Review: Eaarth–Making a Life on a Tough New Planet

4 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Disease & Health, Environment (Problems), Environment (Solutions), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Future, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Public Administration, Science & Politics of Science, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
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4.0 out of 5 stars Starts Weak, Ends Strong, Not the Whole Picture

July 21, 2010

Bill McKibben

EDIT of 2 August 2010: However great the mind or the man, we all make mistakes. Paul Hawkins made his with Monsanto, I've made mine. ClimateGate established with clarity the fraud associated with both the fabricated science and the intended “sub-prime mortgaging” of the Earth's atmosphere. Maurice Strong and Al Gore are pushing fraud, not fixing. Mercury and sulfer and methane are bigger problems than carbon, and global warming is a small element–not even close to being the main event–within Environmental Degradation, threat #3 after poverty and infectious disease. It troubles me when people vote against the messenger–McKibben is a great man–he's also made a mistake. Get over it and do more reading, integrate more, and it will all come out fine.

. . . . . . .

I was so annoyed with the narrow first third that glorifies the likes of Al Gore, Thomas Friedman, and Larry “women can't think like scientists” Summers that I was actually contemplating three stars. This is a weakly researched book that buys into the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and Maurice Strong carbon fraud, while ignoring the vastly more intelligent findings of the High Level Panel on Threats, Challenges, and Change, A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change, in which Environmental Degradation is #3 and more broadly defined.

Any book that quotes the discredited James Hansen of NASA and that builds a case around Op-Eds and undocumented assertions is a stain upon scholarship, and the first third of this book falls into that sinkhole. Despite many references to the Copenhagen summit, there is not a word in this book about ClimateGate (see the Rolling Update at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog) and therefore I find this author guilty of active misrepresentation bordering on a lack of integrity in this specific instance. The author is spending too much time with newspapers and not enough time with books representing the distilled reflections of others.

Having said that, and deducted one star for the lapse, I find the balance of the book absorbing, fascinating, and rich in gems of insight and fact. It should be read in conjunction with:

Limits to Growth: The 30-Year Update
Human Scale
High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
The Future of Life
Acts of God: The Unnatural History of Natural Disaster in America
The Next Catastrophe: Reducing Our Vulnerabilities to Natural, Industrial, and Terrorist Disasters
The Real Global Warming Disaster: Is the Obsession with “Climate Change” Turning Out to Be the Most Costly Scientific Blunder in History?
Biomimicry: Innovation Inspired by Nature
The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits

My criticism and praise of this important work are based on the above and the other 1,600 non-fiction reviews I have posted to Amazon, all more easily accessible in 98 reading categories at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Network.

Early points that got my attention:

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Worth a Look (DVD): The Day Before Disclosure

5 Star, Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial), Reviews (DVD Only), Worth A Look
DVD 1.5 Hours

Recommended by a very broadly read and traveled person from the Southern Hemisphere.

You do NOT have to log in.  Takes over a minute to start, click further along on the bar to hurry the start, after first clicking on the Play triangle.

This is a world-class film, exquisitely produced and thoughtfully scripted.  This is the real deal and is consistent with everything that has been poking into the public consciousness for decades.

US started trying to shoot them down in 1952–this is about as smart as the Spanish declaring any indigenous peoples who did not speak Spanish to be heathens subject to enslavement.  Lost so many pilots the order finally rescinded in 1954 or so.

Many excellent interviews with a range of serious people.

The Roswell alien crash was directly associated with US early nuclear endeavors probably being “scouted” by concerned aliens.

Most disturbing is the lengths that US and UK governments went to drug and otherwise disorient and silence direct witnesses who were not “cleared” to be aware of extra-terrestial matters.

Brazilian and Russian reports suggest alien activity in “containing” effects of early nuclear explosions.

Mexico is so focused that a two-hour prime time show covers UFOs once a week.

Norway has world's only full-time UFO spotting and assessing station (Hessdalen)

Excellent discussion of both alien collection (e.g. two ton slab of earth cut and lifted with no evidence of heavy equipment) and alien concern over Homo Sapiens combination of nuclear weapons, violent nature, and early space exploration.  Specific discussion of alien interventions to cause offensive missile malfunction as well as “shut down” of missiles on alert….

