Review: The Blank Slate–The Modern Denial of Human Nature

6 Star Top 10%, Civil Society, Democracy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Blank SlateOne of a Handful of Revolutionary and Liberating References,

May 12, 2007

Steven Pinker

This is a truly extraordinary book, some of the finest scholarship I have ever read, easily up there with E. O. Wilson's “Consilience” and other such works.

Four bridges from biology to culture: 1) cognitive science; 2) cognitive neuroscience; 3) behavioral genetics; and 4) evolutionary psychology. I am of course reminded of Stewart Brand, Howard Rheingold, and the long-standing views on Co-Evolution.

The author's primary and most adroitly presented view is that the human mind is NOT a blank slate, and that we must completely separate science from religion as well as politics, because in failing to recognize human nature, we are making bad decisions in many areas. He cites Chomsky as saying that children should grow a language, not learn it.

He sees culture and cognition as the essential “special sauce” for sustainable diversity and societal design. He sees culture as the means by which we construct and destruct.

I believe we are there, and the work of Tom Atlee (“Tao of Democracy”) and Jim Rough (“Society's Breakthrough), along with the other books on the transpartisan list, are the end of the beginning. We can now evolve properly. The author outlines how religious dogma and political ideology harm society and science and humanity most severely.

He lists four fears of the dogmatic: 1) fear of inequality; 2) fear of imperfectability; 3) fear of determinism; and 4) fear of nihilism.

He focuses on the costs and consequences of self-deception, and the important not only of leaning to learn, but of learning to learn collaboratively rather than competitively. He emphasizes that reciprocal altruism works and as a Nobel Prize certified in the 1990's, trust lowers the cost of doing anything.

On pages 220-221 he discusses our need for intuitive physics, biology, engineering, psychology, special sense, number sense, sense of probability, economics, mental databases and logic, and language. This is precisely what the Earth Intelligence Network plans to fund with Medard Gabel's EarthGame. EarthGame will displace rote learning and structured prison-like education for many.

Part V discusses hot buttons, with a chapter for each: Politics, Violence, Gender/Rape, Children; and the Arts. He says that reality-based theory and practice work better than dogma-based ideological biases. Of course they do, but the majority of the public has dropped out and left thieves and morons in charge. We can fix that.

The ends brilliantly. Suffering does NOT ennoble, there is no noble savage, we must understand and craft the culture of man. As Will and Ariel Durant tell is “The Lessons of History,” the only real revolution is in the mind of man. The author cites Richard Shweder and his trinity of autonomy, divinity, and community. There are 901 references over 43 pages and an amazing five-page list as an appendix, from Donald E. Brown, of Human Universals.

This is a transpartisan reference work of great importance.

All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Bk Currents)
Consilience: The Unity of Knowledge
Doing Democracy
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right
The Lessons of History
The New Craft of Intelligence: Personal, Public, & Political–Citizen's Action Handbook for Fighting Terrorism, Genocide, Disease, Toxic Bombs, & Corruption
The Republican War on Science
Smart Mobs: The Next Social Revolution
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People

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Review: Escaping the Matrix–How We the People can change the world

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Democracy
Escaping Matrix
Amazon Page

Perhaps the Most Revolutionary and Liberating Book Going Into 2008,

May 12, 2007

Richard Moore

This book has jumped to the top of the transpartisan list. Together with All Rise and several of the other books on that list, it is an actionable practical formula for restoring the Republic and then spreading participatory democracy and moral capitalism–communal localized capitalism–to the rest of the world in a non-violent information-driven manner.

The “matrix” is the virtual unreality that governments and their corporately-owned media have manufactured to distract, imprison, enslave, and manipulate the majority of the public into dropping out of politics and failing to exercise their right to think, debate, vote, and oversee their representatives. I completely agree with Ron Paul when he says we need to dismantle this insolvent corrupt mess of a government, and reconfigure ourselves back to a Republic of, by, and for We the People.

Key themes in this world interconnectedness instead of separation; community sovereignty instead of federal sovereignty, distributed economics (no absentee landlords) instead of concentrated wealth, transformation and harmonization instead of adversarial, common sense judgments instead of special interest judgments, and finally, the reconstruction of social will to completely overpower, in a non-violent manner, the class war and globalized predatory looting of the commons that the central bankers have wrought on the planet.

