Jan Herring is President of Herring & Associates LLC, a management consultancy, specializing in intelligence matters, and a fouinding principal at the Academy of Competitive Intelligence, the gold standard for commercial intelligence training at all levels, entry, mid-career, and capstone.
He is unique in the world of commercial intelligence for having been the first modern pioneer and champion in the U.S. Intelligence Community for Open Source Intelligence (OSINT). As the very first person ever to hold the office of National Intelligence Officer for Science & Technology (NIO S&T), he attempted in the early 1980's to repair the severe deficiency in access to open sources in all languages. His work laid the foundation for work by others that will eventually result in a national Open Source Agency fully independent of but support of the secret world.
Beyond 5 Stars–Inspirational, Valuable, Practical, September 27, 2008
Mike Oehler
This book is phenomenally wise, useful, easy to read, and plain inspiring. I picked it up this morning intending to get back to it tonight and ended up not putting it down at all.
I have bought and read a number of underground building books as well as log cabin books, and would sort them into three categories:
A Expensive log homes for the really rich
B Moderate earth-covered (not quite underground) homes for the middle
C This book, for those who truly want to integrate innovation and low cost with deep Earth comfort and resilience and all the good stuff that goes with it.
This book, in short, is in a class of its own. Most will notice that it was first offered in 1978. As the USA goes through a major financial crisis that proves nothing has changed–Wall Street and the two “parties” it has bought down to their lost souls are still here, still looting the commonwealth–this book proves that it is timeless.
There is indeed a great deal of land across this great country where one can still afford to “dig in,” and this could not be a better time to be thinking about renting what you have now in the close in fragile areas, and setting up alternative housing with adjacent land for a basic Life Garden.
As I went through each chapter I found the list of materials, the prices, the diagrams, and the text all coherent, concise, and totally “on target.” Black and white photographs throughout, and a handful of color photographs in the middle, round the book out.
The book ends by discreetly recommending a tape series on design as the key element for success, and one that professional architects generally overlook (as we are all learning, the “experts” in finance and other areas are really “credentialed” but NOT experts).
I LIKE THIS BOOK. As an afterthought, it is recommended by just about every major alternative living, green energy, and sanity outpost (Vermont, Oregon, Washington State) reviewer. This book is a “good deal” and inspiring to boot.
Four on one side as useful propaganda, three in larger context, September 27, 2008
Ronen Bergman Ph.D.
I was torn between three stars (the book is terribly flawed in the larger scheme of things) and four stars for the very interesting and well-presented details that while they are strictly from an Israeli perspective and the book is almost certainly an Israeli propaganda operation against the US public in general and US Congress and generals more specificially, are in and of themselves correct.
The author focuses exclusively on painting the Iranians in the worst possible light, while ignoring the Saudi Arabian and Egyptian misdeeds, and never mentioning the 42 of the 44 dictators that the US Government regards as its best pals because they pretend to support the Global War on Terror (GWOT) which is the ninth high level threat to mankind.
I settled for three because this book is completely out of context, grossly exaggerates the Iranian threat, and fails to demonstrate any semblance of the relative costs and benefits of waging peace. Just prior to sitting down with this book for a few hours I read a much shorter monograph (free online), “U.S. Counterterrorism in Sub-Saharan Africa: Understanding Costs, Cultures, and Conflicts” by Donovan C. Chau. His top-level premises are instructive, and condemn the book on Iran to three stars: Dr. Chau suggests that our three priorities for defeating sub-saharan terrorism must be:
1. Seizing and holding the moral high ground
2. Winning the stuggle for perceived legitimacy
3. Pursuing restrained counterterrorism responses
I will not belabor the point further–it is flat out NUTS for the USA to be spending $60 billion a year on the 4% it can steal with largely worthless technology and largely incompetent human spies; and $600-900 billion a year on a heavy metal military that is next to useless in 90% of the situations we face into the future.
Israel, the US neocons that were party to the 935 lies that led America to war in Iraq, now an occupation, and both of the political parties in the USA that share the spoils while looting the US taxpayers, have become cancers on humanity. In no way does this condone terrorism or excuse the terrible depravity and dereliction of the Arab regimes, but in the larger context, I see very clearly that the US and Israel are pursuing their own terrorist tactics “in our name,” while completely abandoning the much more sensible and much more likely to succeed grand strategy (neither country has a strategy, only campaigns of tactics) of striving for a prosperous world at peace.
Nancy Glock-Grueneich, President of HIGHER EDge (www.higheredge.org), has her doctorate from Harvard Graduate School of Education, taught public policy and related subjects for 15 years, and oversaw program and faculty development for the California Community Colleges for 13 years. She Co-chairs the Editorial Board of the International Journal for Public Participation.
Professor Robert Heibel, a veteran of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, is unique for having established both an undergraduate and a graduate program in intelligence and research analysis. His pioneering efforts have provided varied intelligence communities with very high-quality individuals, properly trained, at a time when their respective countries need them badly. His development of training materials that did not exist, of a training program that did not exist, of a philosophy of education in the national service that did not exist anywhere else at the time, is worthy of the highest regard.
