Revolutionary–a Milestone in Human Applied Thought
November 30, 2010
I have looked over the galley that is free online (as are all my books) and consider this to be a milestone in human applied thought. I have bought it here at Amazon, confident this is going to be one of the few books that I do not donate to George Mason University, which took over my entire library when I joined the United Nations in March 2010.
Medard Gabel is modest–the blurbs do not do justice to him or his work or the incredibly talented and imaginative individuals (not just youth, but mid-career professionals) that he attracts to this calling.
I have participated in two of his design labs and recommend them to one an all. Everyone enters with their own issue area (urban planning, energy, whatever) and halfway through they experience the “aha” moment (epiphany for Republicans)–everything is connected and NOTHING can be planned, programmed, budgeted, or executed without integrating everything.
As Russell Ackoff likes to say, what is good for one part of the system might be very bad for all the other parts. Comprehensive architecture and prime design–all threats, all policies, all demographics–are the future.
6 Star and Beyond–the Essence of Fuller, the Future of Humanity
November 28, 2010
I did not truly begin to understand the breadth and depth of Buckminster Fuller's thinking until I read this book as it deserves to be read, with full attention and detailed notes. This is one of those books that merits–and received from me, a Work Table of core concepts, definitions, obstacles, and solutions, posted online at Work Table [link live at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog].
Although I heard Fuller speak personally at Muhlenberg College and distinctly remember him saying that a housing foundation could support the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner, it was not until this book that I understood in detail exactly what he meant: that we are wasting 90% of what we put into buildings. I have previously read and reviewed Critical Path as well as Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and it is my great privilege to know Medard Gabel, co-creator of the analog World Brain and sole creator of the new digital EarthGame (in concept pending funding).
CORE POINT: True wealth is cosmic energy and the creation of means to deliver to humanity unlimited free energy. Among many other things this creates the possibility of applying energy to create self-contained homes that are lightweight, fully self-contained in water and sewage, and totally green.
CORE CONCEPT: Capitalism and democracy have been perverted by money–those who manage money manage those who manage politics, and they both concentrate on optimizing the false God of money, an abstract concept hardly worth its paper representation, while ignoring–even subverting–the possibility of achieving infinite cosmic wealth on behalf of all of humanity.
CORE CONCEPT: Predatory capitalism on the one hand, and controlled socialism on the other, are both extremes and both fail to meet the needs as well as the possibilities of humanity. Fullerism is at root a non-zero equation.
PERSONAL POINT: This book answers the question I could not answer when a senior executive asked me “what do you do?” Now I know. I am a Comprehensive Global Architect whose objective is Prime Design: From Waste to Wealth (the title of my next book, inspired by this core reading from Buckminster Fuller). All my prior works, including my most recent, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty, have been a preamble to what I now recognize is my life's work…I will try to earn another 25 years (I am 58, 58 + 25 is 83 — my family history suggests I will make it.). I am still looking for a country or global organization that wants to profit from doing this.
A few definitions up front:
QUOTE (142): WEALTH [is] the measurable degree of forwardly organized environmental control, in terms of quickly convertible energy, capacities and performance ratioed system capabilities, per capita, per diem.
Advertising destroyed public trust by pre-empting “industrial design” as code for airbrushing superficial changes to move products to market, rather than seeking integral improvements that could be shared with the consumer.
Design-improved livingry increases wealth.
Synergy is the delta between the sum of the parts and their anticipatable outcomes, and the actual outcome not anticipated.
CORE CONCEPTS
Architects deal with the externalities of man.
“At rest” science and understanding (Newton's paradigm) have been replaced by “constant change” (Einstein's paradigm).
Bad housing breeds bad humanity and bad science–the time/energy costs and the materials costs are too high, housing is the socio-economic “runt” of all the professions.
Challenge is IRREDUCIBLE.
Design is innovative re-assembly that adds value.
Design-preventable includes illumination and prevention of corrupt exploitation of materials for inefficient or unjustifiable applications.
Energy mass, energy radiation, energy gravitation (E3) times Intellect (E3I)
Good design would reduce the per capita consumption of building materials from nine tons per person to one ton per person [this is in the developed world–these reductions would allow the extension of the lower tonnage home designs to nine times more people and more–with mass consumption come mass efficiencies.]
Industry is *supposed to be* the organization and application of collective knowledge and action that produces synergy (added value) over the sum of the parts in isolation.
Individual freedom is ESSENTIAL to the expansion of diversity needed to enable collectives to see the whole.
Total Thinking is the intelligent acquisition, ingestion, processing, and exploitation of all relevant information in order to produce efficiencies and effects beneficial to the mission objective.
Wealth is intellect plus energy combined to create capacity [with more free energy making more refined capacity possible].
