Thomas – Public Intelligence Blog

2017/06/032019/09/06

Review: Project Human Extinction – The Ultimate Conspiracy

7 Star Top 1%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Chris Thomas and Dave Morgan

7-Star Life Transformative Fundamental Reference on Extra-Terrestials, Illuminati, Free Masons, and the Satanic Deep State

After years of reading across many fronts, I was finally given this book and consider it the single best book summarizing the human experiment as an inter-galactic or cosmic experiment focused on free will, and the details about how the Illuminati morphed from nurturing humanity pre-1700 to control and ultimately a plan to eradicate billions of “useless eaters,” most compelling.

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2009/11/092009/11/09

Journal: Lessons of Viet-Nam

05 Civil War, 08 Wild Cards, 10 Security, Ethics, Government, Military, Peace Intelligence

Newsweek November 16, 2009 Cover Story

The Surprising Lessons Of Vietnam

Unraveling the mysteries of Vietnam may prevent us from repeating its mistakes

By Evan Thomas and John Barry

Stanley Karnow is the author of Vietnam: A History, generally regarded as the standard popular account of the Vietnam War. This past summer, Karnow, 84, picked up the phone to hear the voice of an old friend, Ambassador Richard Holbrooke. The two men had first met when Holbrooke was a young Foreign Service officer in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and Karnow was a reporter covering the war. Holbrooke, who is now the U.S. special representative for Afghanistan and Pakistan, was calling from Kabul. The two friends chatted for a while, then Holbrooke said, “Let me pass you to General McChrystal.” Gen. Stanley McChrystal, the commander of U.S. and allied forces in Afghanistan, came on the line. His question was simple but pregnant: “Is there anything we learned in Vietnam that we can apply to Afghanistan?” Karnow's reply was just as simple: “The main thing I learned is that we never should have been there in the first place.” [Emphasis added]

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2009/07/302009/07/30

Journal: US Attorney General Homegrown Terror Threat Increasing

10 Security, 11 Society, Government

Eric Holder Full Story

In ABC News Exclusive, Attorney General Eric Holder Says ‘American People Would be Surprised by the Depth of the Threat'

By PIERRE THOMAS, JASON RYAN and THERESA COOK

WASHINGTON, July 29, 2009

Attorney General Eric Holder told ABC News in an exclusive interview today that he is increasingly concerned about Americans becoming radicalized and turning to terrorism.

“I mean, that's one of the things that's particularly troubling: This whole notion of radicalization of Americans,” Holder told ABC News during an interview in his SUV as his motorcade brought him from home to work. “Leaving this country and going to different parts of the world and then coming back, all, again, in aim of doing harm to the American people, is a great concern.”

Holder said the ever-changing threat of terror and the pressure to keep up with it weighs heavily on his mind as he tries to ensure that the government has done all it can to anticipate the moves of an unpredictable enemy.

“In some ways it's the most sobering part of the day,” Holder said of his morning intelligence briefing, in which he gets the latest report on the landscape of “the organizations, the people who are bound and determined to do harm to our nation.”

+++++++Phi Beta Iota Editorial Comment+++++++

NEWS FLASH FOR THE ATTORNEY GENERAL: There is a “Harvest of Rage” buidling up in America, and is is not from jihadists against the Nation, but rather normal, sober, average Americans full of common sense who are angry at the long list of high crimes and misdemeanors committed by a corrupt Congress and a White House that–regardless of occupant–represents Wall Street instead of Main Street.

The Watts riots by people of color will look like a kiss on the cheek if the white people of Middle America ever decide to march on New York and Washington. With all due respect to the good intentions of the Attorney General, he is out of touch with reality and with America. This is a Republic. The government is failing. It is time to fix it or abolish it. We favor the fix, and the fix is easy: the Electoral Reform Act of 2009.

American is going clinically insane because the federal government as a service of common concern to the United STATES of America is so busy transferring wealth from the individual taxpayer to the banks and special interests that it has failed to do its job: mind the public interest, nurture the public soul, and guard the public commonwealth.

