Reviews (Books & DVD) – Page 96 – Public Intelligence Blog

Andrew Zolli and Ann Marie Healy

4.0 out of 5 stars Kum Ba Ya Reaches Its Peak,August 14, 2012

This book was recommended to me by Dr. Patrick Meier, perhaps the greatest English-language convergence point for crowd-sourcing in all languages, crisis mapping, and sustainable resilience, but I have found it to be a real disappointment–this book is kum-ba-ya at its peak, perhaps one reason why some of the reviewers, themselves deeply rooted in the kum-ba-ya mind-set, have raved about the book.

NEWS FLASH: No matter how long you hold hands and hum and agree to collaborate and have deliberative dialog and collective inspiration and all that, you will never, ever, make progress without first getting a grip on reality. This demands a conscious effort to discover, discriminate, distill, and disseminate FACTS along with OBSERVATIONS and OPINONS, all time stamped with geospatial attributes. Kum-Ba-Ya–much like the US Government–is completely divorced from reality, and especially how others see us and now corporations and banks externalize costs to the future.

Bob Seelert, Chairman of Saatchi & Saatchi Worldwide (New York): When things are not going well, until you get the truth out on the table, no matter how ugly, you are not in a position to deal with it.

Continue reading “Review: Resilience Why Things Bounce Back”

2012/08/122012/08/12

Review: The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Mike Lofgren

4.0 out of 5 stars 6 on Republicans, 3 on Democrats, 0 on the Other 50% of America's Voters,August 12, 2012

I read this book is in original incarnation, “Goodbye to All That: Reflections of a GOP Operative Who Left the Cult,” (truthout, 3 Sep 2011), and have to give the author high marks for fleshing out his original litany of Republican felonies against the public. For that he gets a 6 — beyond five stars and long overdue. He is especially strong on showing how hypocritical, unintelligent, and generally unethical my former party has become. He barely earns a 3 on the Democrats, and this is a pity because his success on the Republicans really calls for a similar indictment for the Democrats by an insider.

Where I was most dismayed by the book is in the author's complete failure to grasp that the REASON the Republican and Democratic parties are so corrupt is precisely because they have excluded the Independents, Constitutionals, Greens, Libertarians, and Reforms from ballot access, while also disenfranchising them through gerrymandering–our corrupt Congress chooses its voters, not the other way around, which is why Peggy Noonan was able to supply Ronald Reagan with the killer saying, “there is less turnover in the US Congress than in the Soviet politburo.”

I've read the other reviews and decided the best thing I can do to encourage the general direction of this book (corrupt parties, corrupt government, time to flush) is list other books I have reviewed that strongly support this one but with more coherence in their chosen area of focus.

I begin with the two party tyranny. My own book I cannot link to but Amazon allows me to list it under my signature.
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny

On the corruption of Congress:
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders

Continue reading “Review: The Party Is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless, and the Middle Class Got Shafted”

2012/08/122012/08/12

Review: Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Communications, Information Society, Intelligence (Public)

Michael Hyatt

5.0 out of 5 stars Solid Handbook On How To Extend a Personal Brand in Cyberspace,August 12, 2012

I bought this book in part because I am about to help a small company modernize its brand in cyberspace, and in part because I was given as a gift Ryan Holiday's book, Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator–it joins other great books I have reviewed such as Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin and Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq.

This book by Michael Hyatt is everything that the other book is not, and vice versa. I recommend them both — the Holiday book if you want to understand the sleaze and corruption of cyberspace, this book is you want to build a clean house with a white picket fence, never mind the criminal neighborhood.

The book is a solid four; I give it a five because it taught me things I did not know and it's resource section at the end is useful. However, it is also out of date on some key points (for example, recommending RSS for anything). Over-all, the book is so thoughtfully put together and so coherent and complete that I believe it deserves to be read by anyone who wants to leverage cyberspace that is NOT a blogger.

The book seriously understates the amount of time it takes to do all this stuff, especially if you are not just running your mouth and actually trying to be useful (according to the Holiday the vast majority, which I do not agree with, if you take out pornography and gambling that are 80% of the web more of less (see The Myth of Digital Democracy my best guess is that 80% of the popular websites are garbage, while within the last 20%, most are honest.

Robert David STEELE Vivas
THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth & Trust

AA Mind the Gap — Vote and/or Comment on Review

2012/08/122012/08/12

Review: Trust Me, I’m Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator

6 Star Top 10%, Communications, Culture, Research, Information Society, Misinformation & Propaganda

Ryan Holiday

5.0 out of 5 stars World Class–Does to Media What Confessions of An Economic Hit Man Did to Predatory Corporations,August 12, 2012

First off, ignore any rating below four stars, they are part of the counter-attack from those the author has outed for the hypocritical, conniving, sad little minds that they are. Four stars is an honest review, in my case I believe five stars is rated in part because information integrity and intelligence (decision-support) is my strongest suit and most passionate area of interest, and in that context, this book is utterly brilliant and chock full of details. Across the board, from index, to sources, to notes, to an appreciation of past history, this is a serious book that should be studied in universities, at least in politics, economics, business, and cultural classes. I read it on the same day that I read Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World. In comparative terms, now that I think about it, this book is a six and Hyatt's is a weak five, making it to five because I learned stuff and will make changes to my own brand based on his outline. Hyatt has written an elegantly simple but truly deeply coherent book that I respect very much. If you buy only ONE book, this one, by Ryan Holliday, is the one to buy.Let me start by linking to four books he lists at the end of his own for additional reading (apart from many in his Bibliography. They are:The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America
Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourse in the Age of Show Business
The Brass Check: A Study of American Journalism
News from Nowhere: Television and the NewsI skimmed the notes and bibliography, something I do first with books I consider particularly serious, and this book easily passes my smell test. I am engaged by the various quotes used to open the book, and immediately won over when early on the author labels the Huffington Post a classic case of a scam — an empty shell sold for way too much money.

