Review: Manifesto for the Noosphere: The Next Stage in the Evolution of Human Consciousness

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Cosmos & Destiny, Culture, Research, Future, History, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy
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Jose Arguelles

5.0 out of 5 stars Baseline Reading, VERY Dense, A Long Study,January 29, 2012

I read this book in galley form and forgot to post a review after the pre-order period ended. This book was a direct inspiration to my own forthcoming book from the same publisher that I am evidently not allowed to link to here at Amazon, The Open Source Everything Manifesto:Transparency, Truth, and Trust.

From the author:

It [noosphere] is a whole-systems paradigm that melds prophecy and analysis of current world trends. It is a perception that the transformation of the biosphere is inevitably leading to a new geological epoch and evolutionary cycle, and it is due to the impact of human thought on the environment that this new era — the Noosphere — is dawning.

This is a capstone work that integrates all the author's past works, each linked here.

The Mayan Factor: Path Beyond Technology
Earth Ascending: An Illustrated Treatise on Law Governing Whole Systems
Time and the Technosphere: The Law of Time in Human Affairs
Surfers of the Zuvuya: Tales of Interdimensional Travel
Galactic Meditation: Entering the Synchronic Order
Mandala
The Transformative Vision: Reflections on the Nature and History of Human Expression
Book of the Transcendence: Cosmic History Chronicles Volume 6
The Arcturus Probe: Tales and Reports of an Ongoing Investigation
The Call of Pacal Votan: Time is the Fourth Dimension

and more. One could spend a lifetime on this author's reflections.

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Review: Redesigning Society

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Games, Models, & Simulations, Information Operations, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Public Administration, Survival & Sustainment, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
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Russell Ackoff and Sheldon Rovin

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 for Democracy as Design, 4 for Fragmentation, 5 on Balance,December 15, 2011

I bought this book after being turned to Reflexivity by Dr. Kent Myers, principal author of Reflexive Practice: Professional Thinking for a Turbulent World–disclosure, he profiled me in that book, to my great surprise, as good a gong as one could ask for. This is a great book, alongside which I recommend Buckminster Fuller's books Critical Path and Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure, and the more recent book from Medard Gabel, co-creator with Buckminster Fuller of the analog World Game, Designing a World That Works for All: How the Youth of the World are Creating Real-World Solutions for the UN Millenium Development Goals and Beyond.In that context the book is a five. I completely agree with the earlier review that graded it a four on basis of spottiness (some great chapters, some not so great), but I upgrade it to 5 for two reasons: first, because the entire book has an explicit focus on Democracy As Design and Democracy as a System of Systems that cannot be “broken down” the way science strives to break down what it studies. In Democracy, as in Reflexivity, the engaged participants are wild cards, nothing can be predicted, agility and resilience are everything, and it is the relationships (the Yang) rather than the objects (the Ying) that really matter. That is six-star stuff no contest.

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Review: The Innovator’s Manifesto – Deliberate Disruption for Transformational Growth

5 Star, Asymmetric, Cyber, Hacking, Odd War, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Strategy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution
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Michael Raynor

5.0 out of 5 stars Helps Understand OccupyWallStreet–Solid 5 Misses Mark on True Cost Economics,October 13, 2011

I was given this book as a gift, and could not have–in a million years of planning–gotten a better book relevant to OccupyWallStreet (OWS) than this book. I read it this morning while my MGB was in the shop recovering from my trip to NYC OWS 6-7 October (shredded the generator). Halfway through my notes, advanced here, I observe that the book is a pleasure to read and a substantial advance on the earlier disruption explorations.

While I sympathize with those who do not “get” this book and downgrade it, I gave it a solid five and seriously considered a six star plus (only 10% of my reviews go there) but kept it at five because any book that considers Walmart disruptive (which it is) without observing the “true cost” to society, the environment, government, and small businesses, is completely missing the big picture.

This book does go beyond the earlier book that I have also reviewed, The Innovator's Dilemma: The Revolutionary Book That Will Change the Way You Do Business, and while Clayton M. Christensen has been churning books out with variations on the theme, I do see in this book very important, useful, immediately applicable insights and would recommend buying the first Christensen book and this book (to which he writes a Foreword).

I am less interested in the emphasis that the author places on Disruption Theory being able to build a bridge from the art of successfully guessing what innovations with succeed to the science of increasing by 5% or more which innovations will succeed, but that is, as the author points out, very significant when you consider that the percentage improvement is on hundreds of billions of dollars of investment.

QUOTE (5): Disruption's central claim is “that an innovation has the best chance of success when it has a very different performance profile and appeals to cusomters of relatively little interest to dominant incumbents, and the organizaton commercializing it enjoys substantial strategic and operational autonomy.”

Could that be a description of OWS and the 99% that have been screwed over by the two-party tyranny that has shaken down Wall Street and the military, intelligence, health, energy, and prison complexes for political contributions (bribes) while discounting the public treasury by 95% (the going rate for an earmark is 5%)?  The 99% are of no real interest to Wall Street or the two-party crime family that has hijacked democracy, and OWS is demonstrating substantial strategic and operational autonomy. What neither the left or right “get” right now about OWS is that it is a manifestation of a broad view that we need to dismantle both parties and end institutionalized politics while restoring the sovereign individual.

