27 March 2010: Full spread sheet and optimal links added below Amazon review.GOT TO RUN, Links later today.
Amazon Page
Beyond Five Stars…Gifted Mix of Intelligence, Integrity, Insight Deeply Rooted in History and Firmly Focused on Today's Reality
March 21, 2010
Ralph Peters
I do not always agree with Ralph Peters, but along with Steve Metz and Max Manwaring, both at the Strategic Studies Institute (SSI) of the U.S. Army, I consider him one of America's most gifted strategists whose integrity is absolute. He simplifies sometimes (e.g. Iraqis turned against Al Qaeda because of the demand for marriage that was refused followed by the bloodbath execution of the family by Al Qaeda, not because of anything the US did) but that aside, Ralph is the ONLY person that reminds me of both Winston Churchill–poetry and gifted turns of phrase on every page–and Will Durant, historian extraordinaire. Ralph has a better grasp of history, terrain, and the military than Robert Kaplan, and deeper insights into our failed military leadership (no longer leaders, just politically-correct administrators out of touch with reality) than my favorite journalist-adventurer, Robert Young Pelton.
I have read and reviewed most of Ralph's books, and am proud to consider him a colleague and a fellow Virginian. Ralph is the only author whose books jump to the top of my “to read” pile, and I absorbed this masterpiece over the course of moving my own flag from Virginia to Latin America. US national and military intelligence have completely given up their integrity, and it resonated with me that the key word that Ralph uses throughout this book–a word I myself adopt in my latest book in carrying on the tradition of Buckminster Fuller on the one hand, and most respected mentor-critic Chuck Spinney on the other–is that very word: INTEGRITY.
I was forced to buy this book as part of a twelve book review for an international organization, and even though it was a business expense, this kind of greed pricing makes me urge all authors to use Print on Demand services and bypass the publishers entirely. Having read the book now, I can assure the reader that this is worthwhile ONLY as a library book on loan. As an independent publisher myself, I could publish this book for $39.95, give Amazon its 55%, and still cover my costs and then some (sell one third of the print run, the rest is profit).
The book is very well put together, with 24 authors that together cover history, Islamic and Jewish water law, eight countries, and five regions, finishing up with the most valuable portion of the book, a discourse on trends with some excellent tables, but no visualization of note. “New Media” is going to bury publishers like this, they are ten years behind the meaningful presentation curve.
Two key points to place this book in context:
1) The law is chaotic, driven by corporate interests, and generally out of touch with reality and with science.
2) The law is unenforceable at the local level and I believe international law will soon be unenforceable at the national level.
The editorial intent is to focus on “issues of architecture, agency, adaptiveness, accountabily, access, and allocation.”
Despite the excellence of the individual contributions, I give this book a three for two reasons: the greed pricing that makes the book unaffordable to the Amazon reader; and the larger lack of context–this is a book about law for lawyers, not a book about where the law is right and wrong and where it should go. Useful as a starting point, this does not help as much as the first book I recommend above, which is also reasonably priced.
The editors have done an excellent job of summarization. In discussing the changing characteristics of governance (by many) as opposed to government (by one), they draw on the collection as a whole to list seven fragmentations:
01 Geographical fragmentation (goverance must be multi-level and multi-national)
02 Functional fragmentation (“world bodies” versus public interest bodies)
03 Resource fragmentation (dispersed actors that I note need harmonization through shared information)
04 Interest fragmentation (harder to reconcile)
05 Norm fragmentation (national, corporate, and social all in conflict)
06 Policy fragmentation (still struggling to find ways to share information and reach consensus)
07 Decision-making and implementation fragmentation (Epoch A going down, Epoch B rising)
The book tends to gloss over the reality that corporate interests are funding and driving the UN and other international water bodies, but I do find their short summary of the Dublin Conference useful and list the four principles here:
01 Notion of finite and necessary nature of water
02 Need for participatory approach at all levels of management
03 Central role of women in water management [rather strangely presented by authors as also tied to the need to recognize water as an economic good–vice a human right]
04 Establishment of multi-stakeholder forums
The authors discuss a theory of change and are very weak on this point. Ted Gurr and others do it better. Revolutionary change occurs across the political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic domains, and these are all deeply inter-connected with one another and with the psycho-social nature of the individuals, most of whom are being radicalized and will no longer tolerate colonial-era practices maintained by corrupt elites.
The conclusion is most helpful and tables are used to good effect.
Differential factors leading to difference water laws including water geography, economic dependence, history and hydro-politics, and importance to ecosystems.
Forces leading to converging [or not] domestic water law and policy include civilization, religion, conquests, communism, international codification, environmentalism, epistemic communities, and globalization.
Colonial influences interacting with tribal and religious derivations in the Middle East and Africa are dissected by this book but I cannot help feeling that this kind of effort deals with the elephant's shadow rather than the elephant itself. Never-the-less, a superb effort.
The table on page 399 on key water principles is very helpful and worthy of retension.
+ Water law principles include sovereignty, equity, and avoidance of harm.
+ Human rights principles include participation, conflict resolution, prior informed consent, and human rights generally.
+ Environmental law principles include environmental impact assessments, sustainable development, precautionary approach, polluter pays principle, decentralization, open international economic system, and notification (of accidents).
The table on page 400 addresses water principles from other sources of governance.
+ Water rights based on ownership, appropriation, and licensing
+ Sectoral approach to water; different laws relevant to water in different fields
+ Gender bias concerns: ownership and appropriation often only possible by males
+ Contextual governance
+ State regulation of contracts
The book concludes that the law needs to open up to other disciplines (see the Graphic on Web of Fragmented Knowledge); that institutions must change [or be replaced]; and that fairness must be a primordal attribute of water law.
