I caught the first half of this movie on cable, and rented the DVD to see how it ended. I was enchanted, not just by the three actors (Judd whose latest is De-Lovely; Garcia from the Godfather etc; and Juckson from Pulp Fiction, The Negotiator et al), but by the over-all concept and execution.
Ignore the detractors–this is a superb story ably acted and I loved it. We in the clandestine service are quite proud of having the very highest rate of alcoholism, adultery, divorce, and suicide (I have 18 professional suicides in my professional history). I don't carry a badge, I do carry a Walther PPK Limited Edition (with a permit).
All three of these actors are gifted, but seeing Judd in this film, in contrast to her performance and complete make-over in De-Lovely, persuades me that she is one of the greatest female actors of our time and will be offering us many more superb acts with world class male actors for years to come.
This is a lovely first-rate film, and if you have lived with death and dishonor and fear including panic from time to time, this is a homecoming of sorts. Those that do not like it do not understand reality. However, to end on a humble note, spying is 90% boredom, including hours spent in hotel rooms waiting for agents to show up, and the most important skill in spying is typing–four hours for every hour of agent meeting–more if you have to transcribe the required recording of a meeting with a terrorist.
I was offered a free rental today, and casting around for something I had never seen before, I grabbed this one thinking it would be about how Nixon was outed from office, not actually assassinated. I put it in on background as I struggled with creating the index to a 550 page new book, and within 15 minutes I stopped and the movie had my undivided attention.
Sean Penn is perfect, deep, emotional, and inspires commitment to the movie and to his plight as a failure who is honest. As I am a student of how “honest” governments are in fact a form of legalized organized crime, I may have appreciated this movie more than most, but I do not hesitate to recommend it to anyone. What price integrity?
More ImportantThan Ever as Boundaries Blur, February 2, 2008
Peter F. Drucker
I realized a few years ago that government as we know it is a complete failure. The US Government as we know it has failed to provide for domestic or global security, has failed to spend our money wisely, and it is broken across all three branches. At the same time, the political parties, corporations, bankers and many asset managers, have also failed, along with the media, religion, and labor unions. I decided two years ago to create the Earth Intelligence Network along with 23 other co-founders, and yesterday the IRS told me they planned to approve our 501c3 letter, so I pulled this down to refresh myself, and was surprised to find that I had read it but not reviewed it.
The book was first published in 1990 and includes interviews with nine contributors as well as original material from Peter Drucker.
Two sentences stand out for me:
1) The non-profit delivers a changed human being.
2) The non-profit leader is responsible for translating glorious mission statements into executable, measureable, visible specifics.
After a year's work with many others, and aided immensely by the recent identification of the ten high-level threats to humanity in priority order, courtesy of LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft, USAF (Ret) and other members of the United Nations High-Level Threat Panel we not only recognized that the lines are blurring as segments of government that are honest, segments of private sector marketplaces that are moral, segments of civil society that are committed to responsible stewardship of their local communities and areas and non-plenishable natural resources; but we began to see the non-profit as central to weaving a shared understanding of the threats, the policies and budgets that can eradicate the threats, and the knowledge that needs to be transferred to Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo, if they are to avoid our mistakes.
This book, in short, is my crutch, my reinforcement, my inspiration, and my proof positive that we can translate our mission into specifics, and do what we have set out to do.
Early on Peter Drucker emphasizes that while the non-profit is the largest employer in America, the share of money being donated to non-profits has remained relatively steady. I suspect that has changed since this was written in 1990, but his second key point in this context is that it is not enough to find donors, one much recruit contributors who wish to be active “in community” and for acommon purpose.
I confess to not being a people person, but I will also be an unpaid member of the board, so I would emphasize that in looking for our first non-profit manager, we are going to look for someone with three skills this books helps describe:
1) Ability to create logical executable specifics
2) Ability to interact effectively with high-end planned givers (humans)
3) Ability to recruit and keep happy passionate people who love life and want to pursue life-affirming, world-changing objectives.