This non-violent social transformation, according to the author, includes local empowerment, human liberation, participatory democracy, sensible economics, and cooperation on a global scale for mutual benefit of all.

The elite is fighting back, repressing dissent, even fully-funded logical dissent. ABC is deleting Ron Paul, who is winning his debates, and this is all I need to believe that we are winning. The revolution will not be televised, as Joe Trippi's book explains to well.

This is a transpartisan author who is quite correct when he says that history shows that we have a false manufactured reality being screened everyday, which is completely different from the real world. He also understands (see my list on Natural Capitalism) that predatory imperialism has deliberately kept the Third World poor and genocidal, with the explicit intent of looting their natural resources and getting as many of them as possible to die off–eugenics.

This author provides one of the finest summaries of how predatory capitalism has disenfranchised population, suborned governments, and “exploded the client” as Michael Lewis tells us in more detail in “Liar's Poker” and more recently, John Perkins' “Confessions of an Economic Hit Man.”

He reviews the transition for competitive imperialism to collective imperialism, and has some very elegant detail on how the central banks have managed a succession of global “bait and switch,” successively destroying, at great profit, the gold standard, the petrodollar standard, and now the United States of America. The banks, he tells us, are “the house” and profit regardless of the misfortunes of others, indeed, because of the manufactured misfortunes, wars, stolen aid, botched humanitarian assistance, and so on.

He has two revelations in this book that for me, at least, are explosive. First, that FDR approved eight covert actions against the Japanese with the intent of forcing them to commit the first overt act of war against the US. Second, that Viet-Nam was a known “no-win” war with a known ten-year trajectory and a known 50,000 projected dead. It was used to militarize the US on a grander scale, while enriching a handful of banks and corporations, all as the expense of the individual tax-payer.

He offers fascinating perspectives of how WWI and WWII were deliberately started (I have read other books in this vein, I believe the author's analysis to be on target), and he accuses Henry Kissinger, a known war criminal, of being the cause of the Middle East problems in his constant mis-representation and manipulation of the views of different parties for whom he was supposed to be an honest broker.

Banking, Oil, Covert Action, and Overt Intervention are the four pillars of what Derek Leebaert called “The Fifty Year Wound” and Chalmers Johnson, “Sorrows of Empire.”

He tells us that in the 1970's the US elites concluded that managing consensus democracy was annoyingly complex, so they began moving toward police state capabilities with the use of big lies, among which I include 9-11, never investigated honorably. I believe that Dick Cheney, Rudy Giuliani and Larry Silverstein should be indicted, arrested, investigated, and interrogated with the same techniques they approved for use on others. Drugs and especially marijuana have been used to create a prison complex while the US Government has deliberately, as a covert action, imported drugs into the US for profit, using the drug czar to control the criminal competition. I am told that Ollie North personally supervised the loading of cocaine on to U.S. Navy vessels in Colombia, and this one of many leads I would like to see brought before a Grand Jury.

He tells us that the core elements of the elite plan are five: US-UK control of oil; neoliberal economics; WTO/IMF as economic assassins; police state powers; and the Pentagon as a big stick; on which see General Smedley Butler, “War is a Racket.”

Key point by the author: culture (and social will) are the missing ingredient for activating the bottom-up Epoch B collective leadership and will of We the People.

He says that reform must be all or nothing. I agree. He says that representative democracy is an adversarial system that must be replaced by a fully participatory bottom-up collaborative system. Adversaries take their differences as a given, collaborators take them as a starting point for dialog.

He is at one with the author of “All Rise” and with Reuniting America's transpartisanship vision of dignity for all, and inclusion of all. An opinion can be debated but a person is always valid and not to be denied or excluded.

We can do this. He concludes with the best annotated bibliography I have seen, as relevant to our challenge in 2008.

All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (Bk Currents)
Confessions of an Economic Hit Man
Liar's Poker: Rising Through the Wreckage on Wall Street
Manufacture of Evil: Ethics, Evolution, and the Industrial System
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Revolution Will Not Be Televised: Democracy, the Internet, and the Overthrow of Everything
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It

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Review DVD: The U.S. vs. John Lennon

5 Star, Culture, DVD - Light, Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Reviews (DVD Only)

US John LennonGive Peace a Chance,

May 26, 2007

John Lennon

I chose this movie for reflection, as I have come to the conclusion that the U.S. Government, at the policy level (Cheney & top political appointees) is insane, criminal, and destroying the Republic. Like Lee Iacocca, I keep asking myself, “where is the outrage?”

