Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 46 – Public Intelligence Blog

2015/02/252015/02/25

Review: National Insecurity – American Leadership in an Age of Fear

4 Star, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Force Structure (Military), Intelligence (Government/Secret), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration

David Rothkopf

4.0 out of 5 stars SUPERB Conclusion–Has Flaws But Still a Strong Contribution, February 25, 2015

Wow. I have met the author and I gave an earlier book of his, Running the World: The Inside Story of the National Security Council and the Architects of American Power a strong review, but I was not expecting the deep common sense and pragmatic observations that conclude this book. There are many aspects of our insecurity that the author is not willing to address — notably the deep corruption of our political system and undue influence by foreign “allies” that are in fact enemies but that pales in light of his deep evaluation of how badly we are doing as a government. There are many flaws in the author's arguments better covered by Reviewer Frank J. Wassermann, I put this down to the author trying too hard to not completely alienate all the mandarins he still meets for lunch and at evening events. I embrace most of Reviewer Wasserman's comments but still give the book four stars instead of his two.

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2015/02/252015/02/25

Review: National Security and Double Government

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Force Structure (Military), Military & Pentagon Power, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration

Michael Glennon

4.0 out of 5 stars World Class on One Half of the Challenge, Misses the Other Half Entirely, February 25, 2015

If Mort Halperin, who wrote the original book with the memorable “Rule 1” (Lie to the President if you can get away with it), Bureaucratic Politics and Foreign Policy is kind enough to praise this book, I will over-look the hype (it is NOT the “first”). This is an important book and very helpful to a deep study of the deep state, but it is also severely deficient to the point of mis-leading the public away from the 42 billionaires that own the government; away from the religious and ideologicial treason that skews government policy; and away from the lack of intelligence with integrity that we have a right to expect from our “intelligence” community. It also soft shoes the elite pedophile protective network within the FBI, and the drug-running money-laundering side show at CIA as well as the totally out of control Pentagon elements willing to murder US citizens including military officers to keep their boat afloat — the deep deep state. [I revere the FBI, CIA, and DoD as institutions — my point is that we don't do serious counterintelligence in the USA, all of those organizations have layers of corruption going back to their founders, each layer recruiting and promoting its successors, all far outside the ken of this book.]

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2015/02/092015/02/09

Review: Teaching Fundamentals for Sailing Instruction

5 Star, Sailing

US Sailing

Perhaps the best teaching/coaching “best practices” overview I have ever read

This volume complements – with some overlap but certainly worth reading on its own merits – the US Naval Offshore Sail Training Squadron Experiential Leadership Guide, which cites this books as recommended additional reading.

Worthy of immediate and continuous note is the opening emphasis on the legal responsibility of a sailing instructor – a duty of care with attendant legal obligations and a vulnerability to being sued if all four of the following can be proven:

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2015/02/02

Review: Digital Humanitarians – How Big Data is Changing the Face of the Humanitarian Response

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Civil Affairs, Complexity & Resilience, Environment (Solutions), Geography & Mapping, Humanitarian Assistance, Information Operations, Intelligence (Public), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Patrick Meier

5.0 out of 5 stars World-Changing Book Documenting Intersection of Humans, Technology, and Policy-Ethics, February 2, 2015

This is a hugely important work, one that responds to the critical needs outlined by Micah Sifry in The Big Disconnect: Why The Internet Hasn't Transformed Politics (Yet) and others such as myself writing these past 25 years on the need to reform the pathologically dysfunctional US secret intelligence community that is in constant betrayal of the public trust.

Digital Humanitarians are BURYING the secret world. For all the bru-ha-ha over NSA's mass surveillance and the $100 billion a year we spend doing largely technical spying (yet only processing 1% of what we waste money on in collection), there are two huge facts that this book, FOR THE FIRST TIME, documents:

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2015/02/022015/02/02

Review (Guest): The End of Intelligence

2 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

David Tucker

2 Stars Half-Baked Intelligence

The author of this book, David Tucker, appears to be one of those folks whose careers have often put them on the fringes of the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC), but who have only superficially been involved in any aspect of intelligence production. Tucker compounds this deficiency by an unwillingness to either research or reflect seriously on his chosen subject. The goal of this book presumably is to demonstrate the dynamic relationships between intelligence, the power of nation states, and the so-called information age. Because Tucker is unwilling to really think through what he means by these terms, the book utterly fails to achieve this goal.

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2015/01/282015/01/28

Review: The End of Intelligence – Espionage and State Power in the Information Age

3 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

David Tucker

3.0 out of 5 stars A poor thesis, rotten sources, with no quality control in the literature review, January 27, 2015

This is a hugely disappointing book. It reads like a graduate thesis badly overseen (with zero in the way of serious literature search). While the author has some experience in the foreign service (perhaps in the clandestine service) and as an action officer and minor manager in the Pentagon bureaucracy responsible for Special Operations and Low Intensity Conflict, he knows little about intelligence in all its complexity, less about the information revolution, and nothing at all across 80% of the relevant literatures he fails to discover or cite.

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2015/01/17

Review: Total Loss – A Collection of First-Hand Accounts of Yacht Losses at Sea

5 Star, Sailing

Jack Coote Revised by Paul Gelder

Wake Up Call for Anyone Responsible for a Small Vessel and Its Souls

This is a hugely important book that should be in any personal or organizational (e.g. sail training program) library. It is organized into the following parts: weather (and waves), faulty navigation (poor thinking), failure of gear or rigging, failure of ground tackle or mooring lines, collision (think submerged free floating shipping container), fire or explosion, and towing mishaps.

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