Worldwide commonwealth credit is both needed and achievable to provide mass-produced sustainable housing for all. That in turn frees up the five billion poor to create “infinite wealth” by combining their intellect with infinite free energy to advance civilization.
OBSTACLES to advancing humanity include:
Advertising in place of genuine progress [should not be a tax-deductible expense in my own view]
“Credit” fueled the perpetuation and expansion of rotten housing at great cost.
Housing is the works of design, the worst of materials, and the worst of applied engineering
Housing as the sucking chest wound in economics [mortgages should not be tax-deductible, this both encourages waste of materials on housing, but also enables the growth of financial fraud]
Managers lack the over-all philosophical discernment to be effective at seeing the whole and building to the whole.
Politics is VERY wasteful, perpetuating inefficient industries.
Specializations are attracting the most gifted, and this leaves the less gifted dealing with integration if they think about it at all. [I always thought this was what business and public administration programs were supposed to do, but having graduated from such a program realize they do not.]
A HANDFUL OF QUOTES
p. 25 “My envisioned transcendental world design plan would be inherently nonpolitical, because it would be utterly independent of any need for authority beyond that to-self-by-self for initiation of its study and development.”
p. 95 In relation to the waste of heavy materials in housing, “…that in this war crisis it is technically treason to allow ourselves to be short sixty-five thousand freight cars weighing fifty tons of steel each, which shortage is equivalent to the number of cars required exclusively to transport the solid foundation and flooring materials unscientifically employed as frozen compression elements to structurally support the tiny weights of one-tenth-of-a-ton load of men who comprise the negligible working loads of housing, or to support machinery from below that could better be suspended, etc.”
p. 246 “The efficiency of the industrial equation is directly proportional to the numbers consuming.” [In other words, capitalism focused on the needs of the one billion rich is long overdue for a redirection of focus to the needs of the five billion poor.]
p.247 “Serve one hundred per cent will involve a world design revolution, not just design of end-products, but of the comprehensive industrial network equations including world-around-livingry-service systems, at regenerative occupancy rentals, mutually installed in anticipatory facilitation of total world enjoyment of individually respected total man.”
p. 249 “Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet, who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his coordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.”
SOLUTIONS
Energy investments will define the future.
Need a world housing industry. We do NOT need water, sewer, and electrical infrastructure. Distributed housing and small cities connected by high-speed rail should be the norm.
Harvesting of scrap is the next needed Manhattan Project/Marshall Plan.
Three World-Class Authors on Amish Create Single Distillation
November 28, 2010
I bought this book because two colleagues, Howard Rheingold and Kevin Kelly, are both working on books about the Amish in relation to technology, with the key thought being that when the Amish adopt or accept any technology, they do so with deep reflection on how the technology will impact on them and their community for generations into the future.
One of a several books I went through on a trip to Chile and back, this book is immediately of distinction because it is a distillation of the experience and insights of three world-class authors on the Amish with fourteen books specifically on the Amish among them.
I agree with the first reviewer, this is a really excellent work. As I went through it, I learned, I was inspired, and I was grounded in both the grace and the hardship of being Amish.
The authors have organized the book, and the publishers have presented the book, in a very pleasing, easy-to-read, easy-to-appreciate manner.
In four parts (Spirituality, Community, Everyday Life, and Amish Faith and the Rest of Us), the authors achieve–without a single false note–both a synthesis of their broad and deep understanding of the minutia as well as the “big picture” of Amish reality, *and* a communication of what we who are not Amish can take from this practicum.
Most who strive to be converts do not make it. It is simply too hard a life for those who have not been bred to it from birth. It has many blessings, including family held close for generations, and it demands many sacrifices, some of which would assuredly be good for us, such as the refusal to accept industrialization of agriculture with all of its chemical poisons.
To emphasize the big picture importance of the Amish, I would observe that in other words I have read it is made clear that there are only two sustainable models of agriculture in the world today (beyond subsistence): the Amish and the Cuban. The latter developed because of the US embargo, demonstrating that the greatest gift we can bestow on other nations is to keep our chemical garbage away from them.
Permaculture is the third way.
This was an excellent read, and certainly a book that could fruitfully be read more than once. An excellent gift to anyone.
I am loath to waste the ten links allowed by Amazon, so here are some other books, generally centered on faith, that I consider most interesting.
I cannot over-state the value of this book to anyone who has a complex and expensive problem but cannot afford to get the author there personally. While the book is no substitute for the genius, the intuition, the experience, and the sheer “quiet energy” that the author can bring to any endeavor, it is not just a starting point, it is more than enough to get you through your first self-organized event, and the results are sure to astonish as well as excite about the potential benefits of having the author lead the next session.
