Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 230 – Public Intelligence Blog

January 22, 2008

Morgan Norval

This is a cute sophmoric book that plays to those who can understand simplistic solution, single-point fear mongering, etcetera. While I am sympathetic to the basic premise (the Spanish finally had to issue the Expulsion Edicts to rid themselves of an unassimilable religion persistently seeking to overthrow the state), this book is too narrow to be truly useful at a strategic level. See Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025 and Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude.

It ignores Catholic genocide, the Catholic crusades against Islam, the high culture of both Arabic Islam and Persian Iran that preceeded European culture, eteceta.

It ignores the present day Jewish genocide against the Palestinians as well as Jewish theft of water from the Arab aquifers (the Arabs are not blameless, far from it).

Most importantly, it ignores India's success (second largest Muslim population outside of Indonesia) as well as the success of Malaysia, Turkey, and Indonesia among others, and it fails to distinguish between Islam and dictatorships or peverted roylaty such as the Saudi's to whom the US Governmetn has prostituted the Republic while they spread virulent Wahhabiism all over the world.

Bottom line: a clever book for simple people.

See instead (my reviews summarize the books if you do not wish to buy):
Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror
Wars of Blood and Faith: The Conflicts That Will Shape the 21st Century
Islamic Leviathan: Islam and the Making of State Power (Religion and Global Politics)
The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
Religion Gone Bad: The Hidden Dangers of the Christian Right
Tempting Faith: An Inside Story of Political Seduction

2008/01/222009/10/30

Review: Outsmart the MBA Clones–The Alternative Guide to Competitive Strategy, Marketing and Branding

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Information Operations

Gold Standard for Marketing a Brand, January 22, 2008

Dan Herman

This is a five-star book. Amazon won't let us change the stars. I realized I was imposing my ethics in taking away one star. For what it seeks to do, this is a five-star book.

This is a well-written book, ably illustrated, that is easy to read and appreciate. A few flyleaf notes:

+ Real-time branding, leveraging opportunities instead of plans

+ Accelerated world, focus on customer psyche

+ Price is NOT a strategic obstacle or advantage

+ Differentiation is everything (at the 5% level)

+ Promotional campaigns of dubious value

+ Good management is not strategy

+ Market research flawed for its focus on aggregate (group) statistics instead of psychology of the individual consumer

+ Vision plus values can make a difference

+ Identify, Invent, Implement

+ Stellar use of examples through-out the book

+ Opportunity scan: content, consumers, market, competitors, us (from outer circle to inner sweet spot)

+ Very useful and thoughtful lists, easy to understand and reflect upon

+ 15 stages of consumption within which differentiation can occur

+ Loyalty bankruptcy a challenge

+ Hypnotic branding and Fear of Missing Out both can be leveraged

Although I am a long-term strategist and focused on saving the Earth for my three boys and future generations, there is no question but that this book is the gold standard in short-term branding and market exploitation for short-term profit. It was worth my while.

Other books of possible interest:
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
Natural Capitalism: Creating the Next Industrial Revolution
Cradle to Cradle: Remaking the Way We Make Things
Green to Gold: How Smart Companies Use Environmental Strategy to Innovate, Create Value, and Build Competitive Advantage
The Philosophy of Sustainable Design
Capitalism 3.0: A Guide to Reclaiming the Commons (Bk Currents)
The Ecology of Commerce
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

2008/01/212010/01/04

Review: Real Change–From the World That Fails to the World That Works

3 Star, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics

Disappointing, Revisionist, Misleading, Incomplete, January 21, 2008

Newt Gingrich

Edit of 13 Feb 08 to remove extraneous negatives.

Although Newt Gingrich is one of a handful of previously elected officials who has both a brain and an appreciation for history, this book is disappointing. It is primarily a base-pleasing blast on a variety of issues that are generally described with no implementation specifics, and certainly nothing in the way of an over-all balanced budget that would show what the trade-offs are.

