I am sorry to say that with all the reading I do, this is the first time I have come across Paul Levinson. This is a gem of a book, and I will attend to anything else he write, and hope to hear him in person someday.
The author, the book, and by the authors account, California, converges four vectors:
– Cyberspace where its just information, not “real”
– Outer Space, where he believes we need to go
– Inner Space, with hightened spiritual awareness being important
– RealSpace, which only live beings with all their senses can engage
I found this gem to be absorbing and it rounded out my Sunday morning reading quite nicely. Some bullets I took away:
– No senses of smell, touch, taste in cyberspace
– Knowledge is not Experience
– Walking and talking are intertwined
– Cell phone is antidote to Interent, restores ability to work in the real world and not be chained to a computer or cubicle
– Makes care for business, not governments, to fund space exploration
– Discusses robots as useful for some things but no substitute for humans
– Discusses how much we missed in our evaluation of Mars until we actually had a real soil sample with traces of bacteria
– Wants a World Spaceport Center at WTC site in NYC, adds chapter on terrorism and sspace.
The selected bibliography, with annotation, is quite remarkable. I am only familiar with a third of what is catalogued there.
This book helped me understand Jeff Bezos better, and that is always useful.
The author buys into the myths of 9/11. This is disappointing.
I was thrilled when this book arrived today, put everything aside, and spent the last two hours with the book.
It is useful, but it could have been much better.
The useful part is the academic model, the timelines of CIA and FBI missed opportunities, and in general, taking the kinds of recommendations that I and others have made, and putting them into polite terms that the la-di-dah crowd and the pontificators can accept. Adapt or die is a homage to Bob Gates, who excells at adapting politically, not professionally. When he and I spoke together at the War & Peace Conference in Paris, I went first, he got up, said “I'm not even going to touch that,” and launched into status quo speak. I am sure he shared Sandra Kruzman's view in the 1990's that my publication of “E3i: Ethics, Ecology, Evolution & Intelligence: An Alternative Paradigm for NATIONAL Intelligence” (Whole Earth Review, Fall 1992, easily findable on the web), “confirms Steele's place on the lunatic fringe.” To the extent that this “safe” author and “safe” book nudge the young and mid-grade professionals to peek oput of their cubbies, it is helpful. Unfortunately, most case officers and analysts do not read widely and most have no idea of what world-class commercial intelligence practices and processes are–as John Perry Barlow said in Forbes some time back, “if you want to see the last vestiges of the Soviet era, go to CIA.”
Missing from this book, which could have been a barn-burner, are three things:
Equal coverage of White House, State, and Defense appointee failures
An appendix integrating all 500+ recommendations, most not implemented, with a structure that could have been of extraordinary value to the Director of National Intelligence.
A solid methodologically-grounded trade-off analysis of how best to spend $60 billion a year on national intelligence, including full consideration of both our rotten educational system that General Mike Hayden has ably lamented in two major speeches; and multinational information sharing.
The author's first book was an instant classic. The core point from the first book, that intelligence needs to be fixed big with the full weight of the President, or not at all because marginal fixes are not worth the political capital, remains extant. The DNI has not been empowered to “fix big” nor does he have the deep bench of iconoclasts needed to do anything other than a 500 day plan that is well-intentioned but still on the margins in the larger scheme of governance and intelligence reform.
This book is not as good, largely because is stays within the box and does not offer new substance, only organizes old stuff covered in many other books including my own (which are noteworthy for their absence from the bibliography–that is either contrived, or poor scholarship, take your pick).
Minus one star.
This is a fine book for the non-professional, the innocent bystander that wants something more substantive than Gertz, less polemical than Steele, less original than Allen, Hiam, or a host of others–I list a few below, more are in my lists.
If I were the publisher of this book, I would not reprint it until the author provided a consolidated actionable integrated appendix of all the recommendations structured so as to be immediately useful to Congress, the media, the public, and of course, the DNI whom we all support as best we can.
As I completed my review and spent another half hour with my notes, and especially noting that the books below (and many others) were not considered by this author, it hit me. She's drunk the kool-aid. This is a book by a person who so wants to please Condi Rice (her PhD mentor) and the extremist Republicans, that she was willing to sacrifice more than I expected to stay in the safe lane with safe authorities.
Minus a second star.
