Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 52 – Public Intelligence Blog

Miriam Knight and Julie Clayston (editors)

5.0 out of 5 stars A Potpourri of Endless Possibilities, September 27, 2014

Ervin Lazlo, among whose many books I have reviewed Dawn of the Akashic Age: New Consciousness, Quantum Resonance, and the Future of the World, opens the book with the observation that we are in a race with time and the cosmos is longing for us to show life and consciousness.

His foreword is followed by a short introduction from Miriam Knight, from whom I extract this quote:

” The revelations and personal shifts that people have described run the gamut from profound understandings of the nature of the forces underpinning the very fabric of physical reality, to the ability to visualize the interior of human bodies and having the capacity to change their molecular structure and create miraculous healings, to the ability to hear and even see beings in other dimensions, and convey their messages to friends, loved ones, and the world at large.”

In her own introduction, Julie Clayton observes that we are asleep to a lot of things in the world, but humankind is stirring into wakefulness – the contributors listed below are showing the way and making the point that the paths toward transformation are many.

Continue reading “Review: What Wags the World – Tales of Conscious Awakening”

2014/09/122014/09/13

Review: Death of a King – The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s Final Year

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Biography & Memoirs, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), True Cost & Toxicity

Tavis Smiley

5.0 out of 5 stars OK to Challenge Racism and Poverty — NOT OK to challenge militarism and the national security state, September 12, 2014

The publisher has done a rotten job of summarizing this book. Here, paraphrasing the author as he just spoke on the John Stewart show, is the bottom line:

The minute that Dr. King turned against militarism and denounced the USA as the greatest purveyor of violence upon the world, he was first marginalized and then assassinated. “The System” was fine with Dr. King focusing on racism, and even poverty, but it would not tolerate for one moment his questioning the military-industrial complex and the national security state.

The author — whom I found to be very inspiring, coherent, and concise — a brilliant articulator of the key points in the book — goes on to have a conversation with Jon Stewart about how the USA simply cannot handle truth-tellers in relation to “big money” matters such as elective wars (racism and poverty being “little money” matters, and deliberately so).

Dr. King was ultimately assassinated by a US Army sniper on detail to the FBI and under the personal direction of J. Edgar Hoover. The story is told in An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King and has also been documented and validated in a judgment by a federal court awarding the King family the single dollar in damages they requested.

Continue reading “Review: Death of a King – The Real Story of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s Final Year”

2014/09/04

Review: Designing a World that Works For All – Solutions & Strategies for Meeting the World’s Needs – 2005-2013 Labs

6 Star Top 10%, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Future, Games, Models, & Simulations, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Priorities, Public Administration, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Medard Gabel

5.0 out of 5 stars Co-Creator with Buckminster Fuller of the Analog World Game, The Gold Standard for Serious Games 4.0, September 4, 2014

Medard Gabel, co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, and architect of the digital EarthGame(TM), is “root” for anyone who wishes to do holistic design, true cost economics, serious games, and open source information-sharing and sense-making. He is too little known, very modest, and does not get the deep attention that he merits.

I have participated in his design seminars, and am always thrilled at how well they work. Everyone starts out working on “their” problem, generally an issue in isolation, and around the middle of the week-long seminar, all the different teams experience the “aha” moment when they realize that they cannot succeed in isolation, that all the challenges need to be addresses by everyone working together.

For me Medard Gabel is the “gold standard” and none of the serious games, however well-intentioned they might be, can be helpful beyond their narrow niche for lack of the holistic understanding and the information-sharing and sense-making architecture that Medard provides for — mostly human, not technical at all. As Russell Ackoff likes to say, what is good for one part of the system might be very bad for all the other parts — Comprehensive architecture and prime design — all threats, all policies, all demographics — are essential to our moving past the toxic industrial era of reductionsim and separation that we have fostered these past two hundred years.

I rate this book, because it is a collection of the best of the best from past books, some of which I reviewed at the time, at six stars instead of five.