Amazon limits me to ten links. ALL links are active at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
This is not a book the Administration (regardless of which party happens to be in control on any given day) because the Administration is totally out of touch with reality, totally partisan, and largely not interested in the welfare of average Americans because Wall Street money is personal, our tax payments are not–they go to the highest bidder.
Indeed, the decisions that the Administration makes every day not only make our citizens less safe, they cost our earnest honest businesses billions of dollars as imposed costs from government errors of understanding and policy and regulation. See my article in Homeland Security Today on “America's Cyber-Scam,” and separately, my update on the massive looting of Haiti that is about to take place as American contractors rush to swindle everyone, joining the Red Cross in the 50% overhead scam–only in the case of US contractors paying Haitians a dollar a day, it will be more like 80% scam.
What the author has done that no one else has done to date, is actually “walk” the ground across America looking for obvious vulnerabilities that terrorists armed with silencers and willing to die could exploit.
Each chapter covers a different vulnerability, and the value of this book is easily seen in the fact that this is almost “real-time” intelligence on specific vulnerabilities, the author has been “up close and personal” with each one, and the bottom line is clear: The US Government and state and local government have no idea how to protect America internally, we are living on grace, not preparedness (just as CIA offices under official cover overseas are not really operating under cover, just tacit immunity from local liaison which has them all pegged).
I sat down intending to make this a five, but the two fluff reviews have to be off-set. Robert Ackoff would say this is a spectacular book about making the wrong things righter instead of the right things righter–too many lawyers and focused on improving a patent approval system that probably needs to be eradicated and the buildings and files plowed under with salt. It also lost one star because I was one of the 4,000 that actually participated in the Open Government experiment, where the legalization of marijuana triumphed and every time someone voted for my governance reform idea, a “monitor” from the partisan correctness office came in and voted against it moving it back down to zero. The author is naive to think this initiative is going anywhere without electoral reform that displaces the two-party tyranny and restores the Constitution, the Article 1 independence of an honest Congress, and integrity of the Executive at the political level. [See especially Chapter 21 in my new book that just went to the printer, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty and is free online at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, and my earlier wire-bound book, also free online, Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography).
Having said that, I found this book to be spectacularly informative, thoughtful, useful, with extraordinary insights and suggestions that were over-shadowed by the focus on the patent system–suggestions about the-redesign of government, for example. I recommend reading my reviews of SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa and of The Myth of Digital Democracy along with this review, the three books were read together as a set. Below are some quotes and my fly-leaf notes. This book is a foundation stone for righteous change into the future, but only that first stone.
QUOTE (xvi): Done right, it is possible now to achieve greater competence by making good information available for better governance, improve effectiveness by leveraging the available tools to engender new forms of collective action, and strengthen and deepen democracy by creating government by the people, of the people, and *with* the people.
Beyond Six Stars–Hugely Important Useful Collection
February 20, 2010
Edited by Sokari Ekine
Contributing authors include Redante Asuncion-Reed, Amanda Atwood, Ken Banks, Chrstinia Charles-Iyoha, Nathan Eagle, Sokari Ekine, Becky Faith, Joshua Goldstein, Christian Kreutz, Anil Naidoo, Berna Ngolobe, Tanya Notley, Juliana Rotich,Ā and Bukeni Wazuri
This book will be rated 6 Stars and Beyond at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog, where we can do things Amazon refuses to implement here, such as sort useful non-fiction into 98 categories, many of the categories focused on stabilization & reconstruction, pushing back against predatory immoral capitalism, and so on.
When the book was first brought to my attention it was with concern over the price. The price is fair. Indeed, the content in this book is so valuable that I would pay $45 without a second thought. I am especially pleased that the African publishers have been so very professional and assured “Look Inside the Book”–please do click on the book cover above to read the table of contents and other materials.
This is the first collection I have seen on this topic, and although I have been following cell phone and SMS activism every since I and 23 others created the Earth Intelligence Network and put forth the need for a campaign to give the five billion poor free cell phones and educate them “one cell call at a time,” other than UNICEF and Rapid SMS I was not really conscious of bottom-up initiatives and especially so those in Africa where the greatest benefits are to be found.
I strongly recommend this book as a gift for ANYONE. This is potentially a game-changing book, and since I know the depth of ignorance among government policy makers, corporate chief executives, and larger non-governmental and internaitonal organization officials, I can say with assurance that 99% of them simply do not have a clue, and this one little precious book that gives me goose-bumps as I type this, could change the world by providing “higher education” to leaders who might then do more to further the brilliant first steps documented in this book. Continue reading “Review: SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa”
I like the “fireside chat” description of this book and am providing my own summary primarily for my own benefit and the benefit of those that follow all of my non-fiction reviews at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog where all of my reviews, in 98 non-fiction categories, are more easily exploited than here at Amazon (but they all lead back to Amazon.
QUOTE (1): We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo.
I have two competing views of this book. The first, beyond five stars, is earned by this quote from page 13:
QUOTE: In our history, the greatest patriots have been those leaders and ordinary citizens who have dared to hold America to our own highest standards–even at the cost of ostracism, punishment, imprisonment and, at times–e3ven death.” I would add unemployment to the list–Washington today does NOT want to hear truth about anything at all.
Beyond Five Stars…Gifted Mix of Intelligence, Integrity, Insight Deeply Rooted in History and Firmly Focused on Today's Reality
Greed Pricing, Useful Content,
Almost a Five–Making Wrong Things Righter
