March 18, 2007 is when I bought this book here at Amazon, and I would have reviewed it within the week. Amazon appears to have destroyed my original review, one more in a long line of errors by Amazon that finally forced me to mirror all of my reviews at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog. Amazon has BLOWN IT in terms of really being useful to the Earth, while I was invited to speak to their Developer's Conference 2007, and had a standing room only audience, Jeff Bezos is a geek, not a thinker, and could never wrap his mind around a World Brain as digital contents remixable at the paragraph level.
This particular book was my introduction to Francis Lappe Moore, and along with Barbara Marx Hubbard and Barbara Ehrenreich, whose books I link to below, I consider her one of the most sensible, intelligent, good-hearted citizen leaders in America, and certainly equal to many non-American emergent leaders I do not know.
The growth of livestock on land (and also in the sea) is poisoning the earth and accelerating the migration of animal diseases to humans. There is now evidence that Alzheimer's Disease is in fact Mad Cow disease badly diagnosed all these years.
I strongly recommend this book for a simple grounding in basic Earth common-sense, and as a gift to others. This is a timeless work.
Super cool global map with question snap-shots. An early look suggests that many are focusing on two things:
1. The insanity of creating a financial carbon trade market instead of focusing on things that are rooted in the ground and impact on what people actually do every day–the public sees Maurice Strong and the Carbon Trade deal as a scam.
2. The utility of rapidly pushing back livestock and the meating of captive meat, as this has an immediate effect not only on methane gas and other climate issues, but on reducing feces into the ground water (remember the cow shit into the spinach?).
COPENHAGEN – A showdown between the world's two largest polluters loomed over the U.N. climate talks Tuesday as China accused the United States and other rich nations of backsliding on their commitments to fight global warming.
Phi Beta Iota: The Secretary General means well, but he has no clue since the UN cannot actually aggregate and exploit multinational information nor make sense out of competing propositions. Al Gore and those who have lied and manipulated data to get their way have set both UN and US science back by at least a decade. It's all connected. The US representatives are not stupid–they are simply lazy and uninformed, too willing to parrot the lines given to them, without the slightest knowledge of substance necessary to be effective.
In a nutshell, Poverty and Infectious Disease are more important than #3 on the High-Level Threat Panel list, Environmental Degradation. That threat in turn is vastly more complex and includes many more things than mere Climate Change, which is itself about much more than carbon emissions, staring with sulfer and mercury and moving on to paving the Mississippi wetlands.
With the exception of China and India, all of those attending are pompous mis-informed bureaucrats without a clue.
Priority 1 is to create a World Brain Institute with an Embedded Global Game that features true cost information on everything, connecting all humans to all information in all languages all the time.
Priority 2 is to widen our circle of compassion so that even the most unethical of politicians can be held accountable and can understand that “We” is ALL of us, and that the Earth does not really care whether the human species survives or not, it is resilient beyond our highest level of incompetence.
Priority 3 is to connect the poor to the Internet and to one another as quickly as possible, beginning with cell phones for every tenth woman in the bottom billion, and building from there.
Priority 4 is to take one line of the Lord's Prayer, “give us our daily bread,” and redirect as quickly as possible resources needed to give clean water, daily minimum allowance of food, and sanitation, to everyone.
This is not rocket science. All it takes is INTEGRITY. “The truth at any cost reduces all other costs.”
Mary Schantag, co-founder and researcher for the POW Network, said her group's Web site lists 3,500 “phonies and wannabes” who claim to be former prisoners of war, medal recipients, members of elite forces or heroic combat veterans. She said she receives new allegations daily.
“This is an epidemic,” said Schantag, who is based in Skidmore, Mo. “It's almost a mass identity theft of people who earned their status as heroes.”
. . . . . . .
“It pretty much boils down to ego, women or money,” Schantag said.
Many impostors get away with their claims for years because the military does not keep a list of most medal recipients. Sterner, who pushed for adoption of the Stolen Valor Act, is now campaigning for legislation that would require the Pentagon to maintain a list of all the men and women it has honored.
“How many people do you see out there claiming they won an Academy Award and didn't?” he asked. “None, since there is a list of Academy Award recipients. How many phonies are claiming Silver Stars? They are all over the country because there is no list of Silver Star recipients.”
Sterner has compiled his own list of more than 26,000 medal winners and posted it on the Hall of Valor Web site, sponsored by the Military Times. Members of the public can search the database to verify the names of true medal winners. Earlier this month, AMVETS launched ReportStolenValor.org, where people can report suspected impostors.
Phi Beta Iota: Marcus Aureleus flagged this one, and we'd like to add to it the dismal lack of coverage of our suicides and amputees, two sides of the four-sided human cost of war that is almost deliberately concealed. See those stories below.
Although I tend to shy away from sequels, I broke down and bought this at Giant to pass time away while completing a tediuous task. It was GREAT.
There is zero babe factor in this movie, which was a disappointment, it could have been scripted much more engagingly, but three things really blew me away throughout:
1) The staging or the access to ostensible Vatican inside and underground areas–presumably not actually within the Vatican, this was all done superbly
2) The twists and turns and the ending were great. I actually had tears of surprise at the end and will not spoil it.
3) Finally, Tom Hanks and the historical allusions still fascinate me. It would be great if history could be taught so ably, but more deeply and more thoroughly.
Absolutely recommended.
To browse all 86 of the DVDs that I recommend, visit Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, each links back to their respective Amazon page but only there can you see JUST my DVD reviews. [Use Reviews (DVD Only) (86)]
YEARS OF DECEIT: US OPENLY ACCEPTS BIN LADEN LONG DEAD
BIN LADEN NEVER MENTIONED IN McCHRYSTAL REPORT OR OBAMA SPEECH
“HUNT FOR BIN LADEN” A NATIONAL SHAME
By Gordon Duff/STAFF WRITER/Senior Editor
Conservative commentator, former Marine Colonel Bob Pappas has been saying for years that bin Laden died at Tora Bora and that Senator Kerry's claim that bin Laden escaped with Bush help was a lie. Now we know that Pappas was correct. The embarassment of having Secretary of State Clinton talk about bin Laden in Pakistan was horrific. He has been dead since December 13, 2001 and now, finally, everyone, Obama, McChrystal, Cheney, everyone who isn't nuts is finally saying what they have known for years.
Extraordinary Value, Genius in a Small Package