Continue reading “Review: Designing a World that Works For All – Solutions & Strategies for Meeting the World's Needs – 2005-2013 Labs”

2014/09/042014/09/04

Review: Creating a Learning Society

4 Star, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Economics

Joseph Stiglitz, Bruce Greenwald

4.0 out of 5 stars Glass Half Full — Cannot Be Ignored But Also Off the Rails, September 4, 2014

Among all economists in the English language, I hold Joseph Stiglitz to be among the most enlightened and virtuous. When I formed a “dream” coalition cabinet in 2012, he was on it. His co-author is of less interest to me — finance geeks have been demonstrably impotent these past fifty years — and particularly those who fall prey to mathematical formulas lacking in social integrity — and I believe with book would have been stronger had Stiglitz either gone it alone, or collaborated with an educator such as Derek Bok. The book is also rooted in old lectures, starting in 2008, and it is focused on Kenneth Arrow's work, which is best appreciated on its own merits. See, for example:

Moral Hazard in Health Insurance (Kenneth J. Arrow Lecture Series)
The Limits of Organization (Fels Lectures on Public Policy Analysis)
General Competitive Analysis, Volume 12 (Advanced Textbooks in Economics)

The weakest point of this book, which does indeed have much to offer for anyone who cares about the future of academia, commerce, governance, and society, is that is “assumes” integrity on the part of the government, and that industrial policies are somehow going to corrupt deep ethical and intellectual failings across all major forms of organization (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-governmental/non-profit). This is the same mistake made by Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update and the Club of Rome. The *losing* alternative to the Limits to Growth assumption that top-down government would deal responsibly with climate change and other high level threats focused instead on education from the bottom up — the central point of Will Durant's 1919 doctoral thesis, now available as Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition.

Continue reading “Review: Creating a Learning Society”

2014/08/292014/08/29

Review: Air Power in UN Operations – Wings for Peace

5 Star, United Nations & NGOs

Walter Dorn (editor) et al

5.0 out of 5 stars Pioneering Practical Work on Future of Aviation — Not Just UN — in Peace and War, August 29, 2014

This book — I disclose that my chapter is one of two concluding chapters — is one of the most practical, comprehensive, and perhaps — we all hope — inspirational books to be published on aviation applications for peace and war in recent memory. Since Look Inside the Book is not available, I will first list the parts and chapters, and then summarize my appreciation for this pioneering endeavor.

PART I THE UN'S FIRST “AIR FORCE”
01 Planning, Organizing, and Commanding Air Operations in the Congo, 1960
02 Peacekeepers in Combat: Fighter Jets and Bombers in the Congo, 1961-1963
03 A Fine Line: Use of Force, the Cold War, and Canada's Air Support for the UN Organization in the Congo

PART II AIRLIFT: LIFELINE FOR UN MISSIONS
04 Above the Rooftop of the World: Canadian Air Operations in Kashmir and Along the India-Pakistan Border
05 Humanitarian Relief in Haiti, 2010: Honing the Partnership between the US Air Force and the UN
06 Flying Humanitarians: The UN Humanitarian Air Service

Continue reading “Review: Air Power in UN Operations – Wings for Peace”

2014/08/202014/08/21

Review: Constructing Cassandra – Reframing Intelligence Failure at the CIA, 1947-2001

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Milo Jones and Philippe Silberzahn

5.0 out of 5 stars Charming, Recommended for Students, August 20, 2014

I found this book, a gift, to be charming and useful. It should certainly be used as a textbook at the national intelligence university and other mainstream schools. I consider this book a hybrid, one that integrates an outsider application of a social constructivist perspective, with an appreciation for selected insider sources who were ostracized at the time but ultimately proven correct when the agency they sought to serve was proven wrong.

Continue reading “Review: Constructing Cassandra – Reframing Intelligence Failure at the CIA, 1947-2001”

2014/08/192014/08/18

Review: 11 Days in May by J.D. Messinger

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ

J. D. Messinger

I bought this book at the suggestion of Miriam Knight, and found it engrossing. This is not a conversation between the author and God, but rather between the author's mind (from the World of Form) and the author as a soul (straddling into the World of Light).

There are multiple bottom lines, I will list just four that jump out at me from my notes:

01 Finding your authentic self — and hence finding sustainable happiness and positive effect — must be rooted in a deep critical appreciation of how false our current world is, particularly its materialistic and reductionist nature, the false assumptions about scarcity, valuation. This sets the stage for personal liberation.

Continue reading “Review: 11 Days in May by J.D. Messinger”