JUDY WOODRUFF: Well, speaking of secretary of defense, Chuck Hagel, who, David, the president wants to be the secretary of defense, hearing yesterday, confirmation hearing before the Senate, pretty rough going.
What did you take away from that?
DAVID BROOKS: Yes, I thought it was terrible. I thought he did a very poor job.
And we have interviewed him. We have — Mark and I have said nice things about him. I certainly have enjoyed the interviews I have had with him, but he really did a bad job. He projected weakness, which is not something you want in a secretary of defense. He could not even respond to freshman senators with any force or vigor.
He projected a guy who hadn't prepared. Some of these questions were obvious questions, about the surge, about some of the things he had said on Al-Jazeera. You have got to have an answer. It's like somebody who walks into a big moment of their life without having done their homework.
And so I still think he will be confirmed on more or less party-line votes. But if it was up to sort of a looking for a boost of — a sign of competence, this wasn't it.
I am having a hard time accepting this, it depresses me and makes me uncomfortable but data is data, and I am afraid I am going to have to accept that about a third of the country are too stupid to handle the 21st century. Here is some more data: Fifty per cent of the people in the U.S. have an I.Q. of 100 or less, and about 15 per cent have an I.Q. lower than 85. That didn't matter! much in the 13th century, but it matters a lot in the 21st.
A recent study by the Center for Public Religion has found that nearly 3 out of every 10 Americans believes that God decides the outcome of sporting events by favoring players who are virtuous and who God perceives as good.
According to the study, ‘Americans are less likely to believe that God plays a role in the outcome of sporting events than they are to believe God rewards religious athletes. While only about 3-in-10 (27%) Americans, believe that God plays a role in determining which team wins a sporting event, a majority (53%) believe that God rewards athletes who have faith with good health and success, compared to 42% who disagree.”
‘We can’t just gloss over this,” said Dennis Traynor of Acronym TV. ‘A majority of U.S. citizens in 2013 think that the all-knowing creator of the universe is sitting in the heavens looking down upon the extreme poverty and misery that encompass the world that he created in six days and sees that half of his beautiful creatures live on less than $2.50 a day and 80 percent of humanity living on less than $10 a day and not only gives a shit what happens on Super Bowl Sunday, but will be rewarding one team over the other based on the purity and faithfulness of the football players’ religion on either team.”
Several readers sent me different versions of this story and, at first, I thought this is not possible. These stories are some kind of urban legend. But, to my amazement, it turns out this is true. It is hard to believe anyone, even the greediest, could be this stupid. But there you are.
I urge you to contact your Representative and Senators, and to sign the petition. This DOE plan is stupidity at an almost surreal level.
“The Department of Energy wants to mix radioactive metal from nuclear weapons factories with clean recycled metal and let it enter into general commerce–where it could be used for any purpose.
It's a foot in the door for revival of a vast–and discredited–radioactive waste deregulation plan defeated in 1992.en and children.
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.
Last Monday, the Community of Latin American and Caribbean Countries (CELAC) met for its second summit in Santiago, Chile, one year after its founding meeting in Caracas, Venezuela in 2011. The Summit is the culmination of roughly a decade of efforts to create a viable mechanism for greater integration in the Americas, and particularly a year of planning by a “troika” of representatives from, believe it or not, Chile, Venezuela and Cuba. They were able to pull it off successfully, despite their obvious differences, and all 33 presidents or heads of state from the region attended, with the exception of Hugo Chavez from Venezuela, who sent a letter with his Vice-President Nicolás Maduro.
CELAC explicitly excludes the US and Canada, a historic first for a hemispheric organization with huge symbolic importance, because it answers a long-standing dream for unity of the subcontinent that harks back to Simón Bolívar and the struggles for independence from the European colonial powers. Beyond the symbolism, however, it is strategically crucial: It means that there is now a subcontinent bloc of developing nations that can speak with one voice,, and also serve as a counterweight to US political and economic hegemony.
It was an embarrassing day to be an American last Friday. The Founding Fathers are turning over in their graves, once again. I knew it was coming, but it was worse than I expected.
AIPAC turned the screws on their assets in the U.S. Senate to make an example of Hagel, and the race was on to see who could be more subservient. As usual, John McCain and Lindsey Graham, the Senators for Israel, led the pack.
To watch the Senate chew up one of their own, solely on instruction of their non-existant Jewish Lobby masters was a humiliating day for America. The Senate, of course, does not look at it that way because they have been doing it for a long time.
This is a master work, and Retired Reader (retired NSA pioneer Richard Wright, who contributes to Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog) beat me to it. He is a reviewer worthy of being followed.
