Review: Threshold–The Crisis of Western Culture

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Electoral Reform USA, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Five for the Voice, Four for the Substance

December 12, 2009

Thom Hartmann

Thom Hartmann is one of a handful of individuals that I consider to be true guides for the rest of us, and I consider two of his earlier books, Cracking the Code and SCREWED, to have been instrumental in my own transformation from recovering spy to intelligence officer to the public.

The book does cover a lot of ground lightly, but it is coherent, and because it is Thom Hartmann, whose voice is hugely important to all of us, I settle on a five instead of a four. Other books that complement this one include Tom Atlee's The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All, Jim Rough's Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People, and The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy.

Here are my notes:

+ Book may be missing pages, mine starts at page xi (Preface) so I am left wondering, what happened to i through x?

+ Book opens with quotes from Einstein and Schweitzer with respect to the urgency of widening our circle of compassion to include ALL living things, and explicitly ALL humanity.

Continue reading “Review: Threshold–The Crisis of Western Culture”

2009/12/10

Review: Give Me Liberty–A Handbook for American Revolutionaries

5 Star, America (Anti-America), America (Founders, Current Situation), Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Electoral Reform USA, Justice (Failure, Reform), Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Major Contribution to Loyal Dissent & True Patriotism

December 10, 2009

The book comes in three parts, the first two by the author, the third a collection of well-chosen pieces by others.

I am totally engaged by the idea that liberty is a state of mind, that America the Beautiful is a state of mind, not to be confused with the Wall Street greed and two-party tyranny that is killing the Republic.

The author has done a moderately good job of reviewing the history, and that which she shares is most valuable. I especially like her quoting Robert F. Kennedy on how each generation must win its own struggle to be free, and later in the book, she cites one of the thousands across the country as observing that we have abdicated our citizenship.

The state of mind theme is carried on in a discussion of the difference between a free society and a fear society, and throughout parts I and II we see documented evidence of how America has become a fear society and how the Global War on Terror (GWOT) has been a virtual seizure of power by quasi-fascist mind-sets who may have the best of intentions but in fact have executed a “paper coup” or as the author also puts it, following a long (LONG) summary of restrictions on everything from permits for free speech to travel to voting rules and regulations, “civic death by a thousand cuts.”

2009/12/102009/12/10

Review: The End of America–Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Censorship & Denial of Access, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Security (Including Immigration), Terrorism & Jihad, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Needs to Be Said, Needs to Be Read, A Solid First Step

December 10, 2009

Naomi Wolf

American Freedom Campaign

I disagree with those that criticize this book. This is PRECISELY the kind of book we need to see, at a reasonable price, being discussed in schools, clubs, and churches.

QUOTE page 27: “The Founders set out to prove that ordinary people could be entrusted with governing themselves in a state where no one could arbitrarily arrest them, lock them up, or torture them.”

This book resonates with me, in part because for the past ten years I have been reading heavily and observing the decline of America in all respects–see my chapter on Paradigms of Failure in Election 2008: Lipstick on the Pig (Substance of Governance; Legitimate Grievances; Candidates on the Issues; Balanced Budget 101; Call to Arms: Fund We Not Them; Annotated Bibliography), both free at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog (as will all my books, but I do recommend the Amazon hard copies).

Continue reading “Review: The End of America–Letter of Warning to a Young Patriot”

2009/11/292009/12/05

Review: Understanding Knowledge as a Commons–From Theory to Practice

4 Star, Censorship & Denial of Access, Communications, Education (Universities), Information Society, Intelligence (Public)

Almost a Three–Ambitious Title, Narrow Focus

November 29, 2009

Charlotte Hess

An MIT publication from 2007, this is actually knowledge from the 2000-2004 timeframe, and it is annoying narrow knowledge written from legal-economic point of view. Well-intentioned, no doubt, this is not the “inter-disciplinary” work that it claims to be, and I demonstrate restraint in not scoring it as a three. Despite references to Yochai Benkler's The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom and Lawrence Lessig's The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a Connected World, these folks are largely out of touch with Web 2.0 to Web 4.0, collective intelligence, wealth of networks, and tao of democracy concepts, authors, and works. This is not a substantive contribution to evolutionary anything (cultural evolution, evolutionary activism, conscious evolution). The index STINKS and there is no consolidated bibliography.

