Public Intelligence Blog

Amazon Page

Immanuel Wallerstein

Price for 160 Pages Beneath Contempt,November 16, 2011

I am angry–I really wanted to buy and read this book, but a price of $50 for 160 pages is beneath contempt. The author is being abused by the publisher and I urge the author to consider a new publisher for the paperback, or demanding that the paperback be published immediately. Barnes and Noble has been shut down by Amazon — all other publishers appear in intent on staving off their ultimate demise in the face of on demand publishing by gouging the public.

This book in hardcopy should not be sold for more than $25, and in paperback for $16. Please join me in boycotting this publisher, as someone who cares deeply about the dissemination of important knowledge — which the author clearly offers — I find this pricing an utter outrage.

Here are some reasonably priced books that I offer as a substitute–my “top ten” if you will.
Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed

5.0 out of 5 stars Beyond 5 Stars – Superb Individual Effort, October 25, 2011

In its own way this book is every bit as good as such classics as The Collapse of Complex Societies (New Studies in Archaeology) or The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters (New in Paper) and I am also reminded of Catastrophe: An Investigation into the Origins of Modern Civilization, all books I have reviewed here at Amazon, mirrored (often with material added) at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.

I was tempted to keep the book at five stars because the author tip-toes around the core issue of our day, institutionalized corruption. While he opens by saying he is striving to address the “linkage between political violence and social crisis in the context of imperial social systems,” the word imperial is as close as he gets to calling out the global criminals that used to be called the elite, and their equally complicit enablers, the political class. Which reminds me of another important book, The Global Class War: How America’s Bipartisan Elite Lost Our Future – and What It Will Take to Win It Back as well as the more recent Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

David Loye

6 Star Plus — Simple, Sensible Revolutionary, July 26, 2011

I am astonished that there are no reviews of this book. I first learned of it from my reading of A Democratic Approach to Sustainable Futures: A Workbook for Addressing the Global Problematique, and now I have discovered other books by this author, among which I would quickly point to

Bankrolling Evolution: A Program for a President
Darwin’s Lost Theory of Love: A Healing Vision for the 21st Century
The Healing of a Nation

This book is very fairly priced, and while it may come across to superficial reviewers as too simple or shallow, I find it to be engrossing. This is a really big idea ably presented, with very brief overviews of prior science, examples of organizational applications, and addendums including a pointer to The Darwin Project.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Review

“This path-breaking collaborative work illuminates complex social and political relationships that constitute governing authority in a changing world. New questions provoke deeper reflection than the term ‘global governance’ typically stimulates. Specialists need to read this fine book, and so do students.”   Louis W. Pauly, Canada Research Chair in Globalization and Governance, University of Toronto

“This volume makes and illustrates an important fact about global governance today: it isn’t only or always the institutional form of actors – be they states, corporations, or NGOs – but their relationships with key constituencies and with one another that shape governance outcomes. Authority, the essence of governance, comes in many guises. I recommend this book highly.”   John Gerard Ruggie, Harvard University

Product Description

Academics and policymakers frequently discuss global governance but they treat governance as a structure or process, rarely considering who actually does the governing. This volume focuses on the agents of global governance: ‘global governors’. The global policy arena is filled with a wide variety of actors such as international organizations, corporations, professional associations, and advocacy groups, all seeking to ‘govern’ activity surrounding their issues of concern. Who Governs the Globe? lays out a theoretical framework for understanding and investigating governors in world politics. It then applies this framework to various governors and policy arenas, including arms control, human rights, economic development, and global education. Edited by three of the world’s leading international relations scholars, this is an important contribution that will be useful for courses, as well as for researchers in international studies and international organizations.

Original Conference with Presented Papers (2007)

Conference: Who Governs the Globe?
November 16 & 17, 2007

Amazon Page

Home Page of DVD

Phi Beta Iota: The industrialization/ chemicalization of agriculture, in combination with the corruption of every aspect of society beginning with governance and extending to the media, has allowed for the desecration of the Earth and the poisoning of humanity.  This has been done with the explicit consent and encouragement of the so-called elites of the West, who have a vision of eugenics and the covert eradication of the poor and uneducated over time.  These elites do not see that the brainpower of the three billion poor is the only thing that can restore natural harmony and sustainable agriculture as well as legitimate governance and natural capitalism.  The time has come to create M4IS2–public intelligence in the public interest.

Amazon Page

Arthur S. Banks (Author), Robert B. Textor (Author)

Set a Standard, Modern Version Urgently Needed

December 16, 2010

When I was a graduate student in the 1970′s, “Banks & Textor” was the bible, and I could not have done my first graduate thesis on revolution without its inspiration. This reference taught me how to “operationalize” from a pre-condition of revolution (e.g. concentration of wealth) to specific measurable factors within a society (e.g. a mix of per capita income and spread).

