5.0 out of 5 stars America Desperately Needs More Illumination Such as This January 16, 2012
I received a review copy of this book [note to publishers: always ask first] and was glad to be offered a chance to read something as important as this. America desperately needs more illumination on the corruption in our government, and the evil done in our name without our permission but very much at our expense.
As a career veteran of the national security community–the Marine Corps and the Central Intelligence Agency–followed by seventeen years teaching 90 governments — 66 directly — how to get a grip on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that provides 95% of what we need to know at 2% or less of the cost of what we spend now on secret intelligence–I am well-qualified to read this book from a patriot's point of view.
A strong national defense capability does NOT exist in the USA today. Posturing fools such as Senator Rick Santorum have no idea what they are talking about when they seek to discredit those of us who do. The infantry, four percent of the force, takes eighty percent of the casualties and receives ONE PERCENT of the Pentagon budget. Within the other 99%, half–at least–is fraud, waste, and abuse that makes America weaker, not stronger.
This book, edited by David Swanson, is a very good deal at $25. Its 368 pages include chapters from thirty other authors besides the editor, and include contributions from Ray McGovern and Karen Kwiatkowski, whose work I have admired in the past. If there were one flaw in the book, but not so serious as to lose a star, it would be its isolation from the pioneering work done by Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney, and Winslow Wheeler, with a genuflection toward John Boyd, the real pioneer of smart sufficient national security.
What is uniquely valuable about this book, something I have not seen elsewhere, is its provision of a holistic examination not just of the military-industrial process and fraudulent, wasteful, abusive bad design, bad performance, and bad cost, but of the costs that the military-industrial complex imposes on all of us and our economy and our society. This is a world-class book that should be translated into other languages to help others avoid our long-running mistakes.
Here are the blinding flashes of solid insight that stayed with me and merit the broadest possible public understanding:
A new book suggests that “It's the economy, stupid,” may be more than political strategy; it may also be the key to environmental sustainability. The book is Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet, by Kendra Pierre-Louis. The argument developed is not just that the consumer choices of an individual won't save the planet without collective action, but also that the only collective action that will save us is abandoning the whole idea of consumer choices.
Pierre-Louis lays the groundwork for her argument by walking us through the hazards of supposedly environmental approaches to numerous fields. First is clothing, in which a big trend is toward organic cotton. While reducing pesticides is all to the good, Pierre-Louis writes, growing cotton — any cotton — is a rapid way to exhaust the earth's stores of fresh water. Among the preferable proposals the author suggests is creating or altering your own clothing so that it means more to you and you throw it away less rapidly. The low-hanging fruit in improving our clothing practices is in quantity, not quality: buy less clothing!
Amazon Page
Next comes diet. Our poisonous farming practices are killing the Mississippi River, exhausting our underground water supplies, drying up the Colorado (on this I recommend the 3-D movie “Grand Canyon Adventure”), eradicating biodiversity, eliminating soil, and consuming fossil fuels. Genetically modified crops are outrageous failures on their own terms, resulting in increased, rather than diminished, use of pesticides and herbicides. Last week, I would add, the Obama administration approved new Monsanto corn despite 45,000 negative public comments and 23 positive, corn that will mean the widespread use of a major ingredient in Agent Orange as herbicide. According to Pierre-Louis, we cannot ethically shop our way out of this, not even by buying local, and we couldn't even if products were meaningfully labeled and the accuracy of the labeling was verified. Instead the easiest solution lies in the fact that, in the United States, we throw away 40 percent of the food we buy. Stop doing that! Start buying and using only what you need.
5.0 out of 5 stars 6 for Democracy as Design, 4 for Fragmentation, 5 on Balance,December 15, 2011
I bought this book after being turned to Reflexivity by Dr. Kent Myers, principal author of Reflexive Practice: Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World–disclosure, he profiled me in that book, to my great surprise, as good a gong as one could ask for. This is a great book, alongside which I recommend Buckminster Fuller's books Critical Path and Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure, and the more recent book from Medard Gabel, co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, Designing a World That Works for All: How the Youth of the World are Creating Real-World Solutions for the UN Millenium Development Goals and Beyond.In that context the book is a five. I completely agree with the earlier review that graded it a four on basis of spottiness (some great chapters, some not so great), but I upgrade it to 5 for two reasons: first, because the entire book has an explicit focus on Democracy As Design and Democracy as a System of Systems that cannot be “broken down” the way science strives to break down what it studies. In Democracy, as in Reflexivity, the engaged participants are wild cards, nothing can be predicted, agility and resilience are everything, and it is the relationships (the Yang) rather than the objects (the Ying) that really matter. That is six-star stuff no contest.
5.0 out of 5 stars Preliminary Review: Understanding the Trade-Offs & True Cost of Empire,December 8, 2011
I have ordered this book and am very much looking forward to providing readers (and myself, this is how I keep notes) with one of my more detailed reviews. The publisher is to be scolded for not using Inside the Book, one of Amazon's best features, and for failing to provide the best possible use of the Book Description and Editorial Reviews section. While the existing review is good and I have voted for it, it does not do this book justice. My decision to buy was based on the easily found review in The Guardian (UK) by Richard Drayton, “Britain's Empire: Resistance, Repression, and Revolt by Richard Gott — review,” published 7 December 2011.
