Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 60 – Public Intelligence Blog

2014/03/162014/03/16

Review: The Hard Thing About Hard Things

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Biography & Memoirs, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Economics, Information Operations, Leadership

Ben Horowitz

5.0 out of 5 stars ABSORBING – Requires Open Mind, March 16, 2014

I generally read all the reviews before writing my own, in part to see if anyone has already covered the ground the way I like to, with a summary evaluative review. There are only two reviews before mine that I consider world-class, please do read them if you have the time. I refer to the reviews by Mercenary Trader and Scott S. Bell, I salute both of them for providing substance useful to all.

This is not a comprehensive book in that it is a very personal perspective, brings together many specific snapshots, but never addresses “root” in relation to how the team went from great idea to source code to buzz to market share. As I read the book I thought often about a book I read in the 1980′s, still a classic, Tracey Kidder's The Soul of A New Machine.

I would say this book is an absolutly priceless gem for the “hard knocks” at the CEO level perspective, and should be combined with any of several alternatives on start-ups such as Matt Blumberg's Startup CEO: A Field Guide to Scaling Up Your Business, + Website, and, forthcoming, Peter Thiel of PayPal's Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future.

I've built two companies, both failures in that I never made the leap from one man with an obession to a movement (OSS.Net, Inc. and Earth Intelligence Network, a 501c3) and what I did not see in this book, or any other book I have found, is the roadmap for getting from a big idea to big marketshare. That book remains to be written, and it could be that it should be written by Marc Andressen and a team. Jim Clark's Netscape Time: The Making of the Billion-Dollar Start-Up That Took on Microsoft is a fine but dated (1999) start but we need something now tailored to the Internet of Things (what everyone else is thinking about) and free individual access to and ability to leverage all information in all languages all the time (what I have been thinking about since 1986 — visit Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog to learn more). I am also reminded of Michael Lewis's The New New Thing: A Silicon Valley Story.

All this by way of saying that you have no business reading or buying this book if you are expecting a holistic 360 degree soup to nuts outline of how to zero to Mach 2. The greatest value of this book for me was in learning that it is possible to keep flying when you lose power and both wings fall off at the same time.

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2014/03/152014/03/15

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy: Tenth Anniversary of War by Deceit

07 Other Atrocities, 9-11 articles, Ethics, Government

Tenth Anniversary of War by Deceit

Emmanuel Charles McCarthy

Center for Christian Nonviolence

Each one deceives the other, no one speaks the truth. They have accustomed their tongues to lying… A murderous arrow is their tongue. It speaks deceitfully; with his mouth each speaks peace to his neighbor, but in his heart he lays an ambush for him … Jeremiah 9: 4, 7

“When virtually all major authority-bearing and communications institutions in a society act in concert to sell a well-packaged web of lies to that society, the
truth will seem absurd. Those who point out that the laws of logic, science, and mathematics—as well as eyewitness testimony—utterly contradict the conclusions drawn by the deceivers will be subject to whatever form of demeaning and/or silencing that is required to maintain the “big lie.”

The underlying assumption of these deceivers is that a lie told often enough, on a large-enough stage, in fact becomes the truth. However, it does not
become the truth.“

“All human beings desire to know, and truth is the proper object of that desire. While each must be respected in his or her search for truth, there exists a primordial moral obligation to seek the truth and to adhere to it once found. People cannot be genuinely indifferent to the question of whether what they know is true or not. One may define the human being as the one who seeks truth. The thirst for truth is so deeply rooted in the human heart that to be obliged to ignore it would cast existence into jeopardy.” -John Paul II

We have come to an unprecedented moment in time. Thanks to the capabilities of contemporary mass media and the deceitfulness of those who control their content, over the next several days more lies will be told to more people more often than arguably during any other period in the history of the world. The pandemic of deceit—on which the current economic and political rulers of the United States depend for the public political validation they need if they are to keep their hands on the controlling levers of the nation's operations of organized violence, e.g., military, police, FBI, TSA, IRS, CIA, etc.—will reach a crescendo on the days leading up to September 11, 2011, as an unparalleled propaganda blitz is orchestrated in order to nail down unquestioning acceptance of the US Government’s shabby explanation of the events of 911.

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2014/03/142014/03/14

Review (DVD): THRIVE

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atlases & State of the World, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Cosmos & Destiny, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Environment (Solutions), Health, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Priorities, Reviews (DVD Only)

Foster and Kimberly Gamble

5.0 out of 5 stars Free Online and Worth Buying to Support the Endeavor, March 14, 2014

This is a riveting movie with phenomenal visuals. I'd rather it had been an hour long instead of two, but in the spirit of slow food and slow Internet, certainly worth two hours of your time as an inspiration to change how you live for the rest of your life.

The movie is a personal contribution of Foster Gamble of the Proctor & Gamble family, but he grew a soul starting in elementary school and by the time he finished at Princeton, he was on his way to being a full-blown radical thinker with libertarian tendencies.