Cheney and Rice equated informed patriotic objections to the elective war on Iraq at “treason”–General Tony Zinni in particular was tarred with that brush. Today the Obama Administration seems to equate opposition to its sophmoric efforts to do good while continuing to loot the Treasury for Goldman Sachs as “the radicalization of Americans.” Yes, America is being radicalized. The public intelligence question to be asked and answered is this: are We the People being radicalized by external or internal circumstances? Phi Beta Iota believes that our radicalization is caused by a government that has lost touch with the public it is meant to serve. Our good people trapped in a bad system have forgotten that their oath is to the Constitution, to defend America against all enemies, domestic as well as foreign, and that sometimes it is the integrity of the individual in the chain of command who remembers the Constitution, that prevents the abuse of power by political appointees who have been bought and paid for by Wall Street.

2009/07/202009/10/24

Review: GIS for Decision Support and Public Policy Making

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Disaster Relief, Games, Models, & Simulations, Geography & Mapping, Geospatial, History, Humanitarian Assistance, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Intelligence (Public), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

ESRI Sales Material, Excellent Price, Recommended,

July 20, 2009

Christopher Thomas and Nancy Humenik-Sappington

As a publisher who is also an author, I continue to be outraged by the prices being charged for “trade” publications. This book is properly-priced–other books on GIS I would have bought are priced at three to four times their actual value, thus preventing the circulation of that knowledge. Those publishers that abuse authors and readers refuse to respect the reality that affordably priced books are essential to the dissemination of knowledge and the perpetuation of the publishing industry.

The book loses one star for refusing to address Google Earth and elements of the Google offering in this industry space. While Google is predatory and now under investigation by the anti-trust division of the Department of Justice, to ignore Google and its implications for cloud management of data in geospatial, time, and other cross- cutting contests, is the equivalent of poking one eye out to avoid seeing an approaching threat.

Having said that, I found this book from ESRI charming, useful, and I recommend it very highly, not least because it is properly priced and very well presented. Potential clients of ESRI can no doubt get bulk deliver of this volume for free.

Return on Investment factors that ESRI highlights up front include:
+ Cost and times savings
+ Increased efficiency, accuracy, productivity of existing resources
+ Revenue generation
+ Enhanced communications and collaboration
+ Automated workflows
+ More efficient allocation of new resources
+ Improved access to information.

The book consists of very easy-to-read and very well-illustrated small case studies, most previously published in Government Matters, which appears to be a journal (there are a number listed by that title).

Here are the highlights of this book for me personally:

+ Allows for PUBLIC visualization of complex data
+ Framework for “seeing” historical data and trends
+ Value of map-based dialog [rather than myth-based assertions]
+ Allows for the visualization of competing perspectives past and future
+ Illuminated land population dynamics, I especially like being able to see “per capita” calculations in visual form, especially when per capita can also be sliced by age, sex, income, religion, race, and so on.
+ Mapping derelict vessels underwater is not just a safety function, but opens the way for volunteer salvage and demolition
+ GROWS organically by attracting new data contributors who can “see” the added value of contributing their data and then being able to see their data and everyone else's data in geospatial terms. This is a POWERFUL incentive for information-sharing, which more often than not receives lip service. GIS for me is the “key” to realizing sharing across all boundaries while also protecting individual privacy
+ Shows “pockets” of need by leveraging data gaps in relation to known addresses (e.g. immunizations, beyond 5 minute fire response, etc.)'
+ Gives real meaning to “Intelligence Preparation of the Battlefield (IPB)” and–not in this book–offers enormous potential if combined with a RapidSMS web database that can received text messages from hundreds of thousands of individuals across a region
+ Eliminates the time-energy cost of data collection in hard copy and processing of the individual pages into an aggregate database.

The book discusses GIS utility in the routing of hazardous materials, but avoids the more explosive (pun intended) value of GIS in showing the public as well as government officials where all the HAZMAT is complacently stored now. For a solid sense of the awaiting catastrophe, see my review of The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters.