The middle core of the book has a lot of underlining. Here are some of the highlights.
+ Strategies are the bulldozers.
+ Strategies are action-focused with measureable results.
+ Set the goals twice as high as a “normal” or business as usual organization might aspire to.
+ Tailor the message to each unique segment (e.g. one message for foundations seeking to harmonize high-end spending programs; another for individual donors seeking to find the best possible way to contribute $100 to one needy person anywhere (hint: cell phone and paid annual subscription–one per village will change the world).
+ Training matters, and not just of staff; also of donors, volunteers, everyone being helped or in any way engaged in the overall mission. [In my terms, if someone cannot recide the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers form memory, or know where to find the 52 transpartisan answers to 52 tough questions, then we have failed to train them or educate them.]
+ Planning is not just about objective results, but about a vast social network of relationships that need to be nurtured for the long-term.
+ Dissent is priceless, discourtesy should never be tolerated.
+ Page 115: “The most important *do* (italicized in original) is to build the organization around information and communication instead of around hierarchy.” See the image above, something I created in the 1990's. All the candidates running for President today are top down command and control freaks, with one possible exception. Epoch B leaders create a bottom up constant churn of information, and for me, this one sentence validated, reinforced, and inspired.
+ Educate up the chain and sideways, not just downwards.
+ Ensure every person is immersed the real-world (e.g. poverty at its worse in the slums of Rio de Janeiro or Caracas) so that they are refreshed as to the reality and the meaning of their mission the rest of the year.
I was very surprised to find a chapter on “How to Make the Schools Accountable,” pages 131-142, an interview with Albert Shanker, at the time president of the American Federation of Teachers AFL-CIO, but it fits perfectly. Three points:
1) CEOs and Labor Leaders need to hold schools accountable.
2) Schools that pursue long-term deep learning find that short-term financial and other objectives fall into place.
3) Hold everyone accountable for giving their all, and end complacency, a sense of tenure, a lack of passion for what should be a life-affirming world-changing endeavor (those words are from other books, see list below).
The index is excellent, and the last page of the book educated me on the continuing value and offerings of The Drucker Foundation.
My take-away from this book is that any strategy that focuses on sharing information with as many parties as possible, and finding ways to optimize sense-making of the collective, and harmonization of many different programs and budgets across multinational, multiagency, multidisciplinary, multidomain boundaries, will in the end produce results that no amount of government mandate, corporate bribery, foundation give-away, or wailing calls of doom, could possibly achieve.
Peter Drucker's legacy adds a new line to an old saying; the last line below:
The men who manage men manage the men who manage things.
The men who manage money manage all.
The men who manage information not only manage the men who manage money, they create new open money, information capital that enhances, influences, and exploits all else.
Great book. The audio series is ideal for those driving back and forth from bedroom communities into big cities, and vice versa.
I do not list books I have written, edited, or published, but urge the reader to consider some of them as well. In early March we will be publishing COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace, that is free online now and forever more, and then in May, free online from April, PEACE INTELLIGENCE: Assuring a Good Life for All. And finally, in July, free online in June, COMMERCIAL INTELLIGENCE: From Moral Green to Golden Peace.
I am certain that public intelligence and bottom-up self-governances are going to put an end to fraud, waste, abuse, corruption and secret earmarks, and that the non-profit, and those who share rather than hoard informationl, will in fact save the world and profit handsomely from doing so, on multiple levels, not least of which is giving seven generations of their descendants a sustainable Earth where everyone is a billionaire (Medard Gabel's vision).