Where I am going to go with my review is toward an in-depth articulation of what has never been done before that I know of, an examination of the trade-offs of Empire and the opportunity costs of Epoch A hierarchical “rule by secrecy.” I have reviewed many books on Empire, Class War, Elite Rule, all easily found in master list online, Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative). I also recommend the observe, Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive).
Russell Ackoff would say that Empire represents centuries of doing the wrong thing righter–and at greater expense across the political-legal, socio-economic, ideo-cultural, techno-demographic, and natural-geographic domains. As we approach the Mayan calendar's start date for Epoch B, 12 December 2012, many of us are conscious that we must abandon old ways and rethink how we organize society. Occupy is a sympton of this – organized people against organized money, organized consciousness against organized violence.
5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond Five Stars-A Liberating / Empowering Book,December 6, 2011
1. On first impressions the book is a major slam. The author and publisher have collected some of the most serious testimonials possible–better than any I have seen on a book of this type.
2. Ten chapters, each chapter at least five segments, means over 50 “snapshots, each easy to digest–my only disappointment with this book is that it fails to provide maps at key points. My favorite book in this regard is Nelson's Complete Book of Bible Maps and Charts, 3rd Edition.
3. I cannot do this book justice. The first and most positive impression I get halfway through the book is that this is a Cliff Note's for smart busy people, boiling down history, philosophy, and putting everything in a sensible context. I dismissed the religion requirement in college, now I am finding that religion is “core” to everything I encounter and if I had to do it over again, would take multiple religion courses as part of my liberal arts education. Certainly this book is a phenomenal offering for any student of any age, as well as adult continuing education.
4. Put bluntly, this book skewers the Zionist hypocrites by name, by government, by time period, by deceptive “offering.” This is not a book that does the same for the Palestinians, I certainly would like to see such a book that could also in passing skewer the Arab dictators as well as the European “enablers” that have made it possible for so much genocide and so many other atrocities to occur for so long in Palestine.
5. The book ends with six strategies, a deeply spiritual and totally practical final chapter on values and emancipation, a section on questions and answers, and an appendix on resources for peace.
6. What I had NOT expected at all, was the RADICAL itemization of ideas from the Bible that are not radical as much as they are FUNDAMENTAL, and including to my enormous surprise, both the seventh year sabatical with debt forgiveness, and the fifty year jubilee with total debt forgiveness across the board. These two–and everything else about this book–make it as timely as one could wish for dealing with the global financial crisis that boils down to corrupt banks eating corrupt governments.
7. I have to read this book again. Being nagged (comment below) led me to rush this out, mostly to honor the author and the spirit of the ideas in this book, but this review is shamefully inadequate–I need to do for this book what I did for Daniel Elsberg's Secrets: A Memoir of Vietnam and the Pentagon Papers, create a table with key points, keywords, do a sort, and then write a summary. I fear I will not get to that anytime soon, so this is my best for now.
Other books I have reviewed and recommend along with this one:
2. What characterizes all books with sensible implementable solutions is one word: INTEGRITY. When politics, intelligence, or commerce lose their integrity, they become corrupt, and as I wrote in my January 2011 letter to The Most Holy Father, “corruption in the secular world is an obstacle to spiritual harmony” and later in the letter, “we need a faith-based global intelligence exchange.” To my enormous surprise, many months later the Vatican pumped out a declaration along these lines (search for Vatican, Ethics, & Truth).
3. There are in my view three “ground-zeros” today for anyone contemplating how to create a prosperous world at peace. The first is Palestine (remember Gandhi: “Palestine is to the Palestinians as France is to the French,”) and what has become an Israeli Zionist plague of genocide and other atrocities perpetrated against the Palestinian people against the wishes of moderate ethical Jews and all others who wish to see a prosperous safe Israel that is not a caricature of Nazi Germany in how it treats “the other.” The second is the global financial system that the Rothchilds and Goldman Sachs [and the Chinese-Indonesian gold masters] have managed to dominate to the point of its–and our–near-death experience. I am a huge fan of Truth & Reconciliation and seek no retrospective vengeance, but it is time for the Rothchilds and Goldman Sachs to go out of business and be absent from the affairs of men. The third is water. I have reviewed twelve books on water here at Amazon and for UNESCO, any my essay containing all reviews can be found by searching for Reference: WATER-Soul of the Earth, Mirror of Our Collective Souls.
4.0 out of 5 stars Needs Updating, A Fine Start, Some Serious Mis-Steps,November 25, 2011
This is an important book, one of many about the downfall of democracy in the USA with some suggestions for action that are a mix of great ideas, out of date items, and a couple, such as Instant Run-Off, that I also fell prey to and have now been corrected on by the crowd-sourcing of the Electoral Reform Act of 2012 (easy to find online).
First off, the author was well-ahead of his time and this book joins four books in particular:
Here is what the author himself summarizes as the key changes we need to make–I agree that Electoral Reform is the ONE THING that we can all agree on, but he has not availed himself of all of the expertise possible as I have in my open call for input, so we each lose one star–I wrote a book that was not focused on solutions, and he has written a book that needs to be updated and fleshed out.
A number of electoral reforms are necessary to rescue American democracy:
Second, although the “author” Duncan Crary takes great pains to minimize his role, I have dealt with massive transcripts and historical artifacts covering long spans and would say that he has done a heroic job–he has excelled–at pulling out “just enough, just right” pieces and ordering them into the following section (since Look Inside the Book is not available, I list them):
