The reader is unlikely to find a book that better contextualizes or sharpens the focus of the moral issues confronting America's founding generation than this book. Using the metaphor of “empires of necessity,” the author shows how America's westward expansion made it the advance-guard of the world, beating a path through the wilderness. But America has never acknowledged that it was enslaved peoples who were in fact beating that path called Manifest Destiny: cutting down forests, turning the wilderness into plantations and into marketable real estate, and picking cotton and cutting the sugar cane that drew more and more territory into a thriving atlantic economy. Slavery alone was the issue at the top of the world's agenda throughout the era of the founding of America. The evils of slavery and the slave trade was the constant refrain of sermons each Sunday from Connecticut to Montevideo; and from Seville to London.
6 Stars on Substance, Revolutionary Illumination, February 20, 2014
This is a book for smart people who care about the Constitution, the Republic, and America the Beautiful — the America of good people with big hearts and strong souls who do the best they can while trapped amidst a complex of corrupt systems that now include most labor unions, most non-profits, and most religions — all the safety nets are gone. It is not an easy read but it could be the most important book you could read right now, as we prepare for the 2014-2020 civil war between the 99% and the 1%. For a sense of where I see Danny Sheehan in modern US history, see my review of Arsonist: The Most Dangerous Man in America. Danny Sheehan's is to the second American revolution as James Otis was to the Founding Fathers. The 1% and their political bi-opoly (the best of the servant class in the eyes of the 1%) are the target for a massive apolitical cross-cultural uprising rooted in natural law, social justice, and common sense.
Danny Sheehan
The book cannot be fully appreciated without first understanding that the author has been a major player in every fundamental Constitutional case having to do with public agency — the sovereignty of the public versus the assumption by the “government” that it has inherent powers once reserved for kings, and that the citizens “donate” (abdicate) their powers once they “elect” said government. I highly recommend Wikipedia's biography on Daniel Sheehan (attorney). This — or the timeline below — is what should have opened the book in the first place. I take the trouble to do this because the value of this book lies with the next generation, the generation now in college and graduate school (or unemployed and unOccupied), not in the generation that rose with Danny and failed to beat down New York money, Texas energy, and the Nazi hydra combined with elite embrace of drugs, money laundering, and pedophilia, among other high crimes against the Republic.
These are listed in order of their most recent publication rather than their original publication dates as Amazon has never understood the value of including first edition dates. Dave Buck merits huge appreciation for having instigated a movement to place many of Buckminster Fuller's works back into a visible platform such as Amazon provides….and reasonably priced as well — each of these is a public treasure. We have added, below the line, books related to Buckminster Fuller, by others. We strongly recommend use of the reviews before making any purchase.
5.0 out of 5 starsNine Nations Was a Snap-Shot — This Is Deep History & Ends Thoughtfully, February 16, 2014
I bought this book prepared to dislike it, having given a rave review to Joel Garreau's The Nine Nations of North America. Let me settle that one immediately. I loved this book. As the author himself points out early on, Garreau's book was a snap-shot, this book is a deep history. I was also quite taken, at the end of the book, with the author's acknowledgements that begin with Garreau and go on to others such as Wilbur Zelinsky's The Cultural Geography of The United States: A Revised Edition and Raymond Gastil's Cultural regions of the United States.
Although I would have liked some illustrations and maps in relation to each section of the book — there is only one map for the entire book — I found the book riveting, and would like to see it become a standard text for multi-disciplinary education across history, political science, sociology, and cultural studies.
Tour de Force! That's the only way to describe Pepe Escobar's remarkable achievement with Globalistan: How the Globalized World Is Dissolving into Liquid War. In page after page, Mr. Escobar demonstrates his remarkable erudition gained in a peripatetic career, spanning the caves of Tora Bora to the slums of Sao Paolo and Mumbai; from the halls of venality to the palaces of the gluttonously wealthy; from conversations with forgotten Pentagon warlords to raps with Brazilian gang lords.
Our Neocon leaders seem to think the rest of the World is frozen in situ, waiting for them to hatch their nefarious schemes. Globalistan shows us the consequences of such a blindered [or should I say “blundered”] attitude.
Producers for the talking heads of “mainstream” media will have to have this book. It is the one volume necessary to make sense of our churning humanity in the 21st Century. A quick scan can provide the background on every crisis from Iran to “Chindia”; from Shiiteistan to the Gazprom Nation; from PetroEurostan to the Bush White House.
Escobar demonstrates why it is true that if we don't find ways to spread our prosperity around the World, the have-nots will come and take it away from us with guns and bombs and box cutters. All of the walls and fences cannot protect the United States, Europe, and Saudi Arabia from overwhelming illegal immigration. Weapons and fences doom us, like the Texans at the Alamo. Eventually they will be overrun by 3 billion human beings living in abject poverty, but with access to the latest episodes of “24” and “Sleeper Cell,” unless we help the Mexicans achieve their dreams of Texas in Mexico.
Hoover's FBI and its threat to the Preservation of our Democratic Values and Institutions, February 8, 2014
Herbert L. Calhoun
Seen properly in its widest context, this book tells us an important story about ourselves. It is a story about a familiar political game that our leaders continue to play on us. First they tell us what to be afraid of, and then they ask us to trust them to know how to protect us? For us to ask questions, to seek open debate, or to make enquiries about any of this is considered disloyal and unpatriotic?
The story in this book is about how one much-revered individual acquired, and then grossly misused the power and trust “we the people” vested in him; and how he was subtly given permission to serve as a proxy for the nation's darkest inner fears. Thus, it is only in this sense that Betty Medsger's book, “The Burglary,” is a story about the FBI — as it is seen indirectly from the vantage point of being the failed institutional reflection of its creator and “leader for life,” J. Edgar Hoover (JEH).
This book thus tells the story of what happens when one of our most revered heroes is allowed to lock himself behind a wall of secrecy, where he and the institution he leads is accountable to no one. And where the willfully created but bogus legends about him are allowed to grow to mythical proportions — until, that is, the truth begins to unravel them. This narrative shows us what happens when that process, and the game of fear upon which it depends, gets played out as trust in our hero begins to wan, and as his image becomes darker and more tarnished as he flails, misfires, turns against us; and finally explodes and disintegrates like a Roman candle on the Fourth of July.
The national hero in question of course is none other than the afore mentioned John Edgar Hoover, who's legend, up until the burglary at the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania, was as pristine as Caesar's wife's bedroom linen. JEH's FBI shield, literally was the nation's collective shield against all of America's worst fears: the Communists spies, the terrorists, the anti-Vietnam war peace activists, religious pacifists, left-leaning liberals generally, but most of all it was a collective shield against the one symbol that condensed all of these fears into one: America's black population. Mr. Hoover's hatred for blacks was visceral and so virulent that by the time of the burglary, it is not an exaggeration to say that it had “gone critical.”
The complexity of the moral landscape during America's founding generation, March 2, 2014