As an intelligence professional I am alert to coherence, structure, facts, sourcing, and “the story.” This book does not disappoint in any way. About the only thing missing are several maps to illuminate the author's “ten most wanted” nefarious (unethical) bloggers, and perhaps a few “how to” charts. I would also have liked some emphasis on “attaboys,” recognition for a few sites, mine being one them, that tell only the truth and have no advetising. This is a good book by an honest, articulate subject matter expert and I absolutely recommend it as both a standard reading in all MBA programs and all national (secret) intelligence and covert action programs, and as a recommended reading in all other majors.

Continue reading “Review: Trust Me, I'm Lying: Confessions of a Media Manipulator”

2012/07/302012/07/30

Review: The People v. the Democratic Party

5 Star, Democracy

Michael Walsh

5.0 out of 5 stars 48 Pages – A Masterpiece of Brevity: Now Do the Same for the Republicans,July 29, 2012

At 48 pages, one can only marvel how we have advanced to where a “book” can be a long article. Perhaps the price is right, perhaps not. What we can clearly see is that the author has a gift for incision, a gift we hope he will apply to the other half of the two-party tyranny.

30% of the eligible voters elected Obama, and a major reason he won so narrowly, despite breaking his promise to run on public funding, despite getting $750 million, $300 million of which is still not accounted for, was the treason within John McCain's own camp. Staffed by Bushies, the McCain campaign was largely clueless, and not attentive to the correct gut feeling of the House Republicans — no bailout, insure from the bottom up with no evictions and no foreclosures.

What the author does not address is the FACT that on every charge that he makes against the Democrats, the Republicans [I was a Reagan Republican] having easily taken the lead under Newt Gingrich, who single-handedly overturned Article 1 of the Constitution and converted the Senate and the House into “foot-soldiers” for the President (when he was a Republican) and subversive obstructionists when not.

We in the USA live in a two-party tyranny, a criminal tyranny that excludes from both ballot access and vote relevance six other parties: Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Reform (active), and Natural Law and Socialist (inactive).

Continue reading “Review: The People v. the Democratic Party”

2012/07/212012/07/30

Review: Value-Based Fees – A Guide for Serious Consultants

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Leadership

Alan Weiss

5.0 out of 5 stars Opened My Eyes – One of Three Books of Huge Value, July 21, 2012

A colleague pointed me toward the books of Alan Weiss, and I bought three. This is the first one I have read. The other two, that I will review over the next ten days or so, are Million Dollar Consulting Proposals: How to Write a Proposal That's Accepted Every Time and Million Dollar Web Presence: Leverage the Web to Build Your Brand and Transform Your Business.

In a manner of speaking I felt my life passing before my eyes as I read this book. For over twenty years I have led the charge on connecting governments to Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), only to see every government and every corporations seeking to suck at the government breast go with “butts in seats” and “time & materials.” I myself come from that culture, and as smart as I may be, I confess to have never considered the obvious: consulting fees based on the Return on Investment (ROI) in relation to specific outcomes. As I followed the author's roadmap in this book, inventorying what I know and what outcomes I can achieve for organizations that are generally mired in the Industrial Era of stove-pipes and information hoarding, oblivious to the potential of open source everything, crowd-sourcing and crowd-seeding, and so many other things, I felt a mixture of shock (how could I be so stupid) and awe (the best years are ahead of me).

I read a lot, and this book stands out as a work of practical art–the organization, the detail, the white space, the end of chapter summaries, and at the very end of the book, a series of questions that are priceless and alone worth the cost of the book.

Continue reading “Review: Value-Based Fees – A Guide for Serious Consultants”

2012/07/20

Review (Guest): Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World

4 Star, Information Operations

Michael Hyatt

4.0 out of 5 stars A few critiques, but overall, a solid book May 24, 2012

By Amy Andrews

While I've been a fan and follower of Michael Hyatt's blog for a long time, I did not receive a free copy of Platform. I confess, as much as I like his blog, I wasn't going to buy the book for two reasons:

1. Prior to the launch of Platform, he mentioned that much of the content was reworked material from old blog posts (which I assumed I had read previously).
2. Since I teach others how to start their own blog, I am already up to my eyeballs in information of this sort.

Therefore, I thought I would hold off and wait until I could get a copy at the library.

Incidentally, I bought the book the day it launched, swayed by all the 5-star reviews, enticed by the freebies he offered during launch week and intrigued by his launch process, which I wanted to watch firsthand (you just never know when that information will come in handy, you know). 😉

I have read the book in full.

Here are some of my thoughts, in no particular order:

Continue reading “Review (Guest): Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World”