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Paul Krassner

5.0 out of 5 stars Less Funny, More Provocative–Price is a WOW,November 20, 2011

First, a confession. I am 59 years old and had no idea who Paul Krassner was/is. The more I read through the book the more I marveled at his pioneering endeavors and their continuing relevance as Occupy struggles to find its voice and focus. So for all the folks that don’t know who Paul Krassner is, at under $3.00 this book is a WOW value, and I recommend it for that alone.

This is NOT a funny book. There are a few places here and there where one can see the deep tragic comedy possibility, but more than anything this is a very provocative book that beats a single theme: the obscenity of all that we allow to be done in our name, to our bodies and our environment, to our families, schools, economy, and the Republic itself. Obscene, they name is a two-party tyranny and a Congress so corrupt they shame every dictator (all 40+ of them, all but two “best pals” of the US Government) in their craven greed and lack of democratic integrity.

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Mitch Ratcliffe, Jon Lebkowsky

5.0 out of 5 stars SIX STAR #OWS Primer Wow Wow Wow,October 20, 2011

I bought this book in October 2010 because I was getting to know both Mitch Ratcliff and Jon Lebkowsky better, but at first pass through it did not really draw me in. Then OccupyWallStreet happened. I read the book on the flight from the US to Spain where I am talking about commercial intelligence and integrity in the messed up new world, and this time around, the book grabbed me.

Because #OWS has brought to life the ideas the co-editors and various contributing authors understood well before 2004 and articulated in 2004, now I can absorb this book as much more meaningful and inspirational. Anyone associated with OccupyWallStreet in any way from direct to indirect, should read this book. I am donating my copy to the George Mason University Library as I do all my new books (they took over my entire library when I joined the UN back in 2010).

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John Buchanan

Gets to the very crux of our nation’s ills.,September 27, 2009

John Buchanan understands the true spirit of our nation and puts his finger smack on all the ways we’ve strayed away from that spirit. This is the first social studies volume every high school kid should read. This book is so right on it hurts. Get this book; read it; then go out there and save your nation — these United States — from those greedy insiders who have high jacked it for their own evil gains.

Phi Beta Iota:  The Occupy movement in the USA that has emerged in Sep-Oct 2011 is a manifestation of the ideas in this book, and the urgent needs identified but not assimilated in 2005 and earlier.

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John Lenczowski

5.0 out of 5 stars Long Needed Treatise, But Too Expensive,September 21, 2011

EDIT of 11 December 2011: Gene Poteat, President of the Association of Former Intelligence Officers (AFIO) has an excellent review of this book in the Summer/Fall 2011 issue of Intelligencer. The following quote is from his review, it captures the essence with perfection:

“The weakness and deteriorating standing of America in the world today is the failure to take into account the role of information, disinformation, ideas, values, culture, and religion plays in the influence and conduct of foreign and national security policy.”

While the above glosses over the corporate capture and abject corruption of all three branches of the Federal government, it certainly summarizes and recommends the book in question. See also my graphic, “Information Pathologies,” loaded above next to cover.

End Edit

In the midst of an economic depression, it is a real shame to see a book that is so very relevant to unscrewing the Republic, and also see the same book terribly over-priced. At 230 pages this book should be offered at 24.95, and a donor should be found to permit the author to speak to the Department of State via the Secretary’s Open Forum, with a free copy of the book to every person attending.

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The author is the founder of the Institute of World Politics, a rather unique institution that offers three Masters programs and that strives to do what no other university can claim: to teach a mastery of all of the instruments of national power, and to teach how culture, ethics, strategy, and philosophy can come together to drive Whole of Government planning, programming, budgeting, and execution so as to advance both the prosperity and the protection of the Republic.

This book came to my attention after I found and truly enjoyed another book out of the Institute of World Policy, by Cultural Intelligence for Winning the Peace by Juliana Geran Pilon. Everything I read about the Institute, or by those associated with it, offers a very strong, coherent, culturally-compelling vision of how to advance positive values inherent in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of the United States of America.

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Juliana Geran Pilon (Author)

EDIT of 10 Sep 2011 to add more specifics and a concluding judgment.

I am delighted to see that Look Inside the Book has been activated and urge one and all to look over the table of contents and then buy the book. This is a preliminary review, mostly because it causes me pain to see no review at all on this important work. A copy of the book is on the way to me from the publisher. I will insert my substantive additional comments in a few days.

The book is in the Ada Bozeman tradition, and brings back to mind my continuing recommendation that no one be allowed to graduate from any serious international studies or international security course without reading at least the 25-page introduction, but ideally the full work:

Strategic Intelligence & Statecraft: Selected Essays (Brassey’s Intelligence and National Security Library)

She is to intelligence and statecraft what Will and Ariel Durant are to the study of history.

It distresses me to observe that we have not come far since this book was published, with many failures across the fifteen slices of human intelligence (HUMINT) among which are included the Human Terrain Teams (HTT) that I believe should be absorbed into the new active duty Civil Affairs Brigade with regional battalions. This would be an excellent time to hold a conference and do a follow-on book, this time integrating both the full spectrum of HUMINT capabilities, and the new meme, Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making (M4IS2).