1) Newt Gingrich was “present at the creation” of the brutally destructive practices of extreme partisanship, and I am not surprised to read, but feel compelled to question, his “immaculate conception” in this book as being good and clear-headed, while relegating all those “left behind” to the role of “evil-doers.” Cf. Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency; The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)). In my view, the number of Republicans bailing out of Congress is starkly indicative of their realization that America is fed up with party-line corruption.

2) Claiming that most of America is center-right and that the Democratic party now represents the fringe left places this author at the edge of delusion. Presumably he has read Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, but I question whether he has a clue about Liberty Coalition, Reuniting America, Cultural Creatives, World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, Bioneers, or any of the other groups that in the aggregate represent over 150 million American voters who despise BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties and are–as Lou Dobbs urges–declaring Independence.

3) Neither Dick Cheney nor Lou Dobbs appears in this book, nor is there any mention of the manner in which Congress and the White House have deceived and misled the public for over a century (Cf. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil)

4) His specious recommendations on Iraq are completely inconsistent with reality as I have observed it across many many reviews. He fails to point out that the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Shinseki, correctly told Congress that 400,000 were needed to assure orderly stabilization & reconstruction, and that it was Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney who over-ruled the Army and insisted on listening to a combination of Ahmed Chalabi (an Iranian agent of influence) and the Israeli government all too eager to have us do their dirty work. He natually avoids discussing the fact that we were snookered by Iran into doing what they could not do for themselves. Cf. A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies)

Now for the substance, such as it is:

1) Platitudes on steroids. This is a facile book that explodes a YouTube video into a 242-page double-spaced booklet (not counting the last third of the book, appendices).

2) There are no footnotes, endnotes, or bibliography. This is a massive Op-Ed that is totally disconnected from the need to take account of any larger reality.

3)He touches lightly on young people, education, the judiciary, privatizing social security, immgiration (never mind that he consistently failed as Speaker to funded urgently needed border patrol positions), and green conservatism. “National security” gets two double-spaced pages, other topics as many as four to six. Whoopee.

3) His approach to a balanced budget is disingenius as well as mis-directed. He chants the four mantras: 1) cut taxes; 2) increase spending on what I like, decrease it on everything else; 3) end pork barrel spending; and 4) smarter spending. He certainly has a point with respect to the idiocy of rewarding Lockheed Martin for consistently failing NASA, but the last time I looked, the President and Congress had an Office of Management and Budget and a Government Accountability Office, so this is pontifical. He has no serious observations on how to eliminate income taxes (introduce the Tobin tax on Federal reserve transactions); increase revenue (end the import-export pricing fraud, the crop insurance and other frauds, different corporate books for IRS versus stockholders, the list is long and he does not have it).

4) He calls for citizen leadership and more entrepreneurship without any reference to what has been going on for over a decade in the way of World Cafe, Nexus for Change, National Online Deliberation, Wisdom Councils, Wealth of Networks, etcetera.

The book asks three relevant questions and fails to answer them to my satisfaction as a broadly-read person who believes that transpartisanship, not bipartisanship, is the necessary solution:

1) Whom do we serve?

2) What do we value?

3) How do we measure achievement?

The book contains scattered impulses, some good (Hart-Rudman emphasized that the failure of US education, especially in mathematics and science, was a major threat to the future of the Republic), and some bad (several blatant overtures to evangelicals).

Enough.

By way of larger context for those who believe non-fiction can be useful:

1) There are ten high-level threats to mankind identified by LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft and other members of the High-Level Threat Panel, as reported out in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change:

01 Poverty
02 Infectious Disease
03 Environmental Degradation
04 Inter-State Conflict
05 Civil War
06 Genocide
07 Other Atrocities
08 Proliferation
09 Terrorism
10 Transnational Crime

Bush-Cheney, and Gingrich, ignore the first 8 threats as well as the last. The global war on terrorism is a fraud. What we *should* be doing is orchestrating a $250 billion a year program against the first seven threats, stop being the world's largest arms merchant, and start phasing out the 44 dictators, all but two our best pals (see Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.