The first third of the movie is focused on free energy and all the pioneers from Telsa to Trombly to Bedeini to Hutchinson to Mallove who created proven sources of free energy only to suffer raids from the FBI (we do not make this stuff up) and other abuses including in some cases the torching of their labs and murder. I am hugely impressed by this portion of the movie, which includes short interviews, and I strongly recommend the movie for this part alone if you lack patience for what follows.

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2014/03/142014/03/14

Review: Cool Tools – A Catalog of Possibilities

5 Star, Culture, Research, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

5.0 out of 5 stars An Education, Bank, and Theater All In One — This is NOT a “Coffee Table” Book, March 14, 2014

I received this book as a gift from the author — we go back many years, and I was glad to review one of his earlier books,Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, later also reviewing New Rules for the New Economy.

Talking with Kevin after I received and went through the book, I learned that it is being described as a “coffee table” book in some circles. Let's kill that idea right away. This is NOT a coffee table book! Coffee table books in my own mind are slick superficial collections of photos with big print, meant to keep people occupied for a few minutes while they wait for their appointment.

This book is an education. Yes, it is a successor to the Whole Earth Catalog and a logical follow-on to that catalog and the Whole Earth Review's tools section, but on top of that is the existing modern website kk.org/coooltools/. It is not just about “tools.” More or less the Whole Earth is covered in this book, with treehouses being one of my favorities (also underground houses). It covers books, methods, gardens, communications, design, places, and the family.

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2014/03/142014/03/14

Review: The Direction of War – Contemporary Strategy in Historical Perspective

5 Star, Strategy

Hew Strachan

5.0 out of 5 stars Greatest Book Ever — But Misses the Core Point, March 14, 2014

I love this book — absolutely required reading the war colleges as well as the civil service colleges. Perhaps its greatest value is in setting the stage for professionals to refuse illegal orders and begin the long hard process of ending the corruption of our Western elites, particularly those in the US and UK. The author is to be saluted for correcting Samuel Huntington's various mistakes of interpretation, and for generally finding a place for moral generals in the larger scheme of things.

HOWEVER the book misses the core point underlying modern war, which is that the imperial powers do not fight wars to win anything in particular, but rather to “use up” their militaries, reduce their population of angry young men, and foster opportunities for corruption among the elite and their particular servants (e.g. CIA revitalizing the Golden Triangle around Viet-Nam, and Afghan poppy production for Wall Street liquidity).

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2014/03/122014/03/30

Review (Guest): This Republic of Suffering – Death and the American Civil War

5 Star, Culture, Research, War & Face of Battle

Drew Gilpin Faust

Closure, or does the Suffering just still go on … ?, March 12, 2014

By Herbert L Calhoun “paulocal”

Quietly, this is an amazing book about the back side of war — the side we pretend not to know is really there at all — the ugly side, the painful side. It is a stunning academic treatise about that side of the “so-called” Civil War that the history books do not speak openly about: what happens once the glorification and breast-beating heroism of war ends?

What happened in the Civil War when that war ended — when the “real work of war” began — is that there were no bands playing; no protocols on how to respect the dead, no systematic way of identifying the bodies. Gawkers and wives were roaming the battle fields together in search of trinkets they could sell, or looking for their loved ones. The lucky dead had a letter or a picture in their breast pockets that would later identify them. That way, at least then their loved ones would be allowed the minimum level of closure, but this was not to be the case for most of the dead. Nor, arguably, was it to be the case for a nation that is still in need of closure from the Civil war.

This author tells us that the “real work of war” began when the flesh and stench of 5 million pounds of 620,00 death men and 1 million pounds of the flesh of 3,000 dead horses, all laying out in the hot sun stinking up the “land of the free and home of the brave,” had to be disposed of.

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2014/03/112014/03/11

Review (Guest): How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World? A Scorecard From 1900 to 2050

2 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Complexity & Resilience, Economics, History, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Bjorn Lomberg et al

2.0 out of 5 stars It just gets better and better!, November 15, 2013

By David Wineberg “David Wineberg” (New York, NY USA) – See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Milton Berle once appeared for an interview on a morning TV show in New York. After, his interviewer threw to the weather woman. Berle left his seat and took over doing the weather. His analysis? A line of tornados ripped through New Jersey last night, causing $100 million in IMPROVEMENTS. That is the feeling I got with How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?

Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus got a bunch of academics to look at issues from a common denominator. Everything has to be evaluated as a percentage of GDP. Everything has to be monetized to make the models work. Lives, disease, biodiversity – everything gets a dollar value in these studies. Lack of historical data is not a problem either; the models “backcast” to 1900. The conclusion is that our worrisome problems are an ever shrinking cost to us, relative to GDP.

But of course, prices have never reflected the ecological cost of production or use, so we've been freeloading, with GDP expanding while costs have been controlled. The bill will go to our grandchildren. These models don't reflect that. Instead, the ballooning GDPs of the last century simply leave the cost centers in their wake, taking an ever smaller share.

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