Astonishing Powerful, Easy to Read, MUST Be Reprinted
February 2, 2008
Richard J Spady
This book was recommended to me by Joseph McCormick, former Army Ranger, world-class philosopher, and one of the founders of Reuniting America, 110 million strong and totally transpartisan in nature. We both agree with Peter Peterson's views in Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It. None of the political candidates today, with one possible exception, understand Epoch B Swarm Leadership (I cannot load images for out of print books, please see the four non-fiction images at this link: Managing the Nonprofit Organization), and even the exception keeps talking about one America, Democrats and Republicans together. This otherwise erudite man fails to understand that over half of the two parties' members no longer identify with the extremist spoils system; that Independents are fully unified as a third party; and that Libertarians, Greens, and Reforms are now a fourth slice of America that must be respected. This book is the ONE BOOK that I would recommend to anyone who wants to be a transpartisan leader and co-steward of America the Beautiful.
If you are completely unfamiliar with the broad literature on co-intelligence, wisdom councils, citizen councils, large-scale human collaboration, this one book is a superb overview and reflects over two decades of pioneering by the authors.
On the other hand, if you are fully or even partially familiar with the books I list below, this book is a marvelous tightly integrated yet smoothly presented stand-alone which won my immediate respect because of the thoroughness of the authors in respecting and citing other pioneers.
Since it is out of print, but I was able to get a perfect-condition signed copy from 6 Finches (5 stars, great deal), I want to point out that the hard-copy cover that does not appear on this Amazon page is world-class, and I believe this book should be reprinted in paperback and also offered free online.
The Foreword by Rev Dr William Ellington and William Cane of the Forum Foundation is alone worth the price of the book. It is a spectacular erudite and yet down to earth overview, and alone, captures the entire book.
This is a solution oriented book, one that represents the view that the meaning of life is social–interpersonal–the collective pursuit of happiness. The book calls for massive social innovation, and implicitly, addresses precisely how we need to deal with the fact that all three branches of the government are broken, the two political parties are craven and corrupt, and most of our other institutions, including the so-called forth estate of the media, are equally decrepit. To take just one example from another book, The New York Times wrote 70 editorials on Iraq, and never once mentioned international law or morality.
The book offers nine pages of quotes from others, and the first part of the book stresses–without any excessive verbiage–that the spiritual core of science was lost; that “science was not only not inevitably progressive but not even inevitably benign. Citing Eltron Mayo, material progress has retarded human collaboration. Further on: slogans, distorted news, and propaganda all undermine diversity of views and potential of human collaboration.
The book states clearly that the current top-down elitist system of government and corporate management is broken. Further on in the book they point out that authoritarian “rolism” denies and deprives the individual of the right to be heard; the right to participate in decisions about their life and the life of their community.
Throughout the book the authors stress that the ultimate source of power is the people themselves; that civic values and the ability to collaborate to discover and communicate and effect common good, is the heart of civilization.
They introduce the concept of Many-to-Many (MTM) communications, and the last half of the book is full of examples including protocols and forms that can be used for large scale deliberative democracy where human opinions are presented by machine and polarization-consensus visualized and returned to the human participants as feedback and inspiration.
This book is at root about enabling, leveraging, and effecting large-scale collaboration that is inherently moral and legitimate.
Below are concise snapshots of each of the main sections of the book.
Basic Attitude: respect, listen, accept or reject, modify.
Learning: damns our rote one-way (didactic) learning, calls for activating and challenging all children from the earliest age with social network and information sharing skills.
Leadership: decisions must be made at the lowest level at which BOTH sufficiency of information and sufficiency of resources can be combined. Centralization of leadership is BAD, dictators (we have 44 of them, 42 best pals of both Clinton-Gore and Bush-Cheney) will not prevail.
Authority: derived from the consent of the governed. Moral authority is the only authority impervious to legal authority that exceeds its mandate as Bush-Cheney and the doormat Congress have done these past eight years. Democracy in the ideal is inspired society in pursuit of happiness for ALL.
Politics: best if completely open, interactive, maximizing understanding, collaboration, and engagement across all boundaries at all levels. I agree, and this is one reason we need Electoral Reform legislation that puts both the Democratic and Republican party machines OUT OF BUSINESS.