Moves the book into the pedestrian category, and that is a real shame, because had she kept her balance and used all the sources and intellect of which she is demonstrably capable, this book could have been most helpful. I am very disappointed. I recommend that the book be completely re-developed, or that an appendix of the integrated recommendations be offered free at the book's home page on Amazon; if that were done the book would be worthy of four stars, in my opinion, and I would change the rating, something Amazon now allows us to do.
I bouight this book partly on a whim and partly because a new non-profit a bunch of us have created, Earth Intelligence Network, is about to start fund-raising from the foundations. For the one page list of the top foundations and what they focus on, alone, I was fully satisfied.
However, and this was a very pleasant surprise, the book suggests that in the Forbes 400, average worth of those without a college degree is 5.96 billion, while those with a degree have a lesser averaage wealth of 3.14 billion. I have an extremely bright and talented who scorns most structured classes, and I am going to give him this book as a way of considering his options. I am certainly coming to believe that online education and “free universities” need to explode, and structured classroom learning reduced at the same time that all learning should become open books team learning, not competitive rote learning. This book actually reinforces that view.
The book opens by emphasizing that a great deal of the wealth today came about because of the equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush, the combination of President Reagan cutting taxes, the wireless “landgrab”, and smart people, generally already rich, borrowing money to buy under-valued assets (in contrast to the subprime mess we are in now).
The book examines factors in success, and after luck or intuition it lists drive, a willingness to take risks, self-confidence, and even obessive attention to detail. A lack of ethics and a willingness to commit crimes against stockholders, employees, and the government are featured in perhaps 10% of the Forbes 400 caught and convicted, and I would speculate another 30% in gray areas. The book cites one person's view that a major recession is coming, and the public's perception of the super-rich as having gotten there by greed and abuse, a factor to be reckoned with in the near future.
Part I focuses on individuals, and we learn that three families, Buffet, Gates, and Walton, hold 14.5% of the total wealth represented in the Forbes 400 list.
Part II focuses on specific economic sectors where fortunes have been made.
Part III was the most interesting part for me, it focuses on how the super-rich spend their money. Heir and trophy wives, how to stalk and marry a billionaire, yachts (over 200 feeet long, the top ones being over 400 feet), helicopters at eleven million, art, competing for the America's cup, a multi-year cost, all quite interesting.
Best of all is the chapter on Giving It Away, and the table on page 278, listing 36 top givers and their interests.
Bottom line: I do not consider this a voyeur type of book, but rather a book that is enjoyable to read on a Sunday morning, and one that could spark useful reflections in both adults, and seniors in high school, or those in college. I regard this as a very fine gift, and will be passing my copy on to my oldest son.
Evidence on Why Central Banks Need to Go Or Be Publicly Owned
September 20, 2007
Alan Greenspan
I have always admired the author, and until 9/11, bought into the myth that the Federal Reserve was a remarkable institution and an essential part of our stability. No longer.
This is a first-class book, a mandatory examination of the US and global financial systems from an insider's perspective, but it completely avoids the harsh reality: there is a global class war going on, the paradigms of secrecy and scarcity and war are killing us; there is plenty of money for all seven billion of us to be billionaires, but corruption and greed are concentrating wealth as never before.
I am especially distrubed by the author's own admission that he lobbied the White House for an attack on Iraq to “secure” the world's oil supplies. As a professional intelligence officer who agreed with General Tony Zinni on the idiocy of attacking Iraq, I am shaken. His expression of that opinion is akin to a brain surgeon trying to compose music. Our entire system failed because Dick Cheney is a nakedly amoral person, and all the other checks and balances failed to operate as designed by our founders.
With respect, and with sadness, I list a few contrarian books below. I have two explicit recommendations for the next President:
1) Eliminate all income taxes by taxing every Federal Reserve transaction 0.006 cents and use the wealth that makes available to provide free public education to the planet “one cell call at a time”
2) Support the creation of the EarthGame(TM) with embedded transparent budgets published in advance and voted on by all of the people all of the time. Congress is impeachable for its secret earmarks and its failure to stop the attack on Iraq (or the coming attack on Iran), and in my humble opinion, We the People are very close to a general strike. [Bush's appearance in NYC on 25 September could be the first public coming togather to peacefully bring down a government that no longer represents the goodness of America or the average American.)
For additional background see the Internet posting “A Fed Panic and a Massive Bailout of American Banks paid for by the entire world.” If you cannot find it, it is also in the Collective Intelligence portal page at my corporate website.
