals with Paul's unique approach as a practicing Christian, a conservative libertarian and a citizen statesman. The amoral and utopian aspects of left-libertarianism are absent in this book.
Indeed the word libertarian has been mentioned only 6 times in the text. In comparison, the word moral has been mentioned a good 109 times, and “liberty” occurs 191 times. The book emphasizes the true essence of Christianity and Christ as the prince of peace, not a messenger of aggressive/deceitful secular wars.
The writing is universal in its appeal so that a person from China, India, Africa, Islamic World or Europe will naturally relate to its contents. It defines the true meaning of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the three principles of humanity. It is applicable to all human societies and aggregates, not just America. It shows the essence of conservatism and social order and extensively deals with liberty's relationship with morality, religion and ethics.
The book is tabulated in 50 chapters and covers 5 principal themes:
Not a single one of the other reviews mentions “hindsight games” which come at the end in Chapter 12, where Ben Gilad, whom I know and admire, properly lists Helen Ho and Matthew J. Morgan as the authors.
At the age of 58 with 30+ years as an intelligence professional behind me, very little catches me by surprise but this is one of those exquisite “ahas.” For me, the insights into hindsight games as a means to retrospectively identify strategic, operational, tactical, and technical junctures, where participants can reflect on what they knew, what they did not know, what they had wish they had known, and how they might advise the next generation to state its intelligence requirements differently–for me this is an intellectual gold strike.
I have never heard of any of the war colleges or strategy centers or major corporations or NGOs doing hindsight games. This for me is HUGE, and Ben Gilad's integrity is high-density–although the plan of the book properly puts the chapter at the end, after his concepts and doctrine and methods for business war games are outlined, this is the chapter that every one of the eight tribes (academic, civil society, commercial, government, law enforcement, media, military, non-profit or non-governmental) should be thinking about.
Hindsight games are a perfect means of both debriefing out-going executives and mission area specialists, and of transferring lessons learned from one generation to another in a super-professional manner.
I am reminded of Kristan Wheaton's still relevant book, The Warning Solution : Intelligent Analysis in the Age of Information Overload, and believe that would make an excellent HindSight Game pre-read, pulling in seniors and mission area specialists to talk about what proper warning and better intelligence might have allowed them to do these past twenty years.
By no stretch should this book be dismissed as a three. While I might normally have gone with a four, I am settling on five for balance and because the author not only covers an extraordinarily important topic in a sensible measured way, but his endnotes are another book all by themselves–I recommend all readers start there.
Where the author falls short is in lacking a strategic analytic construct for measuring the true costs of lying in blood, treasure, and spirit. He tends to ascribe pure motives to leaders (for example, not at all confronting the raw fact that Dick Cheney committed 23 documented impeachable acts (see my review of Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency for the itemization) and Dick Cheney also led the telling of 935 documented lies best covered by TruthDig but also in Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq.
The book disconnects grand strategy (global engagement) from domestic prosperity in a manner I find disconcerting, and while the author is most able in documenting the costs to a democracy of lies to the public, I do not see nor feel the deeper reality: lies destroy the Commonwealth. Lies allow a two-party tyranny to sell out to the Arabs (not just the Israelis), to Wall Street–lies permit the mortgage clearinghouse fraud, the derivatives fraud, and the Federal Reserve fraud on the one hand, while also fooling the public into a national security policy that is clinically insane, catastrophically costly, and ultimately a self-inflicted wound that could be fatal. Continue reading “Review: Why Leaders Lie–The Truth About Lying in International Politics”
This English translation of this classic work by Sun Tzu is certainly an excellent one in that in addition to providing the original 13 “Chapters” of the original work it also provides the reader with considerable background that places this work in its proper context. It also provides commentary on specific portions of each chapter by Chinese scholars of Sun Tzu. All in all, the late Samuel B. Griffith has produced one of the more complete and carefully organized versions of, “The Art of War.” Any serious student of this classic work will find Griffith's work an excellent resource.
The written Chinese language is ideographic not phonetic and consists of thousands of pictographic characters whose meanings often depend on how they are arranged and combined into compounds. Further, Chinese doe not employ Western style punctuation so it takes a good deal of skill and knowledge for a Western to know where to break Chinese texts into sentences and paragraphs. Griffith appears to have done an excellent job in translating the Sun Tzu texts into something understandable by an English reader.
Worth reading for Nathaniel Fick's introduction alone. And then some….
