Phenomenal Integration of Ideas–Superb “Once Over”
February 10, 2010 [final review 21 February 2010]
Edmund J. Bourne
I have sent INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty to the printer and it is on that foundation that I highly recommend this book for a simple easy to understand overview of the fifteen converging forces that the author lists and then discusses in superbly-crafted very easy to read overviews. He covers:
01 A conscious universe
02 Multidimensional reality
03 Interconnection of all minds
04 Complementarity of science and spirituality
05 Radical empiricism [revalidation of intuition and visioning]
06 Consciousness has a causal influence
07 Natural ethics [I really like this, hugely beneficial for all]
08 Reverence for nature and earth [in my book, diversity rocks]
09 A sense of inclusiveness toward all humanity [diversity again]
This is not a book the Administration (regardless of which party happens to be in control on any given day) because the Administration is totally out of touch with reality, totally partisan, and largely not interested in the welfare of average Americans because Wall Street money is personal, our tax payments are not–they go to the highest bidder.
Indeed, the decisions that the Administration makes every day not only make our citizens less safe, they cost our earnest honest businesses billions of dollars as imposed costs from government errors of understanding and policy and regulation. See my article in Homeland Security Today on “America's Cyber-Scam,” and separately, my update on the massive looting of Haiti that is about to take place as American contractors rush to swindle everyone, joining the Red Cross in the 50% overhead scam–only in the case of US contractors paying Haitians a dollar a day, it will be more like 80% scam.
What the author has done that no one else has done to date, is actually “walk” the ground across America looking for obvious vulnerabilities that terrorists armed with silencers and willing to die could exploit.
Each chapter covers a different vulnerability, and the value of this book is easily seen in the fact that this is almost “real-time” intelligence on specific vulnerabilities, the author has been “up close and personal” with each one, and the bottom line is clear: The US Government and state and local government have no idea how to protect America internally, we are living on grace, not preparedness (just as CIA offices under official cover overseas are not really operating under cover, just tacit immunity from local liaison which has them all pegged).
I sat down intending to make this a five, but the two fluff reviews have to be off-set. Robert Ackoff would say this is a spectacular book about making the wrong things righter instead of the right things righter–too many lawyers and focused on improving a patent approval system that probably needs to be eradicated and the buildings and files plowed under with salt. It also lost one star because I was one of the 4,000 that actually participated in the Open Government experiment, where the legalization of marijuana triumphed and every time someone voted for my governance reform idea, a “monitor” from the partisan correctness office came in and voted against it moving it back down to zero. The author is naive to think this initiative is going anywhere without electoral reform that displaces the two-party tyranny and restores the Constitution, the Article 1 independence of an honest Congress, and integrity of the Executive at the political level. [See especially Chapter 21 in my new book that just went to the printer, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty and is free online at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, and my earlier wire-bound book, also free online, 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).
Having said that, I found this book to be spectacularly informative, thoughtful, useful, with extraordinary insights and suggestions that were over-shadowed by the focus on the patent system–suggestions about the-redesign of government, for example. I recommend reading my reviews of SMS Uprising: Mobile Activism in Africa and of The Myth of Digital Democracy along with this review, the three books were read together as a set. Below are some quotes and my fly-leaf notes. This book is a foundation stone for righteous change into the future, but only that first stone.
QUOTE (xvi): Done right, it is possible now to achieve greater competence by making good information available for better governance, improve effectiveness by leveraging the available tools to engender new forms of collective action, and strengthen and deepen democracy by creating government by the people, of the people, and *with* the people.
We stopped subscribing to WIRED when advertising crossed the 60% mark, but this issue came to us and has a useful article on the end of old money, which is to say, the end of money where banks and credit cards take an undeserved cut from every transaction while taking huge risks with your money as collateral.
The Open Money movement is proceeding apace, with community-oriented credit cards like Interra, new forms of home rule stripping corporations of their illegitimate “personality” status, and moving money from Wall Street to the local bank.
Meanwhile, Twitter is changing the world again by becoming a trusted point to point money transfer agent. here are five new ways to pay that cut out the banks and credit card organized legalized crime lords:
Twitpay. Type a friend's Twitter handle, a dollar amount, and twitpay to transfer funds to their PayPal account.
Zong. Instead of entering credit card information anew for every online purchase, users fill in their phone number and the charge shows up on their monthly bill.
Square. The latest from Twitter cofounder Jack Dorsey, this 3/4 inch cube turns any iPhone into a credit card reader.
GetGiving. This mobile app uses PayPal to enable charities to accept small donations without the usual exorbitant credit card transactions fees.
Hub Culture. Travelers can avoid the hassle and fees of swapping dollars for euros by transacting in vritual currency in this international network of workstations.
To our surprise, PayPalitself, central to most alternative schemes, was not highlighted other than being mentioned above.
Tiny politics, small news, then search, mail, and pornography largest
NOTE: to magnify any image, right click on the image and select view image, then use CNTL + clicking the + while keeping CNTL down to reach a readable magnification of the image.
Below the Fold: Top News Sites, Top Political Sites
This book educated me. It challenged and soundly negated some of my assumptions, but it also reinforced my view that the Internet at this time is a communications network, not a knowledge network or an action network.
Here is the last paragraph:
“Yet where the Internet has failed to live up to its billing has to do with the most direct kind of political voice. If we consider the ability of ordinary citizens to write things that other people will see, the Internet has fallen far short of the claims that continue to be made about it. It may be easy to speak in cyberspace, but it remains difficult to be heard.”
Totally awesome. This is an impressive piece of work. At Phi Beta Iota I am posting four web diagrams showing top news and political sites and a couple of other things (I no longer post images to Amazon after they removed 354 images as a lazy way of censoring twelve copies of Obama-Bush sharing the same face–I no longer trust Amazon with my work, hence Phi Beta Iota–and a lesson about Internet abuse).
Behind this elegant book is a great deal of hard work with lots of math, lots of elbow grease, and lots of time spent making sense of massive amounts of data. I am totally impressed.
01) Digital divide is not the only divide–Internet is a winner take all environment
02) Liberals predominate online
03) Googlearchy has replaced meritocracy…top ten sites rule, everyone else go fish
04) Pornography and webmail are the two big dogs on the Internet, followed by search engines and a very small news set. In comparison to webmail, news is less than 20%, and in comparison to news, politics is perhaps 1% at best (of news–a tiny tiny fraction of it all).
05) The author does not really get into the deep web, the reality that there are over 75 search engines and Goolge is losing marketshare, or the fact that China and India and Brazil are creeping up and will one day soon hit a vertical rise in their web presence, especially now that kanji and other webname character sets are accepted.
06) The heart of the book, but not the bulk of the book, is about the “missing middle” and the very real fact that ordinary citizens are neither seen nor heard within the Internet overall and within the political chambers of the Internet particularly.
My review does not do this book justice. It is profoundly deeper than my summary above.
The book does reinforce my view that we must get all research and all budgets online, and that we must create the World Brain Institute and the Global Game, mandate true cost information online, and start using citizen buying power to move capitalism in a more moral sustainable useful direction (see my review just posted of Come Home America: The Rise and Fall (and Redeeming Promise) of Our Country and my many other reviews of books on capitalism, one more of which I will mention here, The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism.
Phenomenal Integration of Ideas–Superb “Once Over”
Almost a Five–Making Wrong Things Righter
