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]
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.
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.
I like the “fireside chat” description of this book and am providing my own summary primarily for my own benefit and the benefit of those that follow all of my non-fiction reviews at Phi Beta Iota, the Public Intelligence Blog where all of my reviews, in 98 non-fiction categories, are more easily exploited than here at Amazon (but they all lead back to Amazon.
QUOTE (1): We live in a country where telling the hard truth with clarity has become taboo.
I have two competing views of this book. The first, beyond five stars, is earned by this quote from page 13:
QUOTE: In our history, the greatest patriots have been those leaders and ordinary citizens who have dared to hold America to our own highest standards–even at the cost of ostracism, punishment, imprisonment and, at times–e3ven death.” I would add unemployment to the list–Washington today does NOT want to hear truth about anything at all.
I found this movie very compelling and am putting it into circulation as a shared good. It is built around four specific veterans (one each from WWII, Viet-Nam, and Gulf I) and does a superb job of weaving direct interviews, past photos of the three protagonists, and archival film clips.
The Marine from Gulf I is especially compelling as he tells of his deliberate refusal to accept a Conscientious Objective discharge after killing over 30 people in Iraq, and ultimately, with the aid of a high-powered lawyer, prevails in getting an Honorable Discharge.
The same Marine–and the others–discuss how one must train normal people to kill, and there is no thought of how to untrain them (war dogs get reintegration training, humans do not).
The clear message, in these words:Ā We are One, and War is no way to settle disagreements.Ā That is of course both correct and naive–it discounts the fact that Empire is about money for a few, and the troops are merely cannon fodder.Ā That's the first thing we have to change–take the money out of war and into peace.
This book is available immediately from WHSmith. I recommend it without reservation, it is in my top dozen books on the World Brain – Global Brain -Global Mind – Collective Intellgence reading area.
Amazon seems to be deleting a lot of reviews from top reviewers, which I find quite annoying. Indeed, Amazon has become so unreliable, on top of being unresponsive to years of requests for simple changes (e.g. being able to access all reviews by a specific reviewer against a specific search such as “World Brain” that I finally created Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, where you can access all reviews in each each of 98 reading categories, all leading back to Amazon, but not dependent on Amazon.
This book is extraordinary in that is directly connects information to DNA and makes an absolutely fascinating case for how every single atom on the planet is an information element, and all of the atoms in the whole are the Global Mind.
There are no notes, and normally this would set me off, but I found the personal reflections of this author so utterly extraordinary that I can not find fault on this point.
Phenomenal Integration of Ideas–Superb “Once Over”
Almost a Five–Making Wrong Things Righter