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Review: Public Parts – How Sharing in the Digital Age Improves the Way We Work and Live

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Democracy, Information Society, Intelligence (Public)
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Jeff Jarvis

5.0 out of 5 stars Being Twittered, a Helpful Contribution,September 27, 2011

I was going to use the existing review as a guest review at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog (all point back to their Amazon pages), but on further investigation have found that this book is being Twittered, and the Executive Director of the Earth Intelligence Network thinks very highly of it (he read it, he does not do reviews, this is my way of sharing his views and my links as well as flagging the book for the global readers of Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog). So in part to give the author a break, in part to urge used of the Look Inside feature that Amazon enables and the publisher utilized, and in part to point to the below books, I give this book five stars and suggest that it deserves a bit more praise than it has received.

See Also:
Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder
Groundswell, Expanded and Revised Edition: Winning in a World Transformed by Social Technologies
Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations
All Rise: Somebodies, Nobodies, and the Politics of Dignity (BK Currents (Hardcover))
Society's Breakthrough!: Releasing Essential Wisdom and Virtue in All the People
The Tao of Democracy: Using co-intelligence to create a world that works for all
Engaging Emergence: Turning Upheaval into Opportunity
Conscious Evolution: Awakening Our Social Potential
Cognitive Surplus: How Technology Makes Consumers into Collaborators
Ambient Findability: What We Find Changes Who We Become

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Amazon sucks in some ways.  The following two relevant non-fiction titles are “not allowed” by their rules against “self-promotion,” never mind that they are the only two books on their respective topics and highly relevant to the domain that this book addresses.

2010 INTELLIGENCE FOR EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

2008 COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace

Reference: Integrity at Scale Free Online Book

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Blog Wisdom, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Culture, Research, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Information Society, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Intelligence (Public), Leadership, Monographs, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Politics, Priorities, Public Administration, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)
Click on Image to Enlarge

 

Recommended by Contributing Editor John Steiner

Source Home Page

Chapters with Links Below the Line

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Review: Critical Choices – The United Nations, Networks, and the Future of Global Goverance

5 Star, Best Practices in Management, Change & Innovation, Civil Society, Complexity & Resilience, Decision-Making & Decision-Support, Diplomacy, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Politics, Priorities, Public Administration, Security (Including Immigration), Stabilization & Reconstruction, Strategy, Survival & Sustainment
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Wolfgang H. Reinicke (Editor), Francis Deng (Editor), Jan Martin Witte (Editor), Thorsten Benner (Editor), Beth Whitaker (Editor), John Gershman (Editor)

5.0 out of 5 stars Global Hybrid Network Governance Primer for UN+, July 21, 2011

By  Robert D. Steele (Oakton, VA United States) – See all my reviews

Last week I reviewed the first book on this topic by the first author (Wolfgang Reinicke), Global Public Policy: Governing Without Government. I overlooked that book published in 1998, and this book in 2000, for lack of consciousness. Evidently others did as well given the lack of reviews. What makes both these books even more important now is the appointment of the primary author, Wolfgang Reinicke, to the position of inaugural dean of the school of public policy at the Central European University founded and richly endowed by George Soros. To understand how much George Soros has broken away from the government-financial crime axis, his essay free online and also the first fifty-seven pages of The Philanthropy of George Soros: Building Open Societies is essential reading.

I read this book at three levels: for content on its merits; for insight into the specific individuals and agencies behind the book; and for insight into where George Soros might be hoping that Dean Reinicke will go with network governance, what some of us call Panarchy, which is rooted in what we call M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making). In other words, secrecy is out, transparent true cost information about everything is in–transparency breeds truth, truth breeds trust, and this is how we achieve a non-zero prosperous world at peace that works for all, not just the top 1%.

On page 91 one finds a quote better suited to the front matter, from Kofi Annan:

QUOTE (91): The United Nations once dealt only with governments. By now we know that peace and prosperity cannot be achieved without partnerships involving governments, international organizations, the business community, and civil society.

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Review (Guest): The Ultimate Resource 2

5 Star, Change & Innovation, Education (Universities), Environment (Solutions), Future, Information Society, Intelligence (Wealth of Networks), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Survival & Sustainment, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity
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Julian Lincoln Simon

5.0 out of 5 stars The doomslayer falls,April 4, 1998

By A Customer

On Sunday, February 8th, psychologist and economist Julian L. Simon succumbed to a heart attack in Maryland. It is difficult to overstate the damage his death will cause the world debate on overpopulation, natural resources, and the environment. Dr. Simon's prolific and energetic mind gave rise to fourteen books and countless papers and lectures, dedicated to overthrowing the dogma that underlies so much of today's environmental discourse.

Simon, still considered a maverick after thirty years of relentless data-gathering, impeccable empirical work, and well-thought out conclusions, questioned the unquestionable. He maintained that the earth is in good shape by every conceivable measure, and that the environmental situation continues to improve each year. Every index of human happiness – food prices, net income, infant mortality, life expectancy, disease rates – has steadily improved. He documented those claims with reams of data, culminating in his 1996 tour de force The State of Humanity. It is absolutely comprehensive, and contains enough obscure data to make the most jaded Trivial Pursuit fan squirm (if you ever want to read about the average lower-class Brazilian's annual starch intake, look no further).

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