Relationship of media to intelligence explored in a very negative manner–fast forward to 9/11!  National Enquirer bought out by CIA front company to sensationalize and marginalize extra-terrestial material.

Bleeding-edge thinking is that Homo Sapiens is a hybrid possibly altered from earliest days of emergence.  Covers abductions, surgical procedures, samples with focus on reproductive organs.  Babies, toddlers described in various forms of human to alien mixtures.  Abductees who have children see the children abducted in turn, as if the aliens are doing generational studies.

As many as 60 distinct alien “types” are believed to exist, playing many different roles across many different types of human groups and activities.

“Truth Embargo” implemented 62 years ago is coming to an end.  Classification is an obstacle, and especially so in NASA of all places.  The truth will come out.  This is the story of the Millenium.  It will change virtually every paradigm across every science *and* (even more importantly) our cosmic/social paradigms.

A “must see” film.

Countries Opening Their UFO Files to Public: Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, New Zealand, Peru, Russia, Spain, Sweden, Turkey, Ukraine, Uruguay

See Also:

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Review: Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind

5 Star, Intelligence (Extra-Terrestrial)
Amazon Page
5.0 out of 5 stars Review Deleted By Amazon, Reconstructed from Memory
July 20, 2010

C. D. B. Bryan

I read and reviewed this book when it came out in hard-copy, and I continue to be very annoyed with Amazon for its policy of deleting best in class reviews from the past so as to encourage new reviewers–they would be better off deleting the least useful review, but they seem motivated by a desire to give the new reviewers a chance to achieve rankings (hence, deleting least useful reviews does not meet the need, but deleted high value reviews of high performance reviewers does).

What I remember most clearly from the book is CONSISTENCY. Across all the encounters, all the accounts, all the investigations, there was a distinct, scientifically-validated consistency in all of the descriptions, effects, etcetera. This was the first book I was able to find that combined reputable scientific inquiry with a massive cross-section of stories from around the world, and that impressed me greatly.

See also the following books among many others:
UFOs and the National Security State: Chronology of a Coverup, 1941-1973
The Cover-Up Exposed, 1973-1991 (UFOs and the National Security State, Vol. 2)
Hidden Truth: Forbidden Knowledge
Disclosure : Military and Government Witnesses Reveal the Greatest Secrets in Modern History
Opening Minds: A Journey of Extraordinary Encounters, Crop Circles, and Resonance
Vital Signs: Discovering the Keys to Abundant Christian Living

And in DVDs:
What the Bleep Do We Know!?

Worth a Look: Book Reviews on Water

00 Remixed Review Lists, 12 Water, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page

Six-Star and Beyond

Review: Governing Water–Contentious Transnational Politics and Global Institution Building (Global Environmental Accord–Strategies for Sustainability and Institutional Innovation)

Review: Blue Gold–The Fight to Stop the Corporate Theft of the World’s Water

Review: The Atlas of Water, Second Edition–Mapping the World’s Most Critical Resource

Five Star and Below

Review (DVD): Blue Gold–World Water Wars

Review: Environmental Security and Global Stability–Problems and Responses

Review: The Blue Covenant–The Global Water Crisis and the Coming Battle for the Right to Water

Review: The Blue Death–Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink

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Review: Building Social Business–The New Kind of Capitalism that Serves Humanity’s Most Pressing Needs

6 Star Top 10%, Associations & Foundations, Best Practices in Management, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Humanitarian Assistance, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Justice (Failure, Reform), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Priorities, Public Administration, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, United Nations & NGOs, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page
5.0 out of 5 stars 4 in isolation, beyond 6 in context–a cornerstone book

July 14, 2010

Muhammad Yunus and Karl Weber

While I sympathize with those who feel that the book lacks reference to prior art, that social business has been around for a very long time, and that much of the book is somewhat similar to his first book that I also reviewed, Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, I am rating this book a five here and a “6 Star & Beyond” at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, for the simple reason that he is not just doing it, but doing it on a global scale, pushing the envelope across all boundaries, and setting the stage for realizing what Nobel-candidate C. K. Prahalad articulates in The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid, Revised and Updated 5th Anniversary Edition: Eradicating Poverty Through Profits.