Here is how it works in a nut-shell, and I put this into the review because I am not happy with the minimalist marketing information the publisher has provided but happy that Look Inside the Book is activated–use that feature!
1) Everyone who cares is invited to a meeting in a space large enough to accommodate the group. Many events will charge a fee to cover the space, the food, and the travel costs of the facilitators, some events can be free especially if internal. HOWEVER, the diversity of who is invited (i.e. including outsiders, clients, journalists, the lowest ranking maintenance people), THIS MATTERS….A LOT.
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.
TThe author and I reconnected on LinkedIn and he had the publisher send me a copy of this book. I would not normally have bought it for myself, thinking it a “tourism” or “travel” kind of book, and I would have been very very wrong. The sub-title, “and the Dream of Capitalism,” might better read “Case Study in Emirate Capitalism at Its Best.”
This book starts very early in the history of Dubai, back when it was such a hole that no one even knew it was there or wanted to go anywhere within thousands of miles of it. The early part of the book persuaded me that the author has done some deep, serious, utterly professional and thorough homework, and the books reads easily, with gifted turns of phrase that educate and often inspire.
Putting the book down just now (and recommending the paperback that comes with a second epilogue for 2010) I reminded myself to recommend this book as a case study for both business and public administration graduate courses, as well as recommended reading for undergraduates. I certainly believe the author himself should be invited–and very well paid–to interact with the most serious and gifted of business and public administration adult students, both on and off the record. This book is a GOLD MINE of insights into what worked in an environment where, as the author describes so beautifully, the leadership knew that lawyers are generally worthless and bureaucracies are pathetic things to be dismissed. For that section alone this book goes into the Beyond 5 Stars (6 Stars and Above) and will be so rated at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.
This book will be cataloged there in Capitalism, not just regional or country, in Leadership, and in a number of other categories as well. I have not, in as long as I can recall, had the pleasure of reading a book about a people, a place, a leadership, and a time that is as detailed, as harmonized in the telling, as instructive, and as enjoyable as this one.
The level of detail is EXTRAORDINARY and yet not burdensome. The detail is present as the filigree to the main wall, the story told in well-planned segments. The detail gives life to this book. This book is both educational and inspiring.
I am NOT “down on Dubai” and I don't think the author is either. In 58 years of travel and 48 years of reading–the last thirty focused on non-fiction, I have not seen any book do a better job of capturing the essence, in detail, of a culture, a place, and a living time.
The book ends with very serious challenges to Dubai being presented in a professional, responsible manner. The leaders of Dubai are clearly extraordinary people with extraordinary sensibilities, and I suspect they will rise to these challenges, not the least of which are spoiled citizens receiving $55,000 a year, and an energy and carbon footprint that could alone take down the Earth if proliferated. But even here, one sees the beauty of Emirate Capitalism as I choose to call it: every building now has to meet the LEEDS standard, and other measures are being put into place. Having said that, one must also recognize that Emirate Capitalism can be brutal to some, a form of robber=baronism, and that now that the world is in an economic decline, Dubai's leaders are going to have to think twice as boldly, listen to twice as many advisors, and be twice as tough and focused as they have been, if they are to survive.
If you are going to Dubai, if you know anyone at all in Dubai, if you own shares in any company based in Dubai, if you even THINK you might one day fly OVER Dubai, buy and read this book (the paperback, but frankly, although I got the new epilogue in Xerox form, it does not add that much, so for those of us that love hard-copy covers, go with the hard copy and forego the new epilogue, which I am suggesting to the author be put on line so as not to diminish sales of the remaining hard copies.
The author covers the Iran-US and other regional issues well enough, but this is not a book about politics, it is a book about Emirate Capitalism that should be studied for the next century, along with other books that needs to be written about Arab Capitalism as–and if–Arab Capitalism can be inspired by Emirate Capitalism.
This book needs a sequel, perhaps one that expands north and south and brings us all up to date on Emirate Capitalism, Iranian/Persian Capitalism (it does exist), and Arab Capitalism.
As one person cited in the book points out, Dubai is both the most magnificent fastest built marvel of the Earth, and also a microcosm of everything that is wrong with Western engineering ignorant of ecological economics or “true cost” of goods and services. Dubai is an OPPORTUNITY. City of Gold is the opening act–I cannot wait for the sequel. This is “jolly good stuff” and an absolutely riveting read–and not one to be skimmed over, either. This is a serious book for serious people.
I am not going to link to other books here. This book has no peers. Visit Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog for the 1,600 or so non-fiction books, organized in 98 categories, which provide the backdrop from my praise of this book by this author. Righteous!
Revolutionary–a Milestone in Human Applied Thought