Prophecy: Golden Rule, honesty, collaboration instead of pyramidal top-down mandate. Reuniting America uses the word “transpartisanship.”
Administrative (I prefer Stewardship): Diagnose, theorize, accomplish, and review.
Helping Professions: characterized by direct human interaction and the need to recognize and react instantly, build trust, communicate vision.
Zeitgeist: Spirit-of-the-Time, Group must find its soul and its collective understanding. Constant feedback, spirit of listening, vital. Must be impersonal in the good sense, symbolic dialog is rooted in moral authority. We must strive for common opinions, reflections, and interests. I am reminded of Native American councils focusing on total consensus (don't stop until achieved), seventh generation thinking, and the Great Law of Peace adopted by the Five Nations. The right to be heard, to participate in decisions affecting one, one's family, one's community. The ultimate challenge: how to activate and channel human responsibility.
Natural Factors: diagnosis improved, learning improved, peace prospects improved, power of values.
Civilization Theories: unified social field, social quantum mechanics, open societies herald a strategy for peace. Quote Wheatley, “Imagine ourselves as beacons towers of information.” Life is One; One from Many (Dee Hock's book title); Unity in Community.
MTM: communications up and down left and right, forward and back. This reminds me of Paul Ray's brilliant world on “The New Political Compass,” from which I derived a one-page summary of what some of us are now calling “the new progressives” (not to be confused with MoveOn.org's rather myopic assumption that the Democratic Party is the only source of progressive ideas. I certainly disagree, indeed my ideal ticket would be Huckabee-Obama trading places every four years for sixteen years; with Bill Bradley and Susan Collins and a transpartisan sunshine cabinet funded by Michael Bloomberg with Ralph Nader as Chief of Staff, all leading a national conversation based on an online balanced budget open to discussion by all.
Tools: the last part of the book is equally impressive, and the authors present Fast Forum for rapid large scale collaboration and deliberation; importance of mainstreaming reality; social resolution power, Symbolic Dialog as code for human opinions, machine visualization, feedback, and reentry into dialog. I note their phrase, knowledge is in books, wisdom is in minds. The end with hard but civil comments about a social conspiracy and bureaucratic inertia.
Applications: They outline, including illustrative documents and survey forms, how their ideas could be applied at the state, local, and social levels, and especially in education, where they recommend teaching social knowledge and networking from day one; gaming the curriculum with the students' active participation, exploring clean-sheet “how it might work,” and also exploring new forms of moral discussion in which “right or wrong” are set aside to allow for a full embrace of diversity.
There are a number of relevant appendices, the first of which discusses how government and corporate power today are neither responsive nor legitimate. There are conflicts of interest, and only a massive social innovation powered by citizens will break through into new modes of self-governance.
At the end I am introduced to the Dodd Institute for Social Innovation, and I am impressed.
This is a sensational book, and it should be reprinted or at least offered free online. Here are other books that I have found valuable. See also the four images from Earth Intelligence Network that I offer to help illustrate how the 24 co-founders of EIN have absorbed and now give back the kind of wisdom that this book represents. See also:
At Earth Intelligence Network, there are 52 tough questions with transpartisan answers; over 1000 book reviews sorted by threat, policy, or other aspects of achieving the goals that these two authors; and the first of three free books online, COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.
Manhunter is the Red Dragon, all three brilliant, February 1, 2008
Anthony Hopkins, Jodie Foster, Julianne Moore
Manhunter actually corresponds to the book featuring the Red Dragon.
This is one of the most interesting mind-thrillers I have ever enjoyed. The books, links below, are also recommended for those whose imaginations can create a richer tapestry than any DVD might offer.
Anthony Hopkins is the gold standard, but I must give full credit to the actors in Manhunter and Hannibal Rising, they are superb. While I missed Jody Foster, whose Silence of the Lambs performance was extraordinary, Julianne Moore is amazing, and fully her equal.
This set, both books and DVDs, is for the intellectual connosieur.