Positive books that I cannot link to because of the ten book limit, but which another reviewer might wish to list as a collective endeavor for us all:
Getting a Grip: clarity, creativity and courage in a world gone mad
WIKINOMICS: How Mass Collaboration Changes Everything
A POWER governments cannot suppress
The TAO of Abundance
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity
Escape the Matrix
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
Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future
Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
Very Disapointing, Incomplete, Dated, and Annoying
September 19, 2007
Richard K. Betts
Retired Reader is as usual being kind. I agree that the book is useful as a sense of what the insider's want us to think, but it is at best a superficial summary (easily read) that has so many errors (of perception) and omissions (of fact) as to hardly be worthy of the read.
I quickly realized the general shallowness, but out of respect for the author stopped reading and instead went and read every single footnote, every single index entry, and indeed confirmed that this is a mix of old work, draws only on “members of the club” work, and fills in the gaps with Op-Eds and newspaper stories written by people who generally have no clue. Then I read the whole book.
Anyone who cites Deborah Burger's pabulum about “revolution in intelligence affairs” is kissing the institution's ass (pun intended); and anyone who considers the Sims-Gerber book to be transformative (as opposed to useful if you want the status quo), is simply out of touch with reality, with the possibilities, and with the complex pathologies that plague both the intelligence community (see my five images) and our politicians, every one of them, but most especially Dick Cheney and Nancy Pelosi, impeachable for breach of trust. For additional background, see my IJCI commentary on “Intelligence Affairs: Evolution, Revolution, or Reactionary Collapse?”
This is in fact what annoyed me most about this book–it glosses over the high crimes and misdemeanors of the White House but also of the Cabinet, as well as the blatant errors and omissions of virtually every senior intelligence officer. The USS Liberty and USS Pueblo were outrageous acts of war that could have been defended against and also justified retaliation, but instead both Administrations covered up, as they covered up on 9/11 and the Kennedy Assassination. In the case of George Tenet, he screwed up three big things: the clandestine service; the hunt for Bin Laden; and his ignorance in refusing to follow the recommendations made by Boyd Sutton in “The Challenge of Global Coverage,” calling for 1.5B a year against the 95% of the world that we ignore at our peril.
This book gets three stars instead of the two I planned originally because the author is an original, has demonstrated he knows what the higher standard is, and I will simply assume that at this time in his life he too busy to read broadly. He could start with my reviews, which are free.
There are so many books over-looked by the author here that I just shake my head. I link to a few below.
I expected the author to be dismissive of open sources of information, and to ignore my own work despite the fact that he has been a speaker at one of my conferences and knows full well the contents of my varied books. What I was not expecting was what I consider to be an abject superficial apologia, almost a hearts and flowers farewell to the John McLaughlin's of the past.
I was also not expecting the quickly evident lack of familiarity (or lack of time to properly integrate if known) with the wealth of information from many authors on both policy and intelligence failures, and the facts thereof. Nowhere in this book, for example, does the author properly credit Charlie Allen with sending 35 line crossers into Iraq to confirm what we already knew from the defecting son-in-law: keep the cook-books, destroyed the stocks, bluffing for regional sake.
Although acceptable in an academic book of this kind, the author's lack of understanding of the magnitude of the budget (it is $60 to 70 billion, not the loose lips $44 billion that Mary Graham gave us) and his lack of understanding of how what we do now fails to address the ten high level threats to humanity that LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret) helped identify, fails to help us create the needed four forces after next including the White Hat Peace from the Sea and Peace from Above, relegates this book to the curiosity pile.
The book whimpers to an end. For a free and broader grasp of reality and pathology, see my reviews of other books on intelligence (especially the ones the author neglects to integrate), and sign up for the free weekly report, GLOBAL CHALLENGES: The Week in Review. See Earth Intelligence Network.
I won't even touch the lack of serious coverage of education, commercial intelligence, policy-maker ignorance, and all the other small but important details left out of this book. This book comes nowhere near the reality that you cannot create and maintain smart spies in the context of a dumb nation. This is what we get from a community that spends $60B a year creating a President's Daily Brief ($1.2B/week), largely ineffective at all else.
First off, this book is available for under $20 in hard-cover at the UN Bookstore and other selected online outlets. For some reason the UN does not offer it directly, so a third party makes it possible to order with one click at an added cost that was acceptable to me.
