Tag: Baker

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Review: Collapsing Consciously – Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Carolyn Baker

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Best Book to Both Catalyze and Deepen Your Awakening, March 24, 2014

This is a 6 star book (my top 10% across the 98 categories in which I read), and I consider it a book to be stunningly effective. At the age of 61 with no pensions on top of a rich life, I have found myself in unemployment over several years, and as this book so powerfully suggests, this may have been the best possible state for me at this point in time.  I specifically recommend the book as a gift for any unemployed person, but I also consider it essential reading for any entering class of college students.

The author is extremely well-read in this domain, and the book is priceless for the combination of her insights and the manner in which she weaves many other selections into the work.

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Review: Family of Secrets – The Bush Dynasty, America’s Invisible Government, and the Hidden History of the Last Fifty Years

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Economics, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial)
Amazon Page

Russ Baker

5.0 out of 5 stars Tough reading, desperately needs charts and graphs and a proper web site,August 4, 2011

I sat down to write a review and realized that the top review is a very good summary, and has a number of comments that provide specific new information and also recommend two other books, so what I have decided to do, as a direct complement to the top review by Richard Cumming, is provide links to the other books mentioned in the comments, and then add some of my own. I strongly recommend all the comments on the review be read.

The book desperately needs social networking graphics and its own web site. Although the author, who sent me the book, has a web site by the book's title, it is focused on video clips and is not an extension of the book. Public intelligence is now at a point where all that needs to be known is large known, but it cannot be aggregated and made sense of for lack of a public intelligence ability to do data mining and data visualization in a very structured continuous manner.

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Review: Mapping Sustainability–Knowledge e-Networking and the Value Chain

3 Star, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Geography & Mapping, Intelligence (Public), Survival & Sustainment
Amazon Page

3.0 out of 5 stars 5 for Potential Value, ZERO for Greed Pricing

August 21, 2010

Nazli Choucri (Author, Editor), Dinsha Mistree (Editor), Farnaz Haghseta (Editor), Toufic Mezher (Editor), Wallace R. Baker (Editor), Carlos I. Ortiz (Editor)

I was about to buy this book when I noticed the price–$189. This is, once again, a situation where the authors have to think clearly when arranging for publication. News flash: you can still publish and be listed on Amazon, get the publication credit, and NOT be a prisoner to a greedy publisher out of touch with the information society. It is not enough to be published–one must be published in a manner that makes the knowledge accessible to all others, not “locked down” by publisher over-pricing.

Springer is offering it for $139, and Barnes & Noble is offering it for $103.

An online version is offered but Springer site is not at all friendly and there is no obvious price-checkout option for guests.

This book should be selling for no more than $49.00. I am adding it to my Amazon list of outrageously priced books antithetical to the needs of society.

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Journal: Obama To Name Retired General To Top Spy Post

04 Education, 10 Security, Corruption, Government, Methods & Process, Military, Misinformation & Propaganda, Money, Banks & Concentrated Wealth, Policy, Politics of Science & Science of Politics, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Strategy, Technologies, True Cost
Marcus Aurelius Recommends

Probably not an inspired choice.

MA

New York Times June 5, 2010 Pg. 1

Obama To Name Retired General To Top Spy Post

By Peter Baker and Eric Schmitt

WASHINGTON — President Obama has picked Lt. Gen. James R. Clapper Jr. as director of national intelligence, tapping a retired officer with decades of experience to improve coordination of the nation’s sprawling spy apparatus amid increasing threats at home and escalating operations abroad.

Mr. Obama plans to announce his choice in the Rose Garden on Saturday, two weeks after forcing Adm. Dennis C. Blair out of the spymaster job, according to administration officials, who insisted on anonymity to disclose the decision before the formal ceremony.

FULL STORY ONLINE

 
 
 
 

Sheep in Wolf's Clothing

See also:

He has been nicknamed “the Godfather of HUMINT” — using human contacts for gathering intelligence in addition to high-tech methods like satellite imagery or intercepting communications.

Phi Beta Iota:  This alone–a farce on top of a farce–makes him unsuited to the position.   Obama and Gates know what they want: to continue Grand Theft Intel as the same time that Grand Theft Pentagon continues the looting of the public treasury.  If Congress can rediscover its integrity and invite former Senators such as David Boren (D-OK), Pat Roberts (R-KS), and Bob Graham (D-FL) as well as Senator Sam Nunn (D-GA), they might discover the universal condemnation of “business as usual,” which is precisely what this nominee represents.  Whatever claims are made about transformation or revolution will at best be pap and at worst a deliberate breach of trust in lying to the Congress.  Dick Cheney would be proud of what passes for leadership in the Department of Defense today.