Letter (2)
Statement of Work for the Review of the January 1991 Death of Colonel James E. Sabow (2)
Info Memo Review of the 1991 Death of Marine Corps Colonel James E. Sabow (2)
DoD Appeal FY 2004 Defense Authorization Bill Against Section 568 (1)
Discussion Paper on the 1991 Death of Colonel James E. Sabow of 7/2/2003 (1)
Aaron, Darryl R. Chief FOIA Requester Service Center
Alternative Reading for Serious People, January 27, 2008
Madeleine Albright
Edit of 2 Feb 08: Added several images above to make this review more easily understandable in context of what Diplomacy should be and is not.
Based on the superb first review rating this book at two stars, I am going to save my time and money, but thought to add a list of ten books each of which is assuredly better than this one and more relevant to creating a prosperous planet at peace. Just reading my reviews of the ten books below will be helpful, whether you buy the Albright book or not.
By way of setting the stage, I respectfully point out that any Secretary of State who takes a back seat to the Pentagon and the spies, and who accepts a budget of $30B a year instead of $200B to wage peace, is a twit and of no consequence. We spent $950 billion this year waging war, and $60 billion on spies and secrecy. Anyone with sufficient stature to be asked to be Secretary of State (yes, I include Talbott) should also be deeply enough read and have a sufficiency of courage to make acceptance conditional on the President's promising to realign funds away from war and toward peace–anything less is craven servitude solely focused on prestige rather than substance.
There are two key points any future Secretary of State much make to the President:
1) For one third of what we spend on war, we could eradicate all ten high level threats to mankind and assure a good life for all with clean water, nourishing food, and free public education and health. See the image I have loaded. Medard Gabel, E. O. Wilson, and Lester Brown have made independent documented calculations, and they all bear this out. Right now State is a tribe of penniless messenger boys and girls with no substantive influence on what should be its most important product: peaceful commerce with all nations, and an end to our support for 42 of 44 dictators each brutalizing their rewspective populations and looking their commonwealth.
2) For what we spent to put up the spy satellite that is falling out of the sky (with a dangerous nuclear power pack that will scatter when it hits the ground), I could have provided free public intelligence for at least a year to every Congressional Committee, every Cabinet Secretary and all of their Assistant Secretaries, to the United Nations and Non-Governmental Organizations, and to the 250 Foundations that together spend $500 billion a year willy nilly without a Range of Gifts Table for eradicating the ten high level threats to Humanity.
Lester Brown, Plan 3.0
E.O. Wilson, The Future of Life
Medard Gabel, Seven Billion Billionaires (forthcoming, see the article on four billion billionaires, the pie chart image is his and used with permission. He is also the owner/inventor of the EarthGame.
See also, sorry I cannot link (we are allowed only ten links):
I do not link to books I have written, edited, or published, but want to mention five should anyone wish to read them free online at OSS.Net, or via Amazon:
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption (author)
Peacekeeping Intelligence: Emerging Concepts for the Future (edited)
The Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest (with Congressman Rob Simmons)
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace (forthcoming 1 March 2008, free online now at Earth Intelligence Network)
Peace Intelligence: Assuring a Good Life for All (edited, 1 May)
War & Peace: The Seventh Generation (my offering to the public–the Chinese took Dick Cheney's plane down over Singapore, read about this in my memo by searching for <Chinese Irregular Warfare Memorandum Steele>. If we do not begin waging peace immediately, and pursuing the strategy devised by the non-profit Earth Intelligence Network, this planet will be toast within 25 years. Albright is part of the problem, We the People are the only power that can force informed democracy and open government back to the forefront.
I am sick and tired of the two political parties treating our taxes as their personal piggy bank, and of the near moronic “experts” that know almost nothing about reality, and everything about sucking up to the people who empower them without a clue as to their shallowness. The only expert still standing that I respect is LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft. He may be the last honest adult left in Washington, D.C.
Old Spy Loves This Movie, February 4, 2008