The author is as erudite as Alfred Rolington, and the book is completely different, one reason I recommend both books. The first, by Rolington, is a primer, and recommended for students. This book is for professionals, and could well be a primary text for properly managed mid-career courses where officers should be forced to reflect deeply on why their profession exists and how to better engage in that profession.
I am loading a few graphics from my briefing this past week to the Inter-American Defense Board (IADB) in Washington, D.C. as they illustrate some of the points I am going to make about where this book falls short. No critical comment lessens the value of the work as a whole. If I had to pick a dozen people to guide me in managing a new global intelligence agency tomorrow, the author of this book would be one of the first to be called.
The primary short-fall in this book is the author's no doubt judicious but still mis-leading avoidance of any criticism of his policy and political consumers. The UK's blind support of US lies leading to Iraq was not helpful. Nor is the reality that secret intelligence is safely ignored, and that intelligence has nothing at all to do with how the total budget of the nation is applied. Paul Pillar makes the point very ably in Intelligence and U.S. Foreign Policy: Iraq, 9/11, and Misguided Reform. This book also does not address the fact that the City of London and the LIBOR scandal and the elite pedophile rings that in turn bless many other crimes against humanity, are outside the mandate of the secret world. I believe the 21st century is going to be about the juxtaposition of open source intelligence broadly shared, and absolutely ruthless ultra-secret counterintelligence that flushes the wicked from our own house.
The second shortfall of this book is its assumption, common among intelligence professionals, that intelligence is a government prerogative and comprised mainly of secrecy for policy. Related, not worthy of separation, is the book's disingeneous portrayal of terrorism as “the” threat against which “resilience” must be nurtured, while more and more surveillance must be undertaken. Terrorism is a tactic, not a threat, and what the US and UK do to others in the way of proliferation, trade in women and especially children, environmental degradation, disease including vaccines that contain hidden sterilization measures, and on and on and on, is vastly more threatening to humanity than a few pissed off Islamics, many of them, such as the retarded teen-ager in California, false-flag terrorists created to keep the insecurity of the public alive. I am quite sure the author is fully conscious of what the real threats are — starting with poverty among the people and corruption among the peers — and the book is not to be dismissed for this, but because it is such an important work, I feel it essential to draw this line in the sand. Until intelligence can provide decision support for ALL, and until counter-intelligence can keep the mandarins HONEST, it will be a below the stairs housekeeping function, not a principal at the high table.
This is a deep book, full of nuances (e.g. degrees of truth), and one of the most important values of this book is its defense of Human Intelligence (HUMINT), or in the author's terms, “single-source reporting.” He is correct. The US and UK have gone nuts on technical collection, mostly because it is a fantastic way to waste huge quantities of money that generate 5% kick-backs for Congress in the USA. Never mind that this collected information is not processed, not made sense of. Never mind that it is not done in all 183 languages that matter, 33 of them critical, including twelve dialects of Arabic. I share the author's appreciation for HUMINT done right, and only lament that the US is incapable of getting it right. (Side Note: Churchill drew a laugh when he told Pariament “The Americans always do the right thing, they just try everything else first.” What Churchill missed is that the Americans are absolute geniuses at thinking up new things to do wrong.] The US intelligence “system” is a $75 billion a year money pit that produces, according to General Tony Zinni, USMC (Ret), “at best” 4% of what a major consumers needs, to which I would add “and nothing at all for everyone else.”
There is a strong measure of ethical purity running through the book, of civic duty, and I cannot help but feel that the author has another great 20 years ahead of him, this time doing what he does best in a larger global context, using predominantly open sources, and being utterly committed to the PUBLIC service rather than the pro forma service to the mandarins.
He ends with an all too brief call for harnessing all the talent that is truncated (he is speaking of a joint intelligence college, not an eight tribes network (my eight tribes, illustrated in the image under the book cover above, include academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit) and for learning from history. He also has a chapter on intelligence design that I could easily discuss for a week, for now let me just suggest my current papers found by searching for the phrase 21st Century Public Intelligence 3.1.
I've decided to keep this book. After I donated my entire library to George Mason University during my brief tenure with the United Nations, I have traveled light and donate all books to the local library after reading and reviewing. This one I must keep. Put as directly as possible, I believe the author to be something of a genius at the professional of intelligence, but he has been playing with only a portion of the deck, the secret government half. I'd like to think more about how to apply that genius to the whole deck.
Those interested in most of my other reviews of books on intelligence can find them by searching for the phrase Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Intelligence (Most) and also at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, use the middle column to browse my latest reviews not in this list, look for the categories (and number of review):
I have not done justice to this book, but over time may circle back and augment this review. Certainly I hope to meet the author one day and talk about what a multinational station in each region should look like, and how one might create a Centre for Public Intelligence in each district. There is so much yet to be done.