Dick Couch
Dick Couch is a graduate of the U.S. Naval Academy and served with the Navy Underwater Demolition and SEAL Teams in Vietnam. He is the author of twelve other books, including The Warrior Elite, Chosen Soldier and SEAL Team One. A resident of Ketchum, ID he is a frequent guest on radio and TV talk shows. He has lectured the Air Force Academy, the Naval Special Warfare Center, the JFK Special Forces Center and School, the FBI Academy, the Naval Postgraduate School, The Joint Special Operations University and The Academy Leadership Forum. Recently he served as adjunct professor of Ethics at the U.S. Naval Academy.
The message of this slim volume is simple: the two strands of a unit's technical competence and its moral compass are equally critical, with the moral health reflected in the actions and words of our junior leaders possibly more important to combat effectiveness— especially in the insurgent environment, where the war is waged and won at the small unit level and the target is not the insurgent, but the trust and support of the local population.
“A Tactical Ethic: Moral Conduct in the Insurgent Battlespace”, by Dick Couch, is a handbook reminding the men and women who put boots on the ground that actions that seem logical to you, can have a far different effect than anything anticipated. Having served as a Navy SEAL during the Vietnam War and professor of “Moral Reasoning for Military Leaders” at the United States Naval Academy, Couch offers his expert insights to the current and next generation of warriors. Americans need to look no further than the embarrasment caused by bored, misguided soldiers at Abu Graib to understand why a book such as this is needed.
Couch begins the book with a statement of the moral problems currently facing our military. He writes, “If the Vietnam War was the first war in which TV cameras roamed the battlespace, then Iraq and Afghanistan are the first extended stuggles in which digital imaging, text messaging, and cell-phone cameras are commonplace. Today there is far more opportunity for a bad act to be reported.” Couch proposes that the speed and ease of sharing that information will end up losing the fight for the “human terrain” — the support of the local populace, for which the insurgents are also competing.
With a basic understanding of the problem, Couch investigates how America takes the current generation of youth and transforms the insecure teenageers into bold, confident men that serve on the front lines. Feminists may feel slighted that the book does not focus on women, but Couch offers very compeling arguments as to why women are not are not central to the issues addressed earlier. He then looks at ethics training integrated with the basic training of the Army and Marine Corps, neglecting the Air Force because it does not engage in the same type of small-unit combat actions that routinely interact with the local populace. He rounds out his analysis of the warrior ethic training with by examining the (lack of) integration of ethics training with the advanced training of the various Special Forces.
Couch concludes the book by proposing “Battlefield Rules of Engagement (ROE)”, or the keys to moral success. He perfectly summarizes the the common vision of all warriors “All share a universal goal: to prepare appropriately for the fight, conduct themselves in battle with courage and virtue, win the fight, and return with honor.” In this age of pocketcards, I'm sure that the 10 ROEs he proposes will make their way onto the next set issued to the men and women going into harm's way. They are succinct, understandable, and right on the mark. I highly recommend this book for NCOs and company grade officers — your leadership will set the moral compass for the men and women who serve under you. This is a great book to help you chart the course.
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Phi Beta Iota: Advanced Information Operations (IO) must focus heavily on the spectrum of morality, both within blue forces and red forces, and all along the other tribes of intelligence. Will Durant is not alone, when he says in Lessons of History, that morality is a strategic asset of priceless value. The arrogant lose their grip of reality–and morality–before they lose their power.
I like the first and most popular review by the scholar. Here I will provide a snap-shot of my own and a couple of quotations from a rather good wikipedia review of Thoreau.
The film was longer, better, and had more stars than I expected, including William Hurt. Triteness was avoided. Above all, this movie is righteous and timely as we contemplate the present situation.
From Wikipedia on Thoreau:
The government, according to Thoreau, is not just a little corrupt or unjust in the course of doing its otherwise-important work, but in fact the government is primarily an agent of corruption and injustice. Because of this, it is “not too soon for honest men to rebel and revolutionize.”
Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison…. where the State places those who are not with her, but against her,- the only house in a slave State in which a free man can abide with honor…. Cast your whole vote, not a strip of paper merely, but your whole influence.
The movie ends where I expected to begin. And now America begins anew, with a convergence of forces in 2012, where I had hoped it might end with peace and prosperity for all. The fight has only now begun as the public has awakened to the injustices done at our expense and in our name.
RIGHTEOUS.
Here are two lists of lists of summary reviews of non-fiction work that bears on the current and future nature of the world. Both are at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog under REVIEWS.
Riveting–Great Actors, Great (Real) Settings, An Absorbing Delight
