The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.
SHORT URL: http://tinyurl.com/UN-Class-1
See Especially:
2011 Peace from Above: Future of Intelligence & Air Power
References: NATO Transformation Process Documents — and Gaps + Peace from Above RECAP
See Also:
Erudite, Incisive, But Mostly Text and Few Photos, July 4, 2007
This is not the book I was expecting. For that, go to Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America, which I rate at five stars and which so sickened me that I thought of Ike Eisenhower ordering that all those living near the death camps be ordered to march past slowly to see what they tolerated in their midst.
This is without question a very respected academic work, an one line jumps out from the first chapter “On Looking.” It captures the essence of this book perfectly:
“The power and seduction of specatacle lynching, and its social and moral legitimacy as the embodiment of communal values of law and order, white masculine affirmation, family honor, and white supremacy, depended on the crowd's act of looking.” (page 15).
My mind swirled around this, thinking of other books (listed below), of genocide, of eugenics (Henry Kissinger's favorite word), of injustice, of moral perversion and cowardliness, of those who allowed the Jews to be persecuted by the Nazis.
I am reminded of at least one other author, it may have been Francis Lappe Moore in Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life, who noted that “white supremacy” has been the death of democracy in America. To that I would add the perversion of the corporation, which stole a legacy intended for freed people of color, and turned into a lifetime license to steal from all.
Where this book lost me was in its emphasis in the remainder of the book on how lynching are depicted in art–the wood cuttings and other art images outnumber the actual photographs. All very worthy, to be sure, but at this point the book moves into the realm of the academic rather than the visceral, which is why if you buy only one book, I recommend Without Sanctuary: Lynching Photography in America instead.
I won;'t even try to get into today's continued injustice, including red lining black districts to turn them into ghettos, then buying up the real estate at a fraction of its true value, before gentryfing it for resale and much higher prices.
My bottom line: we need two Truth and Reconciliation Commissions in America, the first to bring out in the open all of the evils that the white race has inflicted on people of color from the Native Americans to the black slaves to the Chinese slaves to the current dispossessed that now include a heavy leavening of poor whites. The second, with Nelson Mandela and Lee Kuan Yew as co-chairs, can examine the history of the UK and US as colonial powers, unilateral militarists, and predatory capitalists looting the commonwealths of all other lesser developed nations, with the consequence that we have five billion poor instead of seven billion billionaires.
See also
Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic
The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Corporation
Does the Job–We All Need to “See” This Book's Pages
July 4, 2007
James Allen
There are enough reviews here so that my summative review is not necessary. I will only say that this is a powerful book, and it reminded me of General Eisenhower's order that all those living in the vicinity of the death camps be marched past the stacked bodies so they could see what their abdication of morality had allowed to happen.
This is mostly a book of photographs. If you want deeper text, including a spectacular (unintended pun)chapter on “Looking” and how it was the crowds that validated “spectacle lynching,” then you must also buy Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. The title is misleading, but the content of that book is not–that is the deep academic and psychological review that complements this book.
If yoy only wish to buy one book, of lasting value for generations, buy this one. If you can afford two and want to study the underlying social and psychological environments that allowed whites to treat blacks as if they were animals, buy both.
See also
Buried in the Bitter Waters: The Hidden History of Racial Cleansing in America
Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion
The Big White Lie: The CIA and the Cocaine/Crack Epidemic
The Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution and the Industrial System
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Working Poor: Invisible in America
The Corporation
A Top Book, One of Three in EnglishBruce Russett
I buy books from three sources: Amazon online (80%), airport bookstores (15%), and selected university bookstores (5%). This one came to me from a visit to the University of Colorado bookstore, where I was quite impressed by the breadth and depth of the selection across all topics.
I bought this book because the table of contents is one of the very best I have seen, and even if only the table of contents were memoized, one would be well-prepared for a senior undergraduate or master's degree final examination.
While grotesquely over-priced, as most textbooks are (it cost the publisher $5.70, at most, to print this book, a penny a page), I will leave that to the side, but it is a factor in the loss of one star.