This is a really important and helpful book for those of us that have been thinking about “Information Peacekeeping” (using information to deter and reduce conflict) and “Information Arbitrage” (converting information into intelligence and intelligence into wealth). Nine authors and the editor each contribute extremely well-written, well-structured chapters.
Highlights that I noted for inclusion in my new book, WAR AND PEACE in the Digital Era: Multinational Information Sharing & Decision Support:
ICT (Information and Communications Technologies) has created a new era. Jeff Bezos told the TED conference that we are at the very beginning of innovation in ICT, and I agree. In the Overview of this book we learn:
1) Transnational movements of information and financial capital are a dominant force in the global economy;
2) Worldwide financial exchanges outweigh trade in goods by 60 to 1;
3) ICT services are estimated to be 65% of the total gross national product of the world;
4) Informatics capacity doubles every 18 to 24 while communications capacity doubles every six months (this is one reason the Earth Intelligence Network emphasizes the need for 100 million volunteers to teach the five billion poor “one cell call at a time”);
5) Information that could have been transferred through fiber optics in one month in 1997 can now be transferred in just one second in 2007.
I would add to point five above that I am starting to see massive leaps in processing and machine-speed analysis, to the point that even ugly x-rays can be processed to a point ten times better than previously available to the human eye. This is going to change everything, including security, as a “smart network” helps isolate the anomalous for closer scrutiny.
The chapter on entrepreneurial perspective tells us that education is vital to spawning innovation and entrepreneurial activity, and cited Robert Sternberg (1998) in identifying Analytical Intelligence, Creative Intelligence, and Practical Intelligence as the “three abilities.”
To this I would add the observation that the five billion poor have neither the time nor the luxury of spending 18 years in an archaic educational system that is part child-care and part-prison. See must move quickly to make free education in 183 languages available to anyone with access to a cell phone, and we must redirect ALL of our discarded cell phones and computers, as the book suggests, to the less fortunate.
The sooner we connect the poor, the sooner they can create infinite wealth, and this has the salutary benefit of assuring the rich that their existing wealth is safe from confiscation.
Although I was aware of the World Information Summits, this book provides something I did not have before, a very convenient overview of the efforts by various parties to address the “Governance Deficit” through collaboration. I read the Brahimi Report; I admire what MajGen Patrick Cammaert did with the Joint Military Analysis Centers (JMAC), and believe that the UN System–as well as all Member Nations, are now ready for the next big leap forward, what I call the United Nations Open-Source Decision-Support Information Network (UNODIN).
For those that may not be aware, the UN has asked the Nordic countries to expand on the very successful Peacekeeping Intelligence course developed by Sweden in the aftermath of our peacekeeping intelligence conference there in 2004. At the same time, non-profit organizations are developing inexpensive reference materials to help anyone make the most of open sources of information and open software tools, including TOOZL, which fits on a flash drive.
The book concludes with case studies, among which I found the India case study most compelling. India now provides the bulk of the better call centers, and India-based “Homework Help” costs just $18 an hour. Imagine if we had 100 million volunteers, each fluent in one of 183 languages, and able to take calls from anywhere in the world, and use their Internet access to answer a question or teach “one call at a time.” C.K. Prahalad's book persuaded me that there is no higher calling in life than to help connect the poor to knowledge. This book is a superb beginning for anyone wishing to join this mission.
edutopia is a true gift to humanity from the George Lucas foundation. I consider the book and the DVD to be a superb starting pointfor the necessary global transformation.
Chapter Nine discusses a dozen promising practices that work:
01 Peer Instruction
02 Cross-age tutoring
03 Bringing local experts into the classroom
04 Multi-age classrooms
05 Cooperative learning
06 Class-size reduction
07 Team teaching
08 Looping (teachers stay with same students for several years)
09 Block scheduling
10 Schools within schools
11 School teams
12 Community service
This is a superbly crafted multi-media teaching tool that every teacher, parent, and administrator will learn from and be strengthened by.
My only disappointment is that the book's sponsors and authors focused so narrowly on just the USA and how the wisdom in this book might be applied within our existing academic and vocational infrastructure. My own focus is on the five billion poor who do not have the time for 18 years of rote education. Simply by subsidizing cells phones and creating a global network of 100 million volunteers using Telelanguage.com, we could offer free education to the five billion poor, and our own population, “one cell call at a time.” Education is the only way we can create stabilizing wealth–this excellent book set its sights too low.
A Gem of Reflection
