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Review: Resilience Why Things Bounce Back

4 Star, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research
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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.

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Patrick Meier: Crowd-Sourcing, Crisis Mapping, & Sustainable Resilience

Geospatial, Knowledge, P2P / Panarchy
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Patrick Meier

Could Social Media Have Prevented the Largest Mass Poisoning of a Population in History?

I just finished reading a phenomenal book. Resilience: Why Things Bounce Back, was co-authored by my good friend Andrew Zolli of PopTech fame and his won-derful colleague Ann Marie Healey. I could easily write several dozen blog posts on this brilliant book. Consider this the first of possibly many more posts to follow. Some will summarize and highlight insights that really resonated with me while others like the one below will use the book as a spring board to explore related questions and themes.  Read full post.

Crisis Mapping for Disaster Preparedness, Mitigation and Resilience

Crisis mapping for disaster preparedness is nothing new. In 2004, my colleague Suha Ulgen spearheaded an innovative project in Istanbul that combined public participation and mobile geospatial technologies for the purposes of disaster mitigation. Suha subsequently published an excellent overview of the project entitled ”Public Participation Geographic Information Sharing Systems for Co-mmunity Based Urban Disaster Mitigation,” available in this edited book on Geo-Information for Disaster Management. I have referred to this project in count-less conversations since 2007  so it is high time I blog about it as well.  Read full post.

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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)
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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

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Review: Platform: Get Noticed in a Noisy World

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

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

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

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