I am dug in deep within Fort Bragg, home to Delta and many other good things that we call “special” and this is playing on TV. I own it, but it occured to me that it merits a special salute.
Below are some of the other great DVDs that old spies and infantry officers like me respect:
See a pattern here? The star of Gladiator is totally awesome, but Mel Gibson has more work along the same lines, than anyone. Both are great, I would like to see both of them with Tom Cruise is something spectacular.
Need Undersecretary of State for Culture & Religious Dialog
August 4, 2007
Douglas Johnston
Amazon sometimes eats reviews when editions change. I bought and read this at the same time that I bought and read the same author's book on “Faith-Based Diplomacy,” and I just want to say, after reading the books and also hearing him speak, he is on to something very very important. I believe that we need an Undersecretary of State for Cultural and Religious Affairs just as we need an Undesecretary of State for Democracy and an Undersecretary of Defense for Peacekeeping. America is completely out of touch with the world, and genuine faith, not the American Fascist faith of the fundamentalist right, is a compelling moral advantage that we have lost sight of.
Early Technicolor, Brilliant, Moving, Just Utterly First Class
August 3, 2007
Ingrid Bergman
EDIT of 18 Oct 08 to delete erroneous reference to colorization.
This is such a beautiful film. The color is vivid, technicolor, but nothing can be better than Yule Brenner and Ingred Birgman with a quiet love that comes to fruition.
I am an unabashed romantic, and this DVD is my top ten list.
Do NOT fall for the Meg Ryan version! That is animated pap. I love Meg Ryan but this (Yule Brenner and Ingred Bergman) is the only real thing).
This movie was a perfect evening in every sense of the word.
Edit of 5 Jul 09: At 288 pages, the paperback should be no more than $30.00 instead of $49.00. Authors are encouraged to publish their own books via reliable online “as needed” publishers.
I publish books and know they cost a penny a page to produce in lots of 2500 or more.
The title and the content are superb.
The pricing is despicable and I will ignore this book for that reason.
I urge the authors to approach me, I can publish this book for sale at no more than $34.94 (it costs about $10,000 to print, Amazon pays 45% of the list price to publishers).
This is outrageous in every sense of the word. No author should allow their work to be handled in this fashion. The individual chapters should be available directly from Amazon for micro-cash, and this publisher should be put out of business.
Valid Conclusions, Original, Missed Important Other Works
August 1, 2007
Dan Lindley
Information Peacekeeping and Peacekeeping Intelligence are topics of great importance to me, and I have been writing about them since the mid-1990's, while also publishing several books on the topic and reading others, all easily found on Amazon and listed below. Hence I was most disappointed in the overly academic nature of the book.
I reduce it by one star because it does not focus on the transparency needed among predatory immoral corporations as well as covert operations by the United States and others that poison the well and retard possibilities for peace, and because while it is an original work and offers very valuable primary research in the form of numerous interviews, it completely missed the work done between the Brahimi Report and this book's publication.
The book discusses four kinds of transparency:
1) Cooperative (both formal and informal)
2) Ambient
3) Coerced
4) Unilateral (intelligence, confrontational, and proferred)
The author concludes that information is power and that the United Nations continues to be reluctant or unwilling to use this power (I would add that the US military has the same problem–commanders are spending 80% of their time on intelligence & information operations (I2O) but less than one percent of the staff and budget are assigned to this vital mission).
The author identifies the following impediments to UN success in information operations:
1) Staffing not there
2) Doctrine and procedures lacking
3) Bureacratic intertia
4) Continued fear of “intelligence” as evil instead of decision support
The author concludes that United Nations operations of all kinds could benefit from and be more effective if:
1) More information was collected and analyzed, and then shared
2) Transparency operations were an advanced form of presence beyond patrols and static monitoring–a pro-active form of UN operations
3) Strategic communications (the author appears unfamiliar with the term) are mounted against hate-mongering (the first stage of genocide).
The author focuses on information transparency, but does not appear to see budget transparency as one of the most important means of validating policies and beliefs. “It's not real until it's in the budget” is a phrase taught to me by the former custodian of all national security funds in the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) and I have come to the conclusion that transparency of budgets at all levels is the non-negotiable pre-condition for restoring the trust and engagement of all people in their own governance.
Readers may also wish to search online for:
VIRTUAL INTELLIGENCE: Conflict Avoidance and Resolution Through Information Peacekeeping as published by the US Institute of Peace online
PEACEKEEPING INTELLIGENCE: Leadership Digest 1.0
Information Peacekeeping: The Purest Form of War
I also understand that the Department of Peacekeeping Operations (DPKO) is moving forward with concepts and doctrine for harmonizing the many Joint Military Analysis Centers that MajGen Patrick Cammaert, NL RN inspired during his tour as Military Advisor to the Secretary General. Separately, I am advancing an effort to engage 120 nations in a discussion of Multinational Information Sharing to be institutionalized through an Office of Information Sharing Treaties and Agreements within any diplomatic service. It is slow going, but this book is another helpful stone in the road to peace through information.
This is a great piece of work, and I found it very worthwhile. The author has studied two liberal democracies, the USA and the UK, and tried to correlate the rising or waning power of specific economic blocks with US foreign policy.
He finds that material intersts consistently trump cultural or ideological interests, and that humanitarianism can play a surprisingly strong role in some cases (of course, today, we are ignoring not just Darfur but 15+ other genocides, poverty, infectuous disease, and so on).
The author concludes the the fortunes to be made on the periphery will continue to encourage America as a nation of varied interests, to pursue the fortunes on the periphery, and he therefore anticipates that spending on the military, and the use of the military, will continue into the future.
He ends rather delicately by pointing out that no theory can explain the manner in which Bush-Cheney took America to war in Iraq–this is no doubt his elegant way of saying that when you have thieves and liars in the White House, all bets are off.
7 Star Life Transformative Very Satisfying, Will Take Time to Fully Appreciate – Collective Intelligence Primer
August 1, 2007
Laurence G. Boldt
This has to be a preliminary review. This elegant offering has a ton of useful ideas and concepts and comparisons. My first time around I drew the following out of it:
1) System is the Ego. Escape the matrix by escaping ego.
2) Trust the innate intelligence of nature in harmony.
3) Money should not cost you your soul or everything else.
The best contribution I can make at this point is to point readers to a few other books that have inspired me as I expect this book to continue to inspire me, and a couple of DVDs.
One last thought: Michael Hinton and Jean-Francois Noubelle have pioneered Open Money, and that is one of the things I talk about in my forthcoming opening presentation at Gnomedex in Seattle. My slides and notes can be seen in advance by finding “Open Everything” at my web site in the Archives, EIN Library. In my view, Open Money could be the single most revolutionary idea that is liberating immediately and scales without a problem. Combined with distributed search (Grub) and CISCO AON individually-controlled sharing of both information and CPU power, I see a world well beyond Google in which our brains and our information are under our control and no one can loot that abundance.
Heroic, Ethical, Inspiring