Within this book, several of the chapters stand out for me:

“Hybrid Wars” by Col John J. mccuen, USA (Ret)

QUOTE (75): “Hybrid war appears new in that it requires simultaneous rather than sequential success in these diverse but related ‘population battlegrounds.’”

“Avoiding the Cookie Cutter Approach to Culture: Lessons Learned from Operations in East Africa,” by Maj Christopher H. Varhola USAR and LtCol Laura R. Varhola, USA

QUOTE (156): Inadequate preparation and planning (today) “Despite the lessons learned in Iraq, operations like those ongoing in Kenya and Tanzania are marked by high personnel turnover. Moverow, most of the personnel desployed there have received little or no training on the region, have no Swahili language ability, and do not have a chain of command insisting that they learn the indigneous language in situ [which would not matter since they rotate out so quickly."

Key lessons not learned in Africa Command (AFRICOM):

01 Mistaking the power of tribal identity
02 Overlooking cultural complexity
03 Dubious public affairs efforts
04 Misunderstanding religious influence
05 Ignoring economic and power relations

I am stunned--stunned beyond belief--that military commanders desperate for a culture belly-button have tended to appoint the predominantly Christian chaplains to that position. Talk about the blind leading the deaf.

"Fourth Generation Warfare evolves, Fifth Emerges," by Col T. X. Hammes, USMC (Ret).

QUOTE (312): Fifth-generation warfare will result from the continued shift of political and social loyalties to causes rather than nations."

Col Hammes provides a very tight opening on how most of the US Government refused to take 4th Generation warfare seriously (even after Al Qaeda stated that this was their focus), and does a nice job of showing how all generations of warfare continue to be present while fifth generation emerges in which the emphasis is on a global strategic narrative (information operations) with supporting violent actions.

The book ends with an all too short piece from Antulio Echevarria II, one of the top scholars at the U.S. Army's Strategic Studies Institute (SSI), on "Wars of Ideas and the War of Ideas, and that is perhaps the irony of this superb work brouight together by editor Juliana Geran Pilon: despite the excellence of this specific book, and the coherence of the contributions from all of the authors, the US Government generally, including the Department of State, and the Department of Defense more specficially, are in the toilet when it comes to recognizing the cultural nuances of confrontation in the 21st Century.

I am reminded of Tony Zinni's brilliant distinction among the six different wars that were waged in Viet-Nam all at the same time depending the geographic and demographic terrain, this author takes the concept a step further to posit something that does not exist but should: Whole of Government Multinational Multifunctional War-Peace Spectrum Operations--full court press on all fronts, not just the military front.

Here are a tiny handful of books that I respect along with this one, on this topic. The US Government is massively ignorant about reality and especially about cultural nuances, so all of these books are vital to anyone who has aspirations of public or private service in the international arena, who wishes to display integrity in all respects. Any fool can lecture the "other," understanding them is quite another matter.

Solving the People Puzzle: Cultural Intelligence and Special Operations Forces
Sacred Economics: Money, Gift, and Society in the Age of Transition
Violent Politics: A History of Insurgency, Terrorism, and Guerrilla War, from the American Revolution to Iraq
One Man, One Cow, One Planet
Grand Strategies: Literature, Statecraft, and World Order
God and Science: Coming Full Circle?
Holistic Darwinism: Synergy, Cybernetics, and the Bioeconomics of Evolution
Anthropologists in the Public Sphere: Speaking Out on War, Peace, and American Power
Anthropological Intelligence: The Deployment and Neglect of American Anthropology in the Second World War

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Derrick Jensen (Author), Aric McBay (Author), Lierre Keith (Author)

About the Authors

Activist, philosopher, teacher, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent, DERRICK JENSEN holds degrees in creative writing and mineral engineering physics. In 2008, he was named one of the Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” and in 2006 he was named Press Action’s Person of the Year for his work on the book Endgame. He lives in California.

Writer, activist, and small-scale organic farmer ARIC MCBAY works to share information about community sufficiency and off-the-grid skills. He is the author of Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life after Gridcrash and creator of “In the Wake: A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization.”

LIERRE KEITH is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of two novels, as well The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She’s also been arrested six times. She lives in Humboldt County, CA.

What is different about Deep Green Resistance is that it is the first book that offers a solution that is scaled to the size of our predicament.

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Norman Cousins

Brilliant Detailed Exposure of Power Killing Intelligence, July 30, 2011

This is a new edition of the book, and so very timely. If I had the money to give one book to every American, this would be it, followed by TYRANNICIDE The Story of the Second American Revolution and my all time God Bless America favorite, The Average American: The Extraordinary Search for the Nation’s Most Ordinary Citizen.

Here is the author’s opening statement:

“Connected to the tendency of power to corrupt are yet other tendencies that emerge from the pages of the historians:

* The tendency of power to drive intelligence underground;

* The tendency of power to become a theology, admitting no other gods before it;

* The tendency of power to distort and damage the traditions and institutions it was designed to protect;

* The tendency of power to create a language of its own, making other forms of communication incoherent and irrelevant;

* The tendency of power to spawn imitators, leading to volatile competition;

* The tendency of power to set the stage for its own use.

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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.

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Recommended by Contributing Editor John Steiner

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Chapters with Links Below the Line

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Nathan A. Allen

Six Star Pre-History Ignored Until Now,July 17, 2011