This book could and should be completely re-designed to add more white space, dramatically improve the coverage of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challenges, dramatically improve the coverage of decision-support both secret and non-secret, and introduce a complete new section on national, regional, and global budgets as they represent our actual priorities, together with a completely new section on sub-state (vice non-governmental) tribes, clans, families, and neighborhoods. In my view, this book has the potential to be a “keeper” for every student that buys it, and I would design it–and price it–accordingly.
The books lacks a more revisionist appreciation of the damage that the United Kingdom and the USA have done in their combined two centuries of colonialism, unilateral militarism including horrendous war crimes against most indigenous cultures, and predatory capitalism (not ignoring the same crimes by Spain and Portugal, France, Germany, and Russia).
Were I teaching today, I would lean toward assigning this as the text to one third of the class, with the two books below being assigned to the other two thirds of the class, and everyone having to also buy the third book. See my comment for a URL where anyone can receive, for free, a weekly report, “GLOBAL REALITY: The Week in Review,” covering in less than 8 pages, the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight major players other than the EU and US.
The two books below are better than this book, but this book is most definitely in my top three. See my lists for many other books regarding the information society, intelligence, emerging threats, strategy & force structure, anti-Americanism, blowback, and dissent, and the negative impact of domestic politics on sound foreign policy.
Security Studies for the 21st Century
Understanding International Conflicts (6th Edition) (Longman Classics in Political Science)
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
This is a World-Class Book and DVD for Serious People
June 30, 2007
Robert Christopherson
Edit of 5 Feb 08 to add emphasis comment and links.
Coment of 5 Feb 08: This amazing professional product has pride of place in my 3000 volum library. It is the permanet owner of the teacher's lecturn, always open to chapter. I include an image aboe to emphasize this point. This book and its author, are GOLD STANDARD.
This is the only DVD I watch weekly on background, stopping my work at each song. This is an incrediblly gifted rendition and integraration of reality art, technology, and directoriaq craft. Wow, wow, wow.
I picked this gem up at the University of Colorado bookstore. I do not have the time for a third graduate degree, but if I did, it would be in Environmental Science.
Unlike most textbooks, this hardcover version is worth every penny, and the paperback is a bargain. This is a large book, 8.5 x 11, crammed with photos, extraordinarily well organized, illustrated, and presented, and it includes a CD ROM that the previous owner never opened that I find to be priceless: a series of illustrations and animations keyed to every chapter, with a non-punitive self-test. Also provided free are an online study guide. Supporting materials include a Student Study Guide and a Student Lecture Notebook that provides illustrations and diagrams to be integrated into the class binder. All are identified by ISBNs, but if you miss page xviii, which outlines “the package,” you will be unaware of the other resources.
Each chapter has the base material, a focus study, a news item, and more often than not, a career link. Each chapter ends with self-study questions. My bottom line: this book, taken seriously, *is* a self-taught graduate program in Geosystems.
The only think I do not see in the book, and it may be in the study guide, is “Recommended Reading.” BUT a complete array of current sources are fully cited as easily visible footnotes on most pages.
The only gap in this book, and it could probably be quickly developed as a supplementary paperback guide and CD, is the avoidance of an integrated discussion of costs and consequences. The entire study of Geosystems is irrelevant unless it can be explained to people in “true cost” terms. While the book excels, for example, at showing the severe drop in aquifers across specific places, it does not provide a guide to calculating current and future costs to society for ignoring these problems and allowing corporations and individuals to continue to externalize to the public and to future generations, the costs of being stupid and greedy today.
First rate book. One of the most serious textbooks, one of the best illustrated, explained, supported, and presented, I have every seen. For serious adults and emerging adults only–this is not a book, nor a class, for dolts just trying to meet a requirement for graduation.
Other recommended book:
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
The Future of Life
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
The Ecology of Commerce
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics
Plan B 2.0: Rescuing a Planet Under Stress and a Civilization in Trouble
Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource
Pandora's Poison: Chlorine, Health, and a New Environmental Strategy
Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author
Lacking Costs & Decision-Support,, Brilliant in All Other Respects
June 30, 2007
Bob de Wit
I have left this book at five stars despite its lack of a focus on the totality of the costs picture, and the urgency of decision-support, because I want to cross-fertilize this book into the national, military, and law enforcement strategic regimes (largely non-existent, hence the need), and I consider it to be world-class in all that it presents.