The book also avoids any discussion of the urgency as well as the value of GIS in tracking and reducing natural resource consumption (e.g. water usage visible to all house by house), and the enormous importance of rapidly making it possible for any and all organizations to channel their data into shared GIS-based aggregations. For a sense of World Brain as EarthGame, see my chapter in Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace the chapter is also free online at the OSS.Net, Inc. website forward slash CIB.

This book, 189 pages of full color, is a righteous useful offering. I would encourage ESRI to become the GIS publisher of choice, buy out the titles that I could not afford, and enter the business of affordable aggregate publishing in the GIS field. Other titles by ESRI on GIS:
Measuring Up: The Business Case for GIS
The GIS Guide for Local Government Officials
Zeroing in: Geographic Information Systems at Work in the Community

Five other cool books on data pathologies that GIS can help resolve:
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Fog Facts : Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin (Nation Books)
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
The Age of Missing Information (Plume)

The latter remind me that GIS will not blossom fully until it can help the humanities deal with emotions, feelings, and perceptions across tribal and cultural boundaries. Right now, 23 years after I first worked with GIS in the Office of Information Technology at CIA, GIS is ready for the intermediate leap forward: helping multinational multiagency data sets come together. ESRI has earned deep regard from me with this book and I will approach them about a new book aimed at the UN, NGOs, corporations, and governments that wish to harmonize data and in so doing, harmonize how they spend across any given region, e.g. Africa. This will be the “master leap” for GIS, enabling the one billion rich to respond to micro-needs from the five billion poor, while also increasing the impact of aggregated orchestrated giving by an order of magnitude.

ESRI: well done!

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2006/03/152009/12/04

Review: Vital Signs–A Complete Guide to the Crop Circle Mystery and Why It is Not a Hoax (Paperback)

5 Star, Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial)

Superb Photographs, Light on the Text,

March 15, 2006

Andy Thomas

This is one of two first-rate books on crop circles and their implications for mankind that I recommend. This one is the “coffee table” book, with an absolutely sensational collection of clear color photographs that provide what I believe may be the single best collection of distinct crop circles at distinct times and places on the planet.

This book is however light on the text and the thinking. It should be read in conjunction with “Open Minds: A Journal of Extraordinary Encounters, Crop Circles, and Resonance,” by Simeon Hein, Ph.D.

I am persuaded of three things by these books taken together and my various other readings:

1) The Earth is alive and everything on it is a web of life that has a global consciousness–the butterfly effect and the mind over matter effects are real.

2) There exist other forms of intelligence at least equal if not vastly superior to ours elsewhere, and I speculate from some of this reading that we are a “diversity enhancer” for a larger constellation of planets, and that we may also be failing a longer-term test to determine if we are ready for inter-planetary interaction.

3) There are, between books like this and the many very intelligent people that tend NOT to go into politics, clear possibilities for our rising to the challenge. We simply have not focused as a Collective Intelligence or World Brain, and we need to do so before we destroy our planet and our species.

Both books are almost mesmerizing.

2000/04/082009/10/24

Review: The Very Best Men–Four Who Dared–The Early Years of the CIA

5 Star, Intelligence (Government/Secret)

Best deep look at why the emperor has no clothes,

April 8, 2000

Evan Thomas

I almost broke two fountain pens on this book, and that is close to my highest compliment. Depending on one's mood, it will move any person with a deep knowledge of intelligence to tears or laughter. This is a really superior detailed look at the men that set the tone for clandestine operations in the 20th century: “Patriotic, decent, well-meaning, and brave, they were also uniquely unsuited to the grubby, necessarily devious world of intelligence.” From card file mentalities to Chiefs of Station not speaking the language, to off-the-cuff decision making and a refusal to include CIA analysts in strategic deliberations, this is an accurate and important study that has not gotten the attention it merits from the media or the oversight staffs.