2) There are twelve policies that must be harmonized if we are to stabilize and reconstruct our own country:

01 Agriculture
02 Diplomacy
03 Economy
04 Education
05 Energy
06 Family
07 Health
08 Immigration
09 Justice
10 Security
11 Society
12 Water

3) Nothing the USA or EU in the next ten years will matter EXCEPT AND UNLESS they create an EarthGame, an Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, that compellingly demonstrates to the eight demographic challengers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo) how they can avoid our mistakes.

Earth Intelligence Network is offering a free book online today that will be available on Amazon in late Feburary, “COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.” Here is the bottom line: the age of top-down elite “management” of complex societies, using secrecy, scarcity, and fear to concentrate wealth and abuse the majority, is over. There is a broad literature on the emergence of bottom-up consensual citizen power including localized wisdom councils, and I have over 70 lists that can guide the earnest reader, but I will content myself for now with my last alloted link: The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All.

This book will, I hope, make money for the author. It will not, however, do anything for the Republic. Below I list seven REAL changes:

1) Electoral Reform Act (One-Page Outline at Earth Intelligence Network

2) Debates Open to ALL Parties, Not Just the Two Corrupt Parties

3) End Winner Take All in Both Cabinet and Congress

4) No Legislation Without Prior Public Posting in Detail

5) End Individual Income Taxes, Substitute Tobin Tax on Federal Reserve

6) End CEO Greed, Top Salary No More Than 1000X Lowest Salary

7) End Secrecy, Make All Government Decisions Transparent

To end on a positive note, I am quite certain that Speaker Gingrich would be a most valuable participant in any transpartisan cabinet that brought together leaders from across the spectrum. Our Nation needs more than platitudes–it needs a Transpartisan People's Trust that buys back the government; and an EarthGame in which each person has full access to all relevant information and we can self-govern in the context of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. It does not help that we have lost an entire generation to lazy rote mediocrity in our schools.

The bottom line is that this book does not reflect the demonstrated breadth and depth of the Speaker's knowledge. It's a shallow quickie.

2008/01/192009/12/04

Review: The Social Life of Information

6 Star Top 10%, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Misinformation & Propaganda, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Superb Primer for Any Age

January 19, 2008

John Seely Brown

I come to this book eight years after it was first published, and with all the accolades and superb reviews that it has already accummulated, my primary focus here, apart from flagging the book for those that follow my reviews, is to suggest that it is one of the finest overviews available and easily exploited as a primer for undergraduates, graduates, or adults pursuing their own continuing education via Amazon, which is now the hub of the World Brain.

As is my custom, I provide here a few highlights from my flyleaf notes, and then link to ten books that can be used to study discrete aspects of the digital age as I have come to understand it.

This is one of the best books I have found that makes the case that “fiber to the forehead” is next to worthless, it is not about acquiring more information, but rather about the nuanced networking and social interpretations of information in context.

Indeed, they say that with all the technologies now pushing and creating digital information, consumption of this information is only increasing among individuals by 1.7 percent a year.

I value this book, in part because I have seen the U.S. secret intelligence community lose its mind, today spending $60 billion a year of the taxpayer's hard-earned money, to create monstrous and often counter-productive technical program that access the 4% of the information we can steal, while ignoring the 94% that is in 183 languages we do not speak, and more often than not, NOT online.

The authors write well, and gifted turns of phrase about, such as “the radical instability of infopunditry.”

They do a superb job of addressing the ills of technology-centered tunnel vision, a point that Peter Drucker made in Forbes ASAP 28 Aug 98, and I repeated in my keynote in Vegas to the National Security Agency (NSA) IT conference, in the early 2000 timeframe. We've spent the past 50 years on the T in IT, we need to start focusing on the I now.

The authors are eloquent in saying that more of the same is not the answer, and I totally agree. Returning to the secret world, I paraphrase an Australian journalist commenting on the pathologies of secret programs, who said that giving more money to dysfunctional secret agencies is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Right on. I want to reduce the secret budget to $12 billion a year, and redirect everything else to US education, global access to open sources in all languages, and free on demand education to the five billion poor via a network of 100 million volunteers with skype and internet access who can answer a cell phone question in any of 183 languages: education “one cell call at a time.”

