Truth & Reconciliation – Page 5 – Public Intelligence Blog

2013/06/06

Review: The Thistle and the Drone: How America’s War on Terror Became a Global War on Tribal Islam

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Religion & Politics of Religion, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle

Akbar Ahmed

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star (My Top 10%) — The Book Susan Rice Should Read First, June 6, 2013

I received and read this book today, and while I am troubled by the author's buying into the Bin Laden story and the official 9/11 cover-up, this is a six-star book that easily provides one stellar concept that must be integrated into the fabric of every foreign policy — understanding the failures of the centers in each state with respect to the more traditional peripheries — and a deep broad articulation of why the US “war on terror” has actually been a thoughtless unnecessarily expensive and harmful war on tribes.

Ignore those who demean this book or this author. I generally consider Brookings to be expert at publishing dumbed down talking points for loosely-educated policy makers, but this book is easily in the top tier, a book Cambridge or Oxford would be comfortable published, and a book that ties in perfectly with Philip Allot's extraordinary book The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State. Read my review of that book as a pre-quel to reading this book, which I certainly recommend in the strongest possible terms.

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2013/04/292019/08/29

Review (Guest): The Invention of the Land of Israel: From Holy Land to Homeland

5 Star, Country/Regional, History, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Truth & Reconciliation

Shlomo Sand

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent Complement to First Book! December 6, 2012

By J. Gomez TOP 500 REVIEWER

“The Invention of the Land of Israel” is the follow up to the fascinating and controversial “The Invention of the Jewish People“. This excellent book serves as a complementary addition to the aforementioned book and fills gaps left behind. Historian and outspoken professor, Shlomo Sand does it again with this enlightening and educational book that reveals the history behind the Land of Israel. This 304-page book is composed of the following five chapters: 1. Making Homelands: Biological Imperative or National Property?, 2. Mytherritory: In the Beginning, God Promised the Land, 3. Toward a Christian Zionism: and Balfour Promised the Land, 4. Zionism Versus Judaism: The Conquest of “Ethnic” Space, and 5. Conclusion: The Sad Tale of the Frog and the Scorpion.

Positives:
1. A well-researched and well-cited book that takes you into the always fascinating world of Jewish history.
2. As candid and forthright a book as you will find. Professor Sand provides solid and well-cited evidence in support of his arguments.
3. Enlightening and thought-provoking book to say the least.
4. An excellent complement to his best-selling book “The Invention of the Jewish People”.
5. The myth that was the forced uprooting of the “Jewish people.”
6. The book does a wonderful job of explaining how the dissemination of a formative historical mythos occurred. “Never did I accept the idea of the Jews' historical rights to the Promised Land as self-evident.”
7. Clarifies some of the misunderstood points made in his previous book.
8. Professor Sand takes pride in his historical scholarship and it shows. The quest for primary sources. The author does a good job of letting the readers know what he does have a good handle on and what he doesn't.
9. Explains what really precipitated the establishment of the State of Israel.
10. The book achieves its goal of tracing the ways in which the “Land of Israel” was invented.
11. The book achieves the main goal of disparaging the official historiography of the Zionist Israeli establishment.
12. The notion of “homeland” in perspective. “It is important to remember that homelands did not produce nationalism, but rather the opposite: homelands emerged from nationalism.” The concept of territorial entity.

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2013/04/202013/04/20

Review: Ending the Male Leadership Myth – How Women Can Save Us from Destroying Ourselves

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Intelligence (Public), Leadership, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Fernando Pargas

STUNNINGLY Intelligent, Timely, A Study in Ethics, Business, & Governance, April 20, 2013

I received this book as a gift because I have been telling people for over a decade that the 21st Century is going to be the Century of women, whose compassion, intuition, and smaller egos make them so much superior to men in an age that will be vastly more complex and nuanced than the Industrial Era with its willful ignorance of the true cost of everything including the true cost of colonialism, unilateral militarism, and predatory capitalism.

First, for context, a few of the books that have caused me to appreciate this one and recommend it without reservation, the bottom line being that muscle (and blind heavy metal militaries) are out, brains and heart and “non-zero” are in.

Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition
THE DAWN OF THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
Improper behavior
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women's Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

First off, the author's background is relevant: business professor and corporate time with Time-Warner. This is a serious guy that has done hard time in both the academic and corporate media worlds–he is inteimately familiar with the pretensions and limitations of men, and with the cavalier manner in which we have treated women. I like to point out to people that it used to be legal to abuse women and people of color, and to deprive both groups of voice and vote. This is also an author with a very broad international perspective, who teaches for the United Nations and understands the challenges and the requirements for stabilization & reconstruction.

I am quite taken with the author's discussion of “tribalism” and how modern tribalism combined with media manipulation make us all both stupid and dangerous. As one who has studied the origin of the state (including matriarchs as the first leaders, because lines of inheritance from women were absolutely known) and also the preconditions of revolution (concentration of wealth and huge disparities of income being number one), I see the author's introduction as long overdue common sense. I have been charting what I call “information pathologies,” my reflections on this are easy to find online, they boil down generally to men being able to get away with insanely criminal corruption because of secrecy and the willingness of men to assume that they are entitled to deprive others for their own advantage.