This is not a book that focuses on innovation as much as on structured processes and conventions. I left it at four in part because this is a very good job on one part of the elephant (the anus or intellectual property of old part) and I really appreciated the six of the twelve contributions by Nancy Kranich, James Boyle, Peter Suber, Shubha Ghosh, Peter Levine, Charles M Schweik.

My fly-leaf notes (useful stuff from the book):

Continue reading “Review: Understanding Knowledge as a Commons–From Theory to Practice”

2009/11/202009/11/21

Review: Going Rogue–An American Life

4 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Biography & Memoirs, Censorship & Denial of Access, Culture, Research, Politics, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

No Index But a Proven Player in American Heartland

November 17, 2009

Sarah Palin

EDIT of 20 Nov 09. This is my final review.

The book consists of five parts.

Part I: Life up to the call from John McCain. The book I read and appreciated earlier, Sarah: How a Hockey Mom Turned the Political Establishment Upside Down was instrumental in her selection, along with the heroic work of a band of bloggers, covers most of this ground so the first half will be old hat to those who followed Palin before she became VP. Stuff better told here includes Todd being the Big Man on Campus (BMOC) with TWO “rides” when others had none; beauty contests paid for college; eloped, terrible pain of pregancy, lost second child, Exxon Valdez killed fish prices down 65%, lost some bids for office, and very meaningful for me, with respect to Downes syndrome, she asked “why us” and Todd responded “why not us.”

Part II: Photos, very disappointing for pre-campaign, better for campaign but over-all TERRIBLE.

Continue reading “Review: Going Rogue–An American Life”

2009/11/172010/05/13

Journal: Deep Secrets, Copenhagen World Government, the M-Fund, and the Future

Censorship & Denial of Access, Earth Intelligence, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy

Phi Beta Iota: Conventional minds cannot handle the esoteric, in part because they have been dumbed down by really rotten educational systems that emphasize rote learning, and in part by social conventions that reward loyalty to idiocy over self-discovery and “branching.” We are seeing a convergence in “revelations” as more individuals achieve “hacker-like” open minds despite the Paradigms of Failure. Today we bring together three stories: Deep Secrets; UN use of climate change to achieve World Government “functionality (an oxymoron); and the M-Fund in Japan.

Abstract & Source Online

Deep Secrecy

David Pozen

Stanford Law Review, Forthcoming

This Article offers a new way of thinking and talking about government secrecy. In the vast literature on the topic, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being denied particular items of information, the result is a shallow secret. Every act of state secrecy can be located on a continuum ranging between these two poles. [Emphasis added. Click on logo for rest of abstract and Keywords.]

Copenhagen World Government.

Here are two of the most troubling sections.

Continue reading “Journal: Deep Secrets, Copenhagen World Government, the M-Fund, and the Future”

2009/10/222009/10/22

Review: Hidden Truth–Forbidden Knowledge

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Censorship & Denial of Access, Consciousness & Social IQ, Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization)

Has Warts But On Balance, Best Available Overview

October 22, 2009

Steven M. Greer

I elevated this book from four to five stars in part because I know some of the people to whom the author refers (e.g. Admiral Mike Cramer, referred to by name; and John Petersen, author of Out of the blue: Wild cards and other big future surprises : how to anticipate and respond to profound change, who is not named but described in obvious terms), and because it is the best available review for the public.

This book will seriously annoy those who consider themselves scientific rationalists (e.g. Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West and those who tend to look askance, as I do, and the kum-ba-ya hand-holding crowd BUT–and this is a big but–I absolutely consider this author and this book to be totally credible, and as annoying as the inner spirituality conversations at the beginning and the cosmic spirituality conversations at the end are, this book is a MUST READ for any serious person who cares about the future of humanity and the Earth. I take some of this with a grain of salt, but I want to meet this person, learn more, and believe he is on a righteous path of truth for the good of the larger group, humanity.

Here are my fly-leaf notes:

Continue reading “Review: Hidden Truth–Forbidden Knowledge”