First the gaps: neither “costs” nor “intelligence” (nor “decision-support” appear in the index to this book, which is both a commentary on the content, and a commentary on the index, since I do see the words elsewhere in the book.
“True costs” or “natural capitalism” is emerging as the single most important strategic concept for both political and business leaders. Up to this point corporations have been allowed to privatize profit and externalize the bulk of their “true costs” to the individual taxpayer. That is coming to an end. The public now has a digital memory, the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) is calculating and posting the true cost of everything (e.g. a T-Shirt from Bangladesh has 4,000 liters of virtual water they do not have to export), and Amazon is positioning itself to provide point of sale “true cost” to the individual buyer via cell phone scan back on the bar code: water, fuel, sweatshop, and tax avoidance content at the point of sale. Revolutionary. It will change the marketplace and who wins, who loses in business, nearly overnight (ten years).
On decision-support, other than refer to my short list of a handful of really important commercial intelligence guides, I will simply note that Ben Gilad, one of perhaps ten really great international commercial intelligence practitioners, says in his first seminal work, “Business Blindspots: Replacing Myths, Beliefs, and Assumptions with Market Realities (Infonortics UK, 1996) that:
“Top managers' information is invariably either biased, subjective, filtered, or late.”
This tallies nicely with my own findings over a 30 year career in national and military intelligence: Washinton, certainly, London, Paris, Beijing, and other capitals probably, are operating on 2% of the relevant information. They are ignoring 95% of the information that is not secret, not online, not in their language, and not being collected by either their intelligence agencies or their Cabinet departments, which specialize in staffing stakeholder policies divorced from reality and focused on grabbing budget share.
It merits comment that this book comes to us from The Netherlands, the unheralded owner of much of US real-estate and much of the world's structured knowledge. Consequently, the authors are not suffering from American naivete, they have avoided the traditional shortcomings of most textbooks in English (myopia, avoidance of complexity, generic presentation from one author) *and* they fully int3egrate the vital importance of understanding cross-cultural differences, the international context, and the value of international cases that do NOT follow normal US “rules of the game” including authorized “reasonable dishonesty.”
This book a monster at 950+ pages, is of great value to non-business strategists, the few that are emergent, and below I list some other relevant books from the national side that may be helpful to business leaders and academic theorist-practioners.
I am creating and loading an image of their Figure 1.6 on Strategy topics, paradoxes, and perspectives because in that one image they capture the enormous value of their book and their process. For that image, and the first half of the book on the process, this is a very high value acquisition worthy of deep study.
Other strategic books that I favor, in relative order of importance:
Modern Strategy
Strategy: The Logic of War and Peace, Revised and Enlarged Edition
Strategy: Second Revised Edition (Meridian)
The Art of War by Sun Tzu – Special Edition
Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming
Ecological Economics: Principles And Applications
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
Preparing America's Foreign Policy for the 21st Century
Unforutnately, some of the best books, such as “The Art and Practice of Military Strategy” edited by George Thibault, are published by the National Defense University in limited edition and not listed on Amazon nor available for purchase via normal channels. This is a useful illustration of the concept of “gray literature”: very often the most important information is freely available, but not through the traditional channels. The height of strategy, apart from knowing yourself and not wearing blinders, is to know all that can be known about your environment and the other players, not just that which is convenient to know, or that your generally self-preserving subordinates want you to know.
Three Flaws Easily Corrected, Views are of Strategic ImportanceRobert D. Hormats
would normally deduct one star for three flaws, but because they are easily corrected and the author's former boss is now Secretary of the Treasury, and perhaps powerful enough to ignore Dick Cheney's craven amoral direction as documented in both The Price of Loyalty: George W. Bush, the White House, and the Education of Paul O'Neill and Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency, I restore the one star for actionable potential. My review of the latter itemizes 23 high crimes and misdemeanors committed by Dick Cheney as documented by the authors, and no review our fiscal decrepitude can be complete without understanding how Dick Cheney has bankrupted the Republic and betrayed the Nation and our troops.