As I just wrote in a commentary on the gap between rich and poor in the US,

In the 1970′s an era when “whole systems” thinking tried to flourish only to be crushed by the emergent merger of the two-party tyranny and Wall Street, there was a vital comparative international studies reference, “Banks & Textor,” or more properly, Arthus S. Banks and Robert B. Textor, A Cross-Polity Survey (Cambridge, MA: MIT, 1963). We strongly suspect that today the USA would be qualified a failed state, certainly so if the 1% of the population hoarding the bulk of the wealth were isolated as an extraneous factor contributing little of value to the larger economy while siphoning off one fifth of the asset value through legalized financial crime. There is clearly a need for a return of the Banks & Textor model, but with the added sophistication of distinguishing between negative factors of domestic production (excessive concentration of wealth, legalized mortgage clearinghouse, Wall Street derivative, and Federal Reserve fraud, prison factories and prisons, hospitals, and marginalized enterprises among others).

I would love to see a great university somewhere take on the magnificent challenge of recreating this great work, but modernized to include the Internet factor, measures of openness across all fronts (see my Gnomedex ketone, “Open Everything”) and so on.

This book is still priceless, it was the gold standard in its time, we need it now more than ever, but completely redone and modernized.

Vote and/or Comment on Review

See Also:

A Cross-Polity Survey (Free Download)

Search: revolution theory preconditions

Home Page

Film Review: “2012: Time for Change”

Opening This Weekend in NYC, Playing in LA again this week as well, it’s:

A Film that Will Change the World

by Sander Hicks

If I told you I just saw a great movie named “2012: Time for Change” you may think I’m talking about the 2009 Roland Emmerich disaster movie. That flashy flick was wildly successful at the box office, but it’s described as “cinematic waterboarding,” and worse, by most critics. So how did it make $567 million? Maybe it tapped into that nagging little voice we all have, which says that if we do not change how we live, we face planetary catastrophe, a global environmental meltdown, in full-color HD.

“2012: Time for Change” is different. It’s a lively, smart documentary that weaves a more hopeful vision from over 200 voices and visionaries. The film works as a kind of collaborative brainstorm: Yes, we are destroying the planet, with our patterns of consumption, competition, war and blindness. The Asian Tsunami,  Hurricane Katrina, and even now tornados in Brooklyn show that the Earth has just about run out of patience with us human beings.

Read the rest of this entry »

September 30, 2010

Laurence C. Smith

This book was recommended to me and I recommend it to others, but with the following observations:

1) Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update was there in the 1970′s. It troubles me, as much as I read, how I seem to see the same books every ten years as someone reinvents knowledge that was known before and then either not read, or forgotten.

2) I completely agree with the Deep North concept (the Pacific Northwest Passage is opening, Iceland is now independent of Denmark, and the Yukon and Northwest Territories, along with Alaska, stand to be the main beneficiaries. Similar benefits will acrue around the South Pole, if Chile and Argentina get smart and throw Wall-Mart out of their oceans and off the continent.

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Evolving Series, Multiple Authors, Deep Value

August 26, 2010

Peter Glick, Heather Cooley, Michal J. Cohen, Mari Morikawa, Jason Morrison, and Meena Palaniappan

Although I continue to recommend The Atlas of Water, Second Edition: Mapping the World’s Most Critical Resource as the best overall combination of content, visuals, and price, this book is a solid five stars and represents not just the current biennial report, but in the comprehensive index and tables of contents at the back, the volumes that preceded this one.

This is a multi-author work, and whiled Peter Glick is clearly the lead, other authors are Heather Cooley, Michal J. Cohen, Mari Morikawa, Jason Morrison, and Meena Palaniappan. I continue to be annoyed by Amazon’s oblviousness to academic standards in relation to properly crediting authors, even when publishers correctly list them.

I am very glad to see that the publisher used Amazon’s Look Inside the Book capability and strongly recommend studying the book through that route if you have any doubts. This is a fairly priced master work. It is not for the average reader, for that I continue to hold Marq de Villiers Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource, but any of the following that I have reviewed or will be reviewing in the next few days are world-class:

Read the rest of this entry »

Amazon Page

Single Best Book on Content, Visuals, and Price

August 26, 2010

Maggie Black and Jannet King

This is one of twelve books on Water that I have read or am reading, expecting to get through all of them in the near term.

In comparison to the other works, this is the single best book when considering content, visuals, and price. This is the one book to buy if you want just one book and for that reason it is the only 6 in the lot, although Marq de Villier’s book, the last one listed below, is in that group as well as the first book to really put it all together. Here are ten other books, reviews for all of which will be posted here at Amazon and at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog where you can access all my reviews on books about water with one click.

The Evolution of the Law and Politics of Water
Governing Water: Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building (Global Environmental Accord: Strategies for Sustainability and Institutional Innovation)
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization
Unquenchable: America’s Water Crisis and What To Do About It
Blue Gold: The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water
Whose Water Is It?: The Unquenchable Thirst of a Water-Hungry World
Blue Covenant: The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water
Water Wars: Privatization, Pollution, and Profit
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink
Water: The Fate of Our Most Precious Resource

It is a real shame the publisher has not posted the table of contents, which I find to be one of the most holistic and useful I have seen in a very long time, and/or used Inside the Book capabilities that Amazon makes so easily available.

Read the rest of this entry »