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2013/02/032013/02/03

Review (Guest): Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Insurgency & Revolution, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

James Billington

4.0 out of 5 stars What is reason and logic? By what standard is paradise measured. March 4, 2008

By Henri Porter

Anyone who reads this and is still a bit unsure should read Yevgeny Zamyatin's book WE and Djilas' The New Class: An Analysis Of Communist System. If they are looking for the philosophical approach to the book, they should read Voegelin and any of his works that deal with the philosophical underpinning of what Billington is addressing in this fantastic work. Billington is a Rhodes Scholar. He is a visiting Professor to Harvard and Princeton. His works on Russia are definitive. This book being his best, is his dedication to Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground and Demons. It is scary and brilliant. It answers the question of the two opposing “secret” warring groups one the proponents of freewill the others proponents of the collective and or the secular super powerful state. All this and according to Billington's work, the most startling aspect, is that journalists are the very agents of this revolutionary activity. Puts a very scientism spin on things like global warming and afro-centrism.

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2013/01/122013/01/12

Review: What Has Nature Ever Done for Us?

5 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Future, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Science & Politics of Science, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Tony Juniper

5.0 out of 5 stars MUST READ, gift and share — a roadmap for true cost valuation at citizen level, January 12, 2013

I have long been a fan of Herman Daly's ecological economics and E.O. Wilson's concept of consilience, a form of holistic analytics, and of course Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff, among other systems thinkers. This book, just published, is quite extraordinary, and in the absence of a Look Inside the Book offering, one of Amazon's best features, I want to list the chapters here and point to an online resource that provides compelling information supportive of buying this book and then sharing it or gifting it to others.

Chapter 1: The Indispensable Dirt
Chapter 2: Life from Light
Chapter 3: Eco-innovation
Chapter 4: The Pollinators
Chapter 5: Ground Control
Chapter 6: Liquid Assets
Chapter 7: Sunken Billions
Chapter 8: Ocean Planet
Chapter 9: Insurance
Chapter 10: Natural Health Service
Chapter 11: False Economy?

To get right to the web page that does NOT offer the book for free, only provides the supporting references and comments on each reference, search for:

what-has-nature-ever-done-us-sources-and-references

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2012/12/232013/01/15

Review: Saucers, Swastikas and Psyops: A History of A Breakaway Civilization: Hidden Aerospace Technologies and Psychological Operations

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Complexity & Catastrophe, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), History, Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Science & Politics of Science, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Jospeh P. Farrell

5.0 out of 5 stars This is an Information Operations / Counterintelligence Hidden Gem, December 23, 2012

The cover does this book a dis-service. This is a SERIOUS book that should be used in serious courses of instruction for both Information Operations (IO) and Counterintelligence (CI). The book lacks an index, a terrible mistake on the part of the publisher, but I have to say the notes are world-class and this book earns my intuitive respect quickly.

This book is a bit rough but I put it at a solid five stars and even considered six (my top ten percent across 1800+ books) because this book does something extraordinary:

01 It makes the case for UFOs being a terrestial Information Operations (IO) Psychological Operation (PSYOP — never plural).

02 It connects US underground tunnel civilization (a possible explanation for the Pentagon's missing 2.3 trillion) and advanced technologies including “Nazi physics” versus “Jewish physics”

03 It connects the Rockefeller-Morgan Nazi-philes, Latin America, Switzerland, the Bank of International Settlements, and the drug cartels — in other words, this is also an excellent reading for Counterintelligence (CI).

I draw two major insights from this book:

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2012/12/222012/12/22

Review: The Code for Global Ethics: Ten Humanist Principles

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Economics, Education (General), Environment (Solutions), Future, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Rodrique Tremblay

5.0 out of 5 stars Humanist Manifesto Slams Religions, Foundation for Reflection, December 22, 2012

I bought this book on the recommendation of Pierre Cloutier in Quebec, and very deliberately as the first book to read on 22 December 2012 as Epoch B begins (see graphic above with book cover).

Across the entire book are what I now call E to the 5th: Empathy, Ethics, Ecology, Education, and Evolution. The bottom line of the book is clear: abandon religions as selective (and generally exclusionary) arbiters of morality, each severely hypocritical in having one morality for insiders and another for “others” (infidels, shiksas, whatever the name, moral disengagement is the rule and genocide is often the result).

When addressing really important books, I read the notes, bibliography, and index first. The notes are a second book — these are not normal cryptic notes, each note is a short exposition, and any reading of the book is incomplete without a reading of the notes. The bibliography is extraordinary, and my attention was immediately drawn to the authors honored with three or more books being cited: Karen Armstrong, Mario Bunge, Charles Darwin, Richard Dawkins, A.C. Graylink, Robert Ingersoll, Immanuel Kant, Hans Kung, Paul Kurtz, John Rawls, Peter Singer, Baruch SPinoza, E. O. Wilson, and Robert Wright. Among them Kurtz, Singer, and Wright are central. Roughly 1,000 books are listed by title in the bibliography.

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