The authors point out that at its best, technology augments and enhances human capabilities, it does not replace them (less the truly repetitive mechanical aspects).

They observe (in 2000) that 1-2 exabytes of information per year are created, but that much of this is not useful, and there is a major short-fall in sense-making and precision access.

They discuss, most usefully, the reality that designers underestimate what people do (and I would add, what they want or need).

“Information fetishism” is defined as the belief that information and information technology can replaced nuanced relations among people and their individual and shared insights. In Body of Secrets, link below, Jim Bamford ends his second book on NSA by saying that with all the trillions they have spent, they have still not built the ultimate computer, one that runs on a tiny amount of energy, weighs less than a few pounds, and can make petabyte calculations per second: “the human brain.”

The authors respond to earlier criticism about not addressing LINUX, and point out that LINUX is social innovation, not technical innovation. See Wealth of Networks below.

They note that the primary advantage of IT is that it enhances both local and global access. On the downside, it neglects periphery and context.

The authors reassert, compellingly, the value of intermediation, and I am reminded of our earlier criticisms of the Internet, still valid, in that most information is unedited, unformatted, unpaginated, undated, and lacking in source bias insight. This is still true, and Google is making it worse.

By the authors own account, this book addresses:
1) Limits of infopunditry
2) Challenges of software agents
3) Social character of work and learning
4) Limits of management theory
5) Resources for innovation
6) Unnoticed aspects of the document
7) Implications for design
8) Future of information, especially for university

I have a couple of nits, but not enough to warrant removal of one star. This is clearly a seminal work of lasting value.

Nit #1: Organizational Intelligence (Wilensky, 1967) is not to be found in this book. The authors do not go past Quadrant III (see loaded images).

Nit #2: While they have a superb bibliography and include works by Barlow, Kelly, Strassmann, Toffler, and Turkle, they do NOT include the seminal works directly relevant to this book, specifically, Barlow's seminal manifesto, and the following:

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World
Information Payoff
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit , Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Amazon limits us to ten links. See my earlier lists (the first ten) for 300+ books covering information and intelligence. Here are six more:
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

I regret the limitation on links. See also such gems as Forbidden Knowledge; Voltaire's Bastards; Age of Missing Information; etc etc.

2008/01/192010/01/04

Review: The Culture of National Security

4 Star, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Culture, DVD - Light, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration)

Great from an academic point of view, missing some pieces

January 19, 2008

Peter J. Katzenstein

I confess to some impatience with this book, published in 1996. It is very much state-centric, although to its credit in the conclusion it postulates a need to focus more on non-military resources and objectives, and on non-state actors.

The book opens with the statement that the key to understanding is to focus on how people view their interests and how that changes, but I searched in vain for any differentiation among the eight tribes that define my own study of international and internal relations: government, military, law enforcement, academia, business, media, non-governmental and non-profit (and in the US, especially, foundations), and finally, civil including religion, labor, and advocacy groups. This book may well be one of the last gasps of “state uber alles” literature.

I have a note, bridge between the European literature of the 1980's and the new view emerging in the post 9-11 environment, where most of us now recognize that security in all its forms, including human, food, and water security, are easily as important and often more important than military security.

The editors themselves recognize that all the theories were wrong, and that academia slept through the revolution, failing to foresee or explain.

I am amused by the discussion of identity, and how this presents the academics–poor dears–with moral issues.

I love footnotes, and this book has many of them, but as I went on and on I felt two things: 1) holy cow, the best of the best talking to themselves; and 2) where is everything else? This book strives to examine the fault line between Kennedy's focus on resources and Fukiyama's focus on ideology, while missing the impact of technology on the rise of indigenous peoples. In some ways, this book marks the end of the state-centric academic era, and the rise of the practitioner non-state actor era. There is now more to be learned outside the university than inside.

On balance, I would recommend this book as torture for aspiring PhD's who need to be steeped in the arcane debates among the varied schools of international politics and the effect of domestic politics on foreign policy, but very candidly, I find the books listed below to be a better investment of time and more accessible to broader minds.

