I read a lot, and I confess to have been among those who “bought in” to the celebrity alarmism of Al Gore, but I never displaced the totality of the threats to Earth for an obsessive focus on carbon emissions. Among the three books I have always recommended that are far more balanced than anything by the International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) are:
This review is primarily for the folks that follow my stuff, which includes, apart from all the non-fiction books, great DVDs for serious people with little patience for most idiocy.
I watched this on a flight to Europe and it was fully satisfying.
Although the book is daunting at first site, at 626 pages, it is MUCH easier to read than Laurrie Garrett's Betrayal of Trust: The Collapse of Global Public Health, for the simple reason that it is a collection of twenty-nine stories by different investigative journalists and can be read in pieces.
Use “Inside the Book” provided by Amazon to see the range of the stories. This is mostly about government terrorism against its own people, or in a few instances (e.g. thalidomide, fast food) government complicity in corporate atrocities against the paying public.
Eight of the pieces center on Iraq from 2002 onwards.
Focused on Media, Art, Culture, Less So on Social Networks, May 10, 2008
Henry Jenkins
I come late to this book, published in 2006. I do not regret it. It is a bit too focused on media, art, and “culture” for me, but I cannot penalize the author for being a master of arcane tid-bits. This book is a collection of previously published articles reworked into a book–for me, that is a good thing, as I do not cover the sources that originally carried the pieces.
The book comes recommended by Howard Rheingold and Bruce Sterling, two of the originals, so that alone should encourage anyone interested in this area to take this book very seriously.
Although the author focuses on “participatory culture” the emphasis is this book is on the CULTURE part, not the social networks, integral consciousness, appreciative inquiry, co-intelligence, and so on as I have learned from my Eco-Topia colleauges.
The author himself speaks early on about the book speaking to three concepts:
+ Media convergence
+ Participatory culture
+ Collective intelligence
He gets an A for the first, a B for the second, and a C for the third.
I don't consider myself qualified to be critical of this book, so here are the tid-bits that grabbed me:
+ Paradigm shift is not about communications among individuals but rather about their *being* in *being* with one another (from one to many and one to one to many to many)
+ Author credits Ithiel de Sola Pool (1983) with seeing the transitions that were coming
+ Convergence changes relationships and logics
+ The biggest convergence may be the sharp total confrontation between top down attempts to keep control, and bottom up demands to wrest control
+ Media right now is being excessively influenced by the wealthy that can afford the trinkets (look for my 1993 rant to INTERVAL on “God, Man, and Informaiton: Comments to Interval” for the other side of the story)
+ Emotions and feelings of connection matter more–the author writes of an “affective economy”
+ Producers are finding they must agree to co-creation (this media or cultural trend has a counterpart in the business world, see the Business Week cover story of 20 June 2005 on “The Power of Us”)
+ Media industry is split between the prohibitionists and the collaborationists, and I am most fascinated to see mobile telephone companies in the latter category. If I had to place a bet on Nokia versus Google, I would go with Nokia.
+ Citing another author (always with credit) I am engaged by the concept of “adhocracies” as the opposite of bureaucracies.
+ Digital enclaves are becoming counter-productive, allowing nesting rather than engagement (at least among the one billion rich), need to get out and cross those cultural divides.
I am glad I got and read this book. It is clearly very learned in the media convergence and media-mind aspect, but it is not at all as versed as I was expecting in the nuts and bolts of participatory networking, appreciative inquiry, deliberative democracy, integral consciousness, world brain, etcetera, nor is it all oriented toward large scale problem solving with collective intelligence.
From the larger literature within which I appreciate this book, I see four fully interwoven reasons why America is no longer a republic:
1) Excessive concentration of wealth at the top, CEOs earning 400 times more a year than their lowest paid employee. See Lee Iacocca's recent work, Where Have All the Leaders Gone?
2) Wealth corrupting politicians, while corporate personality avoids justice. The Federal Reserve in particular needs to be closed down.
3) A house-broken media unwilling to challenge “the establishment,” and
4) An inert public, not realizing that it is being treated–in human terms–just as inhumanely as cattle force fed to death in fourteen months.
“Live Free or Die.” Now there's a theme. There are 27 secessionist movements in America, among which Vermont's is the most viable. The time may well have come to dissolve the existing federal government if we cannot achieve electoral reform and the restoration of constitutional integrity.
