Public Intelligence Blog – Page 3962 – The truth at any cost lowers all other costs — curated by former US spy Robert David Steele.

2007/12/132010/09/14

Review: Day of Reckoning–How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Culture, Research, Democracy, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Politics, Priorities

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One of A Handful of “Must Reads” for Christmas

December 13, 2007

Patrick Buchanan

Amazon ate my earlier review, probably because they did not like all the links I included to make the point that while Patrick Buchanan is dead on target as an individual minds, there is a *huge* convergence of public opinion from left to right that boils down to this: government is broken, from war criminals in the White House to doormats in Congress abdicating their Article 1 responsibility to balance the power of the Executive.

This book is a perfect complement to that by Lou Dobbs. This may well be one of the most important books at the dawn of the 21st Century, along with Independents Day: Awakening the American Spirit‘ The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism, and A Power Governments Cannot Suppress.

I regret the loss of my detailed review, here are just a few of the notes from the flyleaf:

+ Insufficient focus on Cheney, but does correctly evaluate Wolfowitz as a madman.

+ Tars Bush's ideology as a “false God”as “modernity's Golden Calf.”

+ Respect Gore Vidal in citing “perpectual war for perpetual peace.”

+ Opens book with excellent discussion of the cost of lost wars and the mismantling of artificial nations (there are 177 failed states today,up from 148 in 2006 and 75 is 2005.

+ This may be the most credible and thoughtful author on the subject of treason in modern times. He explicitly accuses corporate chiefs who favor globalization and “transnationalism” with being traitors to the Republic.

+ He states that Islamic militarism is not a threat to America. I agree.

+ Pages 153-154 provide a brilliant articulation of seven reasons why China is not a threat to the US.

+ I note: “This is the epitaph for the village idiot.”

A few other books supporting his thesis that 2008 is a tipping point year:
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
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
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq
9/11 Synthetic Terror: Made in USA, Fourth Edition

AA Mind the Gap — Vote and/or Comment on Review

2007/12/132010/02/13

Review: The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism

6 Star Top 10%, Capitalism (Good & Bad)

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Nobel Prize Material–Final Review

December 13, 2007

John Bogle

This book is a work of genius and integrity, with the potential to catalyze Wall Street into fulfilling the promise of moral capitalism and community ownership.

Here are some highlights from my flyleaf notes:

+ America is no longer an ownership society–financial intermediaries “own” everyting and the individual owners are passive

+ We can find the wisdom and will to restore moral capitalism

+ Earnings have been manipulated and misrepresented.

+ Executive compensation plus lax accounting and the fiction of quarterly earnings versus actual cash flow have hollowed industry out.

+ Profound conflict of interest exist across all fronts

+ Fund managers have siphoned off one fifth of the gross value of the funds.

+ Our business world chose the wrong bottom line, and ignored the importance of sustaining human, social, and community capital

+ Stock options aqre out of control.

Seven specific Conference Board suggestions:

1) Corporate citizenship

2) Separate ownership from management

3) Fix the stock option mess

4) Pay on performance not peers

5) Return to long-term focus

6) Let sunlight shine on accounting

7) New mindset for Board (aggresive stewardship)

Page 103: “Investment America went wrong, then, because in the contagious enthusiasm of the day, financial engineering and manufactured earnings became the coin of the valuation realm, accepted by corporate managers and investment managers alike. What is more, the emphasis on short-term price came to overwhelm the reality of long-term value, as investors failed to honor the distinction between investment and speculation drawn by John Maynard Keynes six decades earlier.”

In my view, this book, and three others, should comprise the Christmas reading list for all adults:
Independents Day: Awakening the American Spirit
Day of Reckoning: How Hubris, Ideology, and Greed Are Tearing America Apart
A Power Governments Cannot Suppress

I am personally committed to the non-violent legal ethical overthrow of the existing pathologically inept federal government and its politcal leaders in both Congress and the Executive who lack morality, intelligence, integrity, or conscience. Dick Cheney, not George Bush (a village idiot) is their poster child. I find it truly gratifying that a man of such financial stature as John Bogle now articulates and inspires the remorse that Wall Street must feel for running the Earth into the ground.