John Lennon, whatever his warts, got it right. Give peace a chance indeed (see the image I have uploaded, it represents the rest of my life's work and illustrates what Lennon was hinting at).

I believe the Dick Cheney, Rudy Gulliani, and Larry Silverstein murdered most if not all of the victims of 9/11 in NYC, and that Paul Wolfowitz and Donald Rumsfeld put a missile into the Pentagon and separately orchestrated the murder of those on the airplane that crashed. I cannot prove it, but I can certainly say with authority that 9/11 has not been properly investigated; that Iraq was done on a web of lies and that Iran has played Cheney like fiddle, using US power and money and lives to get rid of Iran's two arch-enemies, the Talban and Saddam Hussein.

We have gone NUTS as country. Martin Luther King, John Lennon, even “Hanoi” Jane Fonda were on target. Civil disobedience in long overdue in this country, and this film reminds us why individual morality and individual passion for justice matters.

It also reminds us of the lengths that entrenched power will go to silence and intimiate its legal ethcial opponents. The federal government, at the political appointee level, has no honor.

Why We Fight
War Is a Racket: The Anti-War Classic by America's Most Decorated General, Two Other Anti=Interventionist Tracts, and Photographs from the Horror of It
The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (The American Empire Project)
The Fifty-Year Wound: How America's Cold War Victory Has Shaped Our World
Rogue Nation: American Unilateralism and the Failure of Good Intentions
The Unconquerable World: Power, Nonviolence, and the Will of the People
Gandhi (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)
The Pathology of Power (A Challenge to Human Freedom and Safety)

Review: Where Have All the Leaders Gone?

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Biography & Memoirs, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Congress (Failure, Reform), Country/Regional, Democracy, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Leadership

IacoccaNational Enema With Wit and Character,

April 27, 2007

Lee Iacocca

This book earns my vote for top transpartisan book of the decade, along with “All Rise” (see link below). This great man is saying things that I and others have been saying since 2000, but because of his stature, we now finally have the national enema that we all need. Lee Iacocca, in my personal view, should link up with Reuniting America, and volunteer to form a Sunshine Cabinet of transpartisan retired leaders (corporate, military, law enforcement, education, and others). We need to show America that it is possible to create a balanced sustainable budget, and to have common sense priorities.

The book opens with a discussion of the nine C's of leadership: Curiosity, Creativity, Communicator, Character, Courage, Conviction, Charisma, Competency, and Common Sense. In evaluating the current crop of candidates for President, all fail with the exception of Joe Biden for President and John Edwards for Vice President.

He stresses people and prioities, and for the first time in any book I have read, he calls for all presidential candidates to appoint their Cabinet BEFORE the election so the people can evaluate the team and not just the Man. This is something I have advocated since 2000, see the original documents at Citizens-Party.org.

His comments on Bush-Cheney cronism are devastatingly on the mark. He points out that the insider game excludes top talent.

He finds Congress to be failing at the five top issues for all Americans: Iraq, Jobs, Health Care, Education, and Energy.

He is critical of the Executive for telling lies to get a war with Iraq, for condoning torture, and for being reactive instead of proactive.

To make his point, he notes that for what we have spent in Iraq, we could have instead hired 8 million teachers, 8 million police, fire, and medical support specialists; funded 25M college scholarships, and given every citizen a year of free gas and health care.

In criticizing the Iraq strategy, he points out that unlike Gulf I, there are no Arab nations in the coalition this time, and that is the truth-teller. He specifically laments the loss of “America the Good” in the eyes of the world.

Among the top issues he personally focuses on in the book are Energy, Fair Trade vice Free Trade, restoration of moral capitalism and an end to the CEO looting of companies at the expense of workers; the protection of the middle class, the reduction of medical (and I would add, educational) bureaucracies, and the US brain gap–South Korea, Japan, and Singapore are getting a reverse brain drain from the US, as well as training their own better than we are.

He slams James Carville for representing the worst of the structured political process, where a candidate is told what their policies will be based on political consultants and focus groups.

The book closes with a discussion of four traits he learned from others: Optimism; Common Sense; Discipline; and–from his mother–Love.

At the end, he calls America to action, asking each of us to give something up, put something back in, and elect a LEADER.