I like this author. He gets it. I would gladly work with him in remediation as he suggests, which I summarize below. First, however, the three flaws:
1) He really believes the government baloney about how the military budget is a tiny fraction of our disposable income in comparison to Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid. Not so. See my first image. If we restore universal service (inclusive of demanding two years from anyone asking for citizenship), end most of the “support” (read: looting) contracts that transfer taxpayer wealth to Halliburton and others of their ilk, and if we reform our national health system to provide a mix of lifestyle, environmental, alternative or natural, and medical care, with drug prices based on global wholesale prices, we drop drug unit prices from $600 (US) to $6 (global), bypassing the current Canadian pricing ($60). Extend the retirement age, modify education to be lifelong, and dramatically improve minimum wages, end illegal immigration, and introduce children to the work force as apprentices earlier, and we have the flexibility to heal ourselves and get out of insolvency, which the Comptroller General told Congress is where we are as of six months ago.
2) The author understands that asymmetric warfare allows our enemies to spend $1 and we have to spend much more. Bin Laden actually said this publicly a few years ago, and my second image illustrates both “the Bin Laden equation” of $1 from them requires $500,000 from us, and also the ten threats and twelve policies that must be addressed in a harmonized inter-agency and coalition fashion, using transparent accountable information as the “glue” for information arbitrage, a term I devised in the 1990's, the conversion of information into intelligence and intelligence into profit or cost and risk reduction. The hedge fund managers have been doing this for decades, with one big difference: they manage for the profit of the few rather than the sustainable profit to the many.
3) Alluded to above, and certainly in strong support of the author's recommended program, is the role that information and public (legal, ethical, sharable) intelligence can play in creating infinite wealth. See for instance, the books below (or read my reviews as a short-cut):
Revolutionary Wealth
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom
The Wealth of Knowledge: Intellectual Capital and the Twenty-first Century Organization
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
Infinite Wealth: A New World of Collaboration and Abundance in the Knowledge Era
I take the trouble to emphasize the above prior to summarizing the author's views, and loading a third image on how I am attempting to work with Amazon and others to create a global information arbitrage economy that includes serious games and empowers every *locality*, because “The Price of Liberty” is NOT financial, it is intellectual. Where we have gone wrong these past decades is in forgetting that if We the People drop out of politics, we are left with corrupt minority parties that are Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It and a Congress that is impeachable for failing to act on two stolen elections and as the Article 1 branch of government (see for instance:
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
It is in this larger context that the author's views become vital to the Republic, and actionable by the current and next Secretary of the Treasury. For the record, I am betting on Bradley-Bloomberg and 16 years of transpartisan government with multi-party (5-6 parties, not two) announced in advance and elected as part of “Our Deal.”
This is a lovely history with deep meaning for our future. The author's core point is that a long war requires a long-term fiscal strategy. His elaborations make it clear that the Bush-Cheney Administration, which made fiscal policy from the Office of the Vice President and continues to demean the Cabinet, has bankrupted the Nation.
The author is especially strong at showing the differences between past indebtedness and today's indebtedness. Today we have no surplus, we have an energy deficit, we have idiotic tax cuts for the wealth and an unfair burden on the poor, we continue benefits that are unaffordable and crippling to our evolution, and we are not planning for the future needs of our rapidly aging and often needy.
I was moved to conceptualize “Our Deal” after reading the author's brilliant but down to earth discussion of how the Roosevelt “New Deal” and the Truman “Fair Deal” and the Johnson “Great Society” all ran aground, more or less, because of the rocks of war. The author is clear is saying that it was the Reagan era that turned us into a debtor nation.
The author connects social justice at home with the sacrifices of our troops abroad, and concludes that the Pentagon, above all, must re-examine its allocation of resources (see my fourth image, the “Four Forces After Next” that I began recommending in 1992).
Amnesia & Ambivalence are the death of a Nation. Lack of inter-agency coordination is killing us. We need energy patriotism, savings patriotism, and I would add, democratic patriotism. I am working to create a “big bat” for Transpartisanship, one capable of raising $500M a year in Liberty Bonds with which to buy back our government and force Congress to attend to the people's priorities.
This book helps us all.