Modern Strategy
Security Studies for the 21st Century
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
The Paradox of American Power: Why the World's Only Superpower Can't Go It Alone
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century
Global Assemblages: Technology, Politics, and Ethics as Anthropological Problems
Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

2008/01/192010/01/04

Review: Ideas and Foreign Policy: Beliefs, Institutions, and Political Change

4 Star, Diplomacy, Information Operations

Too general for modern application, January 19, 2008

Judith Goldstein

+ Ideas as roadmaps.

+ Ideas embedded in institutions “take over” in the absence of innovation

+ Decolonialization was an example of new ideas taking over (this really set me off, since I have a passing familiarity with wars of national liberation, CIA's legacy of ashes in Africa and elsewhere, blood diamonds, mercenary and gutter rats using war as their only path to wealth, women and wine, and of course the proxy wars and the rush by the US, UK, and Russia to sell arms indiscriminately to anyone [US sells three times more than UK and five times more than Russia].

+ Better example would be Yale and apartheid. When sub-state actors started shunning South African stock, *and* the white minority realized they could be over-run and exterminated by the black majority, the two in combination led to the release and rise of Nelson Mandela and the somewhat conniving and less than convivial collaboration of De Klerk.

+ Ideas can be especially strong in times of crisis.

+ Ideas create culture; culture defines truth (social construction of reality) and truth as it is perceived defines policy and behavior.

On balance this book disappoints. I raise it from three to four stars to provide for the possibility that I am at fault in failing to appreciate the totality of the book. It is not a five because for over a decade OSS.Net has been operating at the neighborhood and tribal levels of granularity, and for the past five years, pioneering the monitoring of sermons by province, and family beliefs and networks across tens of nations. Domestically we follow “the new political compass” of Paul Ray, and observe the nuanced changes as left-right agree on civil liberties, and Walll Street=0Ecotopia begin to agree on green chemistry, beneficial bacteria, and green to gold operations.

Other books I recommend:
Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq

2008/01/172010/01/04

Review: The God Delusion

4 Star, Culture, DVD - Light, Misinformation & Propaganda, Religion & Politics of Religion, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Five for Science, Three for Humanities, Four on Balance

January 17, 2008

Richard Dawkins

I have seen this argument so many times over the past 40 years; it's as if each new generation has to condemn God to find its own soul. I myself wrote a poem in college once, “Our Father, who art in hell….” You can imagine the sophomoric rest.

There are so many other reviews, I want to use this space to highlight three ideas, point to one posted image, and link to several books that demonstrate that Mike Huckabee has it exactly right: we need God (not the high priests that steal our money to live lavishly) as a foundation for the community of man, as an absolute measure of our morality.

Idea #1: God is or should be a moral standard. Fundamentalists of any stripe that claim to be the sole religion, calling all others unbelievers or heathen or worse, are nothing more than a cult.

Idea #2: Religions are bad in so far as they incite hatred toward others or enrich a few at enormous cost to the many. We do not need intermediaries nor do we need interpreters. God loves us all (including Adolph Hitler and Dick Cheney) and God's love is immutable. We are what we are, and within God's love, we must simply strive to be better, longer.

Idea #3: Engineers and scientists have a very hard time understanding any constructive role for religion. E. O. Wilson has answered the question, “why do the sciences need the humanities,” and I will sum it up in one word: Humanitas. There is a spiritual, artistic, ethical, quantum aspect to life that is often best explained through either myths or conventions.

Here are ten books that have informed my appreciation for God, whom I found again, very strongly in my life, six months ago, when everything started going in the direction that I had been struggling to achieve for twenty years, not for myself, but for my children and the future of life.

01 The Complete Conversations with God (Boxed Set) The Bible is useful as a point of departure. It is not a substitute for being right with God, direct.

02 The Lessons of History Morality is a strategic asset of incalculable proportions (a Nobel Prize was awarded in the 1990's to a man who proved that trust lowers the cost of doing business).