I do NOT agree with those who are critical of either the author or the book. This is an easy to read totally straight-up book that is now, along with “All Rise” and “The Tao of Democracy” among my top-rated Transpartisan books. See my varied lists on Transpartisan, democracy, immoral capitalism, impeachment of Cheney, etc.

If he will help form a Sunshine Cabinet, and Reuniting America can raise $500M a year ($20 from 25 million Americans, or $100 from 5 million Americans) we can close down the Republican and Democratic partisan machines that have corrupted our democracy, and we can restore informed engaged democracy. We need this man's common sense now more than ever.

All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People

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Review: Momentum–Igniting Social Change in the Connected Age

6 Star Top 10%, Civil Society, Communications, Democracy, Education (General)

MomentumOne of Two MUST READS For Any Social Activist,

April 27, 2007

Allison Fine

Edit of 30 Mar 08 to add more links.

This book, and the much more detailed book by Chip Heath & Dan Heath, “Made to Stick” are perfect partners in putting really actiionble public intelligence in the hands of social activitists and transpartisan political reformers. I have added both books to my list of transpartisan books.

This book focuses on digital tools for social change, on creating connected activism, on addressing the listening and communicating deficits.

The author provides a checklist of 12 points for evaluating how connected your activist organization is, another checklist of 8 points on powering the edges, and a final 95-point summary of the “Cluetrain Manifesto,” another book I have reviewed. All of these are useful.

The author points out that hyperlinks subvert hierarchy, and I could not agree more. Epoch B leadership is a form of swarm leadership, and the connected collective can easily bring the hierarchical authority down.

I especially liked the author's focus on all of us being content managers. Sharing information, as Vint Cerf has said recently, is how we get a Return on Information.

The book ends with some hard-earned “Do's and Don't's” and a chapter on the future of funding for social activism.

Over-all a quick read with plenty of substance, and an excellent complement to “Made to Stick.”

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die
The Cluetrain Manifesto: The End of Business as Usual
How to Change the World: Social Entrepreneurs and the Power of New Ideas, Updated Edition
The Power of Unreasonable People: How Social Entrepreneurs Create Markets That Change the World
The Change Handbook: The Definitive Resource on Today's Best Methods for Engaging Whole Systems
Democracy's Edge: Choosing to Save Our Country by Bringing Democracy to Life
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The World Cafe: Shaping Our Futures Through Conversations That Matter
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization

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Review: Don’t Bother Me Mom–I’m Learning!

6 Star Top 10%, Democracy, Education (General), Games, Models, & Simulations
Amazon Page
Amazon Page

Nails It–Secretary of Education Needs to Read This Book,

April 27, 2007

Marc Prensky

I was introduced to the author's work on Digital Natives by a very smart and unusually open-minded colleague at the National Geospatial Agency, and I am hooked as well as relieved.

The greatest complement I can give this book is that my 15-year old, a master of Warlock, saw this book come in the door and immediately took it away from me and read it overnight. He gives it high marks.

This is also the book that inspired me to take Serious Games and Games for Change *very* seriously. Most gamers do not understand the need to work toward an EarthGame that includes actual budgets and actual science, but Medard Gabel of BigPictureSmallWorld gets it, and that's enough for me.

The list of games provided at the end by the author, to create a serious game home learning environment, is priceless. Some may be overtaken by events but the bottom line is that digital learning is vastly superior to rote learning in schools.

I am a participant in three Hacker communities–Hackers on Planet Earth (HOPE) based in New York, Hac-Tic based in Amsterdam, and Hackers/THINK based in California. I have met thousands of hackers over the years, and I am certain that the best and the brightest are not those with straight A's in the current school system, but those that tune out the high school regime by their junior year, and start learning what they want to learn on their own. My oldest son just won first prize in the Fairfax County digital music content, representing his school, but he will not graduate because he refuses to spend time on Algebra 2. He has very high SAT scores, will pass the GED with an almost perfect score, and will take digital music and digital art courses at three colleges in the DC area as a non-degree candidate. I go on at length here because this is both very personal for me, and also a national disaster–our entire curriculum is so out of date, and taught by so many drones, the few master teachers not withstanding, that I completely understand why our national ranking in math and science is out the window, why we have fallen to 7th on the national innovation scale, behind three Nordic countries and three Asian countries.