The Nobel Prize to Yanus was a righteous one–unlike the political idiocy of awards to Al Gore and Barack Obama. I can only hope that the Norwegian public shames its overly political Nobel Committee into getting back on track with awards such as this one.

My friend Howard Bloom has a new book out that complements this one: The Genius of the Beast: A Radical Re-Vision of Capitalism and of course there are others both recent and past, such as Capitalism at the Crossroads: Next Generation Business Strategies for a Post-Crisis World (3rd Edition).

Three things are changing that make this book a cornerstone book:

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Review (Guest): Bureaucracy–What Government Agencies Do And Why They Do It

5 Star, Budget Process & Politics, Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Democracy, Diplomacy, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Force Structure (Military), Information Operations, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Justice (Failure, Reform), Leadership, Military & Pentagon Power, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Security (Including Immigration), Strategy, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
Amazon Page

James Wilson (Author)

43 of 46 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Comprehensive Guide To Government Bureaucracy, January 1, 2002
By Tansu Demir (Springfield, IL) – See all my review

This book is really a “comprehensive” (in the literal meaning of the word), clearly written, richly supported by concrete cases (mostly, federal agencies) guide about government bureaucracy mainly in the United States. From introduction to the end, Wilson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the reasons what the government agencies do and why they do that in the way they do.

The book is organized into six parts: Organizations, Operators, Managers, Executives, Context, and Change. In the first part, Wilson's thesis is simply that organization matters. Organization must be in accordance with the objectives of the agency. In the second part, the author examines the operators' behavior (say, street-level bureaucrats) and how their culture is shaped by the imperatives of the situation they encounter in a daily basis. The third part deals with the issues peculiar to managers of public agencies. In this part, attention is focused upon the constraints that put the mangers in a stalemate (see chapter 7, this chapter is completely insightful!!). The fourth part is devoted to the Executives. This part clearly illustrates why the executives of government agencies compete with other departments and which strategies are used in the process of competition and/or cooperation (especially see the 10th chapter about Turf, insightful!!). In the fifth part, Wilson focuses on the context in which public agencies do their business (Congress, Presidents and Courts). In the last part, Wilson summarizes the problems and examines alternative solutions (the market alternatives to the bureaucracy) and concludes with reasonable and “little” propositions.

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Review: When to Speak Up and When to Shut Up

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Public Administration

5.0 out of 5 stars Christian Social IQ Book with Moral Foundation
July 7, 2010
Michael Sedler

This was a very intriguing book and I am going to have to read it more than once. I bought it thinking it was a social IQ book, kind of an intelligent person's conversational etiquette. It is far more than that, very Christian but also very practical for anyone. If I were to give away two small books as traveling companions for anyone, this would be one, Leadership Lessons of Jesus: A Timeless Model for Today's Leaders, which was sold in the Special Operations bookstores when LtGen Jerry Boykin was deputy for intelligence in the Pentagon, see his biography, Never Surrender: A Soldier's Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom.

Where this book impacted on me to the extent any book can influence the habits of a 57-year old, was in really making crystal clear the value of questions instead of statements as a conversational contribution. I kept thinking Socratic, and also thinking of my colleagues in the war colleges who must learn to teach future generals who do not want to be told anything, but can be challenged to think more broadly.

The author distinguishes between questioning (bad) and asking questions (good), and this I noted down:

QUESTIONING
1. Persisting
2. Complaining
3. Challenging
4. Debating and disputing
5. Making accusations
6. Taking up an offensive

ASKING QUESTIONS
1. Prepare
2. Timing
3. Get to the point
4. Recognize authority
5. Ask for more information if not clear
6. Avoid becoming defensive
7. Avoid trying to justify self
8. Thank for time

Two quotes I especially liked:

“The enticement to be secretive, and to withhold information is a battle for many of us.”

“Dishonesty,trickery, deceit, lying–each may be justified in our own minds. We rationalize and develop our own sense of morality in order to protect ourselves. Unfortunately a web of deceit usually ends up creating more problems than originally existed.”

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