Beyond Six Stars–a Game Changer, Pure Public Intelligence
Julie Cook
This book will join the Six Stars and Beyond group at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, where I can group my reviews in the 98 categories in which I read and you can do a whole lot of other things such as search all my reviews for specific terms.
This book is deeper than most will give it credit. The author has done a great deal of research, presents verifiable notes, and offers up 27 short section with adequate but not excessive white space. I especially like the quotes, several from Albert Einstein, used throughout the book to highlight a point. I also especially respect the reality that the author speaks to directly: when Western commerce and medicine have been so corrupted by the profit motive, it is very difficult to find research that upholds the truth of natural and alternative cures, or that presents the truth about the dangers of our peverted health system that ignores all but the “profitable” quarter of health, surgical and pharmaceutical remediation.
See for example:
Prescription for Natural Cures
Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health
The Blue Death: Disease, Disaster, and the Water We Drink
This is a revolutionary book, and it joins others that make the case for rejecting the big government – big banks – big business triumverate that commoditizes people, loots the treasury, and rapes the Earth for short-term gain by the few against the public interest.
See for example:
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
The People's Business: Controlling Corporations and Restoring Democracy
Human Scale
I am impressed right away with the common sense case for NOT turning over cord blood to profiteers and instead ensuring the last bit of priceless iron and other core ingredients are transferred from mother to child.
The section on vaccinations may strike some as scattered but I am very impressed. Vaccinations appear to be genuinely counter-productive and introduce illness. While a great deal more public intelligence (decision-support) needs to be produced, I am satisfied that on balance the medical and pharmaceutical industries are 60% or more AGAINST human health. I am also continuously outraged at a Congress so corrupt in the USA that it prohibits negotiations on Medicare prices for pharmaceuticals so that we pay 100 times (literally) more for each of the top 75 generic drugs than anyone pays in the rest of the world less Canada, where they pay 10% what we pay. Everyone else pays 1%. ONE PER CENT. The greatest advance in health was clean water, which we are losing rapidly across America and which billions do not enjoy at all. The medical industry is retarded, plain and simple, the excellence of selected elements not-with-standing.
I learn something I did not know that is profoundly important: vitamin C evidently cures both acute polio and acute hepatisis, two diseases that modern medicine still referws to as incurable. I find the author's footnotes compelling.
The section on TV is to the point, and makes the point as well as longer books that I also admire, such as Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television and the Internet equivalent, Silicon Snake Oil: Second Thoughts on the Information Highway. TV is bad for children, who do not know any better–it promotes materialism, depression, bad eating habits, and stunts children socially. The author does not address video games, which have both pros and cons, and a future edition might integrate that interactive follow-on.
The bulk of the book focuses on home schooling, and I confess to being so preoccupied with forcing a revolution in intelligence (decision-support) that I missed a once in a lifetime opportunity to take my three boys and wife around the world on a 65 foot McGregor. With what I know today, I absolutely recommend world travel for parents with children, and home schooling along the way which will be a joy not a burden. There is SO MUCH in this book that normal parents need to absorb, while the author may feel she is spitting into the wind, the wind IS changing direction and I see in all my reading and communications across America a massive revolution against big everything and a strong bottom up desire to get back to basics.
The second half of the book focuses on home schooling with ten reasons that are spelled out in the table of contents (click on the book cover above–the publisher has been responsible in taking advantage of Amazon's Look Inside the Book offering. I like every bit of it and only wish every parent were required to read this book–or at leasdt given an opportunity to read this book, before “going along” with the rank and file decisions that are pressed upon a people grown stupid in the aggregate. The author opens the book with this quote from Albert Einstein: “He who joyfully marches in rank and file has already earned my contempt. He has been given a large brain by mistake, since for him the spinal cord would suffice.”
I put the book down, after going through the bibliography, with a feeling of great satisfaction. This book by this author is “citizen intelligence.” The author is an “intelligence minuteman,” a term coined by Alessandro Politi in 1992. It is the core contributing element to Collective Intelligence, and I will end by pointing to the work on that topic edited by Canadian PhD student Mark Tovey (55 contributors).
Collective Intelligence: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace
This is the best of books–strong thinking, simple elegant presentation, and a compelling message of human health and freedom. Beyond six stars.
See also the books that Amazon points out have been bought along with this one, I cannot link them here (limit of ten and I have not read them) but I see a very strong emergent human understanding that Industrial-era “rank and file” is very very bad for our health as humans.