Below are other books I recommend as a reading list toward November, five about the bad, five about the promise:

The Bad (see my reviews):
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin

The Good (see my reviews):
The Politics of Fortune: A New Agenda For Business Leaders
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits (Wharton School Publishing Paperbacks)
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

God Bless America. We can unite and fix this. Check out Reuniting America (Unity 08 is a fraud, the last gasp of the spoils system).

2007/12/062011/06/20

Who’s Who in Peace Intelligence: David J. H. Bell

Alpha A-D, Peace Intelligence

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David J.H. Bell served as a research assistant to Walter Dorn at the University of Toronto in 1994-95. He graduated from Trinity College (University of Toronto) in 1995 with an honours bachelor's degree in Political Science and Ethics. Subsequently, he has held various positions in the public service of Canada.

Intelligence and Peacekeeping: The UN Operation in the Congo, 1960-1964

2007/12/052009/08/06

Reference: Congressional Research Service Report Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) Issues for Congress

Congressional Research Service

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Below is the 2007 report on Open Source Intellience (OSINT). It was a hugely mediocre effort through no fault of the junior author, Al Cumming, who is now the senior author for intelligence at the Congressional Research Service (CRS). A former Staff Director of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI), Mr. Cumming is a bit more inquisitive, integrative, and evaluative, all necessary in helping Congress understand emerging capabilities that are still resisted by the mandarins of secrecy while not well understood by the intellience consumers who should be doing their own OSINT but do not.

Click on the Frog to read a vitrolic angry critique by OSS CEO Robert Steele, possibly the last angry document closing out 20 years of blind opposition from the secret world. This battle is OVER. The good people of America have won. Public intelligence in the public interest is here to stay, and we anticipate a growing demand to cut the secret intelligence budget in half so as to properly fund OSINT, education, and research essential to restoring the competitiveness of the USA.

2007/12/012010/01/30

Review: INFORMATION WARFARE–Chaos on the Electronic Superhighway

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology

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5 Stars Still a Best in Class Endeavor

December 1, 2007

Winn Schwartau

I continue to believe this is one of the best in class original references. Winn, Peter Black (RIP) and I were among the first to warn of electronic Pearl Harbors, with Winn being the most knowledeable and the only one invited to brief Congress, where it went in one ear and out the others.

Winn Schwartau was one of the first, along with Peter Black (RIP), to warn Congress and the business world that digital systems would be extremely vulnerable. No one listened.

This book is still in my library. It is the non-fiction “first book” in this area.

For the fictional version that will stun with its surprise ending:
Terminal Compromise

For the best movie showing how easy it is to bring a society down:
Live Free or Die Hard (Full Screen Edition)

Other Hacker Books:
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit , Twentieth Anniversary Edition
Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution
The Hacker Crackdown: Law And Disorder On The Electronic Frontier
The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security

Other Hacker DVD:
Hackers
Hackers – Wizards of the Electronic Age

2007/11/302013/12/21

Review: My American Journey

5 Star, Biography & Memoirs

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Colin Powell

5.0 out of 5 stars Valued Early Bird over Spies and Secrecy, November 30, 2007

I read biographies of key officials as a means of trying to understand how they make decisions, and on what basis of fact or fancy they make decisions.

Colin Powell is a great man, and I hope he returns as Secretary of State under a transpartisan team. He was destroyed by Dick Cheney and his own confusion of loyalty versus integrity.

Here is the sentence, on page 293, that made my day:

when he was Military Assistant to then Sectary of Defense Casper Weinberger, he preferred the Early Bird with its compendium of newspaper stories to the “cream of overnight intelligence” which was delivered to the Secretary of Defense by a Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) courier each morning.

2007/11/292010/09/03

Handbook: United Nations (UN) Civil-Military Coordination Officer Handbook

HUMINT, Military, Military, Non-Governmental, Peace Intelligence, Stabilization, UN/NGO

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