I admire this author. In a most positive manner, he is telling us the Secretary of Education is quite naked, and what we can do about it. This is a foundation book for any parent of “digital natives.”

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Review: Society’s Breakthrough!–Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People

6 Star Top 10%, Change & Innovation, Consciousness & Social IQ, Democracy, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum)

Society BreakthroughRenaissance of We the People, Unifying the Young and Old,

April 27, 2007

Jim Rough

This is one of the most brilliant and compellingly comprehensive books I have read in recent time, and certainly one of less than 100, probably less than 25, and perhaps even one of the ten most important books available in English.

Everyone, including corporations, is starting to realize that Green is Good (see my list on Natural Capitalism), and that the Earth is at a tipping point. The ten high-level threats are Poverty, Infectious Disease, Environmental Degradation, Inter-State Conflict, Civil War, Genocide, Other Atrocities (e.g. kidnapping for body parts or child soldiers), Proliferation, Terrorism, and Transnational Crime.

What this author has done is pioneered the concept of Wisdom Councils at every level of society, a leap ahead of citizen involvement initiatives like Citizen's Councils formed in Denmark to study issues of national importance for legislative action. This book suggests a strategy for bringing “all” together as “We the People” where We assume our rightful role as intelligent top authority.

The author is acutely aware that we are fragmented, ignorant, inattentive, and ineffective as a collective at any level. He suggests that we got that way because we adopted a mechanistic system to govern us, where self-interest is the prevailing value, rather than dignity, sharing, open-mindedness, and so on.

He articulates a vision of a We-ocracy, a circle instead of a box, with a spirit similar to our Native American councils, where people seek what's best for all. And, he suggests a surprisingly simple social invention, not fully tested, that can make the vision real.

It was my great good fortune to meet the author personally at the Nexus for Change conference organized by Peggy Holman and others, and I found him to be one of the most sensible, down-to-earth, and focused individuals I have ever met. He told me there that collective problems require collective solutions, and I agree with him completely. It's about all of us, as well as each of us. Along with this book I recommend Tom Atlee's “Tao of Democracy” and the other books linked to below.

The author's conception of the Wisdom Council, which is now enjoying significant success and public appreciation in the Eco-topia of the Pacific Northwest, is one of a continuous Constitutional Convention with all of us as permanent delegates. It is a way “We the People” can come into existence and collectively choose topics, explore them and evolve consensus … possibly some sensible sustainable decision or policy that goes out 200 years (what the Native Americans called 7th Generation thinking).

It's a simple approach that bridges all eight of what I call the tribes of intelligence–government, military, law enforcement, business, academia, non-governmental organizations, media networks, and most importantly, all citizens in all civil societies including social advocacy groups, labor unions, and religions.

The book describes an innocuous-seeming Constitutional Amendment to the United States Constitution. But the author inscribes the book to me, ending with “we don't need an amendment, we are out doing it.” Now, there are experiments in cities and organizations in different countries, begun by ordinary citizens, proving that this strategy can work. (see www.WiseDemocracy.org) This is good news for those of us who care about society as a whole.

I recommend this book, and the three books below, to every citizen and especially to the 48% that do not vote. We get morons and thieves in power because we all do not vote and hence these charlatans are elected by a minority of dogmatic fanatics aided by less than honorable tactics such as Karl Rove has pioneered (see “Bush's Brain”).

But beyond the bits of power our system currently provides to “the people,” all-of-us-together can assert power over the system. This book, the books below, and the many books I connect in my varied lists, show us how. They are ammunition in our combat with the Republican and Democratic Party mafiosos. Unity08 is in my view a scam–a last ditch defense of the totally corrupt two-party “winner take all” and share the spoils system. Only the Center for Wise Democracy, Reuniting America, the Transpartisan Policy Institute, and a couple of other massive social networks now in formation, can transform political hypocrisy, corruption, and illegitimacy. Our government today, all three branches, is illegitimate. We can fix that.

We are long overdue for a popular uprising. This author, like Gandhi (see the DVD), provides for an informed non-violent revolution that is both inevitable, and unbeatable. We the People … what a great concept. Time to honor it again, with the Wisdom Councils and the strategy of full engagement that the author outlines for us.

Bush's Brain
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents)
Seeing the Invisible: National Security Intelligence in an Uncertain Age
Bush's Brain
Gandhi (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)
Don't Bother Me Mom–I'm Learning!

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