03 The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right Rabbi Lerner's book touched me deeply. God is code for compassion, for doing the right thing, for avoiding partisan and fanatic differentiation.

04 God's Politics LP Buy this used, I hope it is reprinted. Religion is like a gun–it is the person who chooses between an exclusive “true believer” role that is hateful, or an inclusive compassion that is respectful of all. I end my review saying he has my vote for Chaplain to the Nation.

05 Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik The author is a Navy Captain (O-6) Retired, I know him, and he taught me that faith is a tangible value that can be demonstrated in a peaceful respectful manner, and doing so yields enormous dividends when negotiating or interacting with those whose faith is strong but different.

06 Thank God for Evolution!: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World This is a joyous and worthy celebration of how to deconflict religion and science.

07 Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors I am often shocked by how little the average American knows of history, to include our genocide of the Native Americans, the Puritan exorcism of women as witches, the Catholic Church's inquisition, the crusades, and their all too eager collaboration with the Nazis in administering the Holocaust. This book is as good as any for reflection in that direction.

08 The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History Howard Bloom is a friend, and also the author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. I learned from the latter book that a human brain “locks down” by the age of 30 or so, and whatever good or evil thoughts have been introduced to that mind, are there to stay. He anticipated the Sunni Shi'ite wars (Iran, which is Persian, and the Iraqi Shi'ites, are terrified because they are surrounded by extremist Sunnis led by Saudi Arabia which the US is stupidly arming, and Pakistan, which has the SUNNI bomb, as well as Egypt and Syria, two of the bloodier dictatorships in that region: remember, CIA put the Shah into power, overturning a democratic election in Iran. See also my review of Web of Deceit.

09 Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror There are so many other books I could recommend, but Amazon limits us to ten. See also Looming Tower, The Fifty Year Wound, Sorrow's of Empire, and Wilson's Ghost as well as the DVD Why We Fight. The bottom line is that the US Government and its secret intelligence agencies (I've done it all across that world) are inherently pro-dictator (see Ambassador Mark Palmer's Breaking The Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025. There are 44 dictators remaining, 42 of them are best friends with Bush-Cheney, and of the remaining two, North Korea and Cuba, both are benign in my view, and Cuba has a great deal to teach us about sustainable agriculture, full employment, and free public health care. I have no patience for demagogues, and pray for the day when we can restore the Constitution, the Republic, We the People as sovereign, and Thomas Jefferson's original vision of commerce and peace.

10 American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America is the top book on the evil that is represented by cult-like fundamentalist movements whose preachers can be (not all) hypocritical miscreants who favor homosexuals and drugs when traveling at our expense. American Theocracy and Tempting Faith also fall into this last category, useful for understanding where religion went wrong.

America is in a desperate condition right now because We the People forgot that democracy requires our constant tending–a Republic, if you can keep it. When we allowed the Democratic and Republican parties to disenfranchise the League of Women Voters so they could shut out third, fourth, and fifth parties; when we allowed the FBI to ignore Steve Emerson's PBS special in 1994 on imams on US territory calling for the murder of Americans and the overthrow of the secular government; when we allowed Jeb Bush to disenfranchise 35,000 to 50,000 people of color in Florida, with a brilliant exposure THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION, and Al Gore chose to “go along” with this “reasonable dishonesty” so as to reap wealth and celebrity (rather than being shunned for spoiling the party), We the People gave up our Republic.

The image I am loading says it all. That is where a number of us are headed, and we carry God with us in mind and heart and spirit. Most churches and non-profits are nothing more than scams to separate the sheep from their money. Free men, real men, *are* God to the extent that they respect the brotherhood of man, follow the Golden Rule, and respect the Ten Commandments, which are the most helpful guide possible for life in a complex society.

A note on Mike Huckabee: he represents faith in a good way, not the evil way that Cheney harnessed and then dismissed. Mike Huckabee has a vision for a return to a Christian, family-oriented Republic. I share that vision.

Category: Reviews (Books & DVD)

Review: The Fifteen Century War, Islam’s Violent Heritage