Reference:  Human Intelligence (HUMINT): All Humans, All Minds, All the Time

Earlier Posts on DNI Self-Destruction:

Journal: With No Successor In Sight, Intelligence Czar Departs

AFIO Selected Headline Links with Phi Beta Iota Comments

Intelligence Headlines of Note

Reference: Strategic Asymmetry–with Comment

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Review DVD: The AMERICAN Ruling Class

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Congress (Failure, Reform), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Justice (Failure, Reform), Leadership, Military & Pentagon Power, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Reviews (DVD Only), Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

5.0 out of 5 stars Truly Remarkable–Provokes & Entertains

December 10, 2009
Robert Altman, James Baker, Bill Bradley, Harold Brown, Hodding Carter, William Coleman, Walter Cronkite, Barabara Ehrenreich, Vartan Gregorian, Robert Hackney, Doug Henwood, Mike Dedavoy, Joseph Nye, Samuel Peabody, John Perkins, Pete Seeger, Lawrence Summers, Arthur Sulzberger, William Taft,  Kurt Vonnegut, Howard Zinn

This DVD is superb and also subversive. I doubt that the “stars” in this movie, particularly James Baker, Bill Bradley, Howard Brown, and Larry Summers, really knew what they were getting into, since their words–and their bland denials–ring so false in this context.

I put the film in while trying to deal with Microsoft's latest “update” that cost me half the morning, and I recommend it very strongly as a Christmas present or for classrooms and book clubs.

My notes:

+ A Peabody, whose ancestors came on “the boat” and also founded Groton, laments that whereas all the leaders used to pass through Groton, now there is no real “source.” I am reminded of Lee Iacocca's Where Have All the Leaders Gone?.

+ Hedge fund visits basically boils all ownership in America down to four banks, and later in the film we learn that six multinational control almost all “content.”

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Journal: Illicit Money, Illegitimate Governments, and More…

03 Economy, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Transnational Crime, Commerce, Commercial Intelligence, Ethics, Law Enforcement

Subscription Access Online
Subscription Access Online

Volume 56, Number 19 · December 3, 2009

Illicit Money: Can It Be Stopped?

By Eva Joly, Raymond Baker

On May 4, the Obama administration announced a plan to crack down on offshore tax havens, which it said are costing the United States tens of billions of dollars each year. The President's proposals were primarily aimed at finding ways to increase revenue from wealthy companies and investors who use loopholes in the law and offshore subsidiaries to reduce their US taxes. But the administration is largely missing a far more devastating problem related to offshore finance: money gained from criminal and other illicit sources. With the use of tax havens and other elements of an increasingly complex ‘shadow' financial network, vast sums of illegal money are being shifted throughout the global economy virtually undetected.

Phi Beta Iota: The illicit global economy is at least two trillion dollars a year against a seven trillion dollar a year legitimate economy, and the latter is both full of legal crime and legal tax avoidance, as well as focused on the one billion rich rathyer than the five billion poor.  One of the many dirty not-so-little secrets about Wall Street is that it relies heavily on laundered drug money for its liquidity; another is that the banking community has been all too happy to manage the funds of dictators and war lords and others.  Below are just three of the many books we recommend in this area.

Illicit: How Smugglers, Traffickers and Copycats are Hijacking the Global Economy (Hardcover)

Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (Paperback)

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Review: Betrayal: How Black Intellectuals Have Abandoned the Ideals of the Civil Rights Era

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class

cover betrayal

4.0 out of 5 stars My Head Hurts–Time for a Black Caucus on Black Power
October 7, 2009
Houston A. Baker
My head hurts. After enjoying and reviewing Waiting for Lightning to Strike: The Fundamentals of Black Politics yesterday evening, I was not anticipating the firestorm of erudite adjective-laden brow-beating that this author delivers. Minus one star for beating several (black) horses to death, and as Reviewer Carter notes, not without meriting some of the same himself.

First off, this is a book that had to be written and must be read. There are, amidst the “wordier than thou” broad brush critiques, some real gems, some really engaging turns of phrase. It is unfortunate that the nature of the inquiry demands fairly personal explicit attacks on avowedly great black intellectuals, but there is some meat here.

Page 104: “Centrist territory is a rhetorical demilitarized zone where honest, committed, and historically informed proclamations on cause and effect regarding race, culture, morality, and gender in the United States can be studiously avoided, fudged, or simply made to suit the audience on hand.”

High points for me as a reader (white, Hispanic, seriously-angry populist):
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