Makes the case for a People's Bank-Union-Intelligence Agency,
October 23, 2005
Larry Beinhart
This is quite an extraordinary book, one of five I picked up while browsing at Barnes & Noble today. It gets a full five stars for elegant writing, logical presentation, and a lovely index. I read it together with Noam Chomsky's Imperial Ambitions: Conversations on the Post-9/11 World (American Empire Project) interviews, and the two complement one another.
“Fog facts” are facts that are out in the open, but “invisible” in the sense that no one acts on them. The stolen Florida election–30,000 plus disenfranchised blacks *and* “overcount” votes where Al Gore was both checked and written, rejected as invalid instead of returned for verification–the specious claims against Iraq; the 9-11 Commission apologia; the list goes on. For myself, the most interesting fog facts dealt with the number of terrorists caught and jailed by France and other nations, as a tiny fraction of the cost of invading Afghanistan and Iraq, and with little to show for it excepts casualties, including significant numbers of US amputations being concealed from the public.
The author “outs” Judith Miller as an agent of Karl Rove in the run-up to the war in Iraq, earnestly selling the Administration's line on weapons of mass destruction, and perhaps one reason she was both favored by Rove in the current Valerie Plume case, and also sought to protect Rove.
THe author gets the jump on the current scandal of the disappearing billions in Iraq–not just the billions for Halliburton in sole source contracts, but the outright theft and squandering of the $19 billion in Iraqi bank credits that Paul Bremer managed to fritter away–and they still do not have running water or electricity.
THe author quotes several times from Mein Kamph in discussing the extremist Republican use of “the big lie” and the comparisons are disconcertingly clear. He weaves a tale of draft-dodging hypocrisy among the Bush Junior and Cheney gang that is all too distasteful when combined with their corruption in favoring Halliburton–his listing of Cheney's ignominious failures as CEO of HAlliburton are fun–and also a sign that Halliburton knew what it was doing in suffering the fool that would deliver the people's treasure. His accounting of Bush Juniors many failures in business, each time living on his father's name and getting bailed out by the forgiving rich that he has repaid many times over with tax cuts and exemptions from asbestos claims, among other loopholes, is dismaying in the extreme. We “know” these things, but we do not act.
On page 82 he repeats what is now perhaps the most famous quote to come out of the Bush Junior White House, where an arrogant aide dismisses a “reality-based” person and says that the U.S. is an empire now, and makes its own reality. That the reality we are making is one of our own destruction escapes this witless aide to the President, so full of himself is he.
The books adds to my understanding of the current Social Security arrangements as a pass through system (each generation funds the next) as opposed to the Administration's proposal for privatization, which converts it to a pension fund that dies with each generation. I am persuaded that we must defend Social Security, it is present form, to the death, and that we must remove the caps and make the wealthy contribute for every dollar, not just up to $90,000.
The author concludes that there is a war today, not between civilizations, but between faith-based and reality-based communities.
I put the book down reflecting to myself that it is time for the American labor union pension funds to lead a revolution. It is time for the people to form their own bank, their own credit card company, their own intelligence agency, and their own media. Although this is happening in fits and starts with the Internet, it is disjointed. We need to marry up money, willpower, and honest information, and we need to out these carpetbaggers and regain control of the commonwealth.
Truth and morality are here to be found, but the question that remains is: will the people act? This is a very fine book for anyone who cares about future generations and resents being robbed.
This is a very worthy and serious documentary. As one who spends a lot of time thinking about “strategic communication” and public diplomacy and public perception, I cannot think of a more important reference point for any US official interested in understanding where we are going wrong in the Arab and Muslim worlds.
Bottom line up front: Al Jazerra gets 5 points from me, in comparison with CENTCOM 1 (for naive earnestness), and Western journalists 0 (just generally stupid).
There are some spectacular flashes of insight in this documentary. My favorite is when one of the Al Jazeera editors says that the US cannot have it both ways–it cannot be the most powerful nation in the world, exercising that power (implicitly, capriciously and dangerously and harmfully) and at the same time expect the world to love it for doing so.
Over-all–and I am perhaps not the norm, having lived overseas most of my life as the son of an oilman, as a Marine Corps infantry officer, and as a clandestine case officer–I have to say that in the real world, Al Jazerra is wiping the deck with our ass. You may not like my opinion, but there are a couple of billion people that probably agree with that opinion, and most of them, right now, are not very respectful of the old USA.
It is not possible to be effective as a strategic communicator, or to practice public diplomacy, without first understanding what your target audience is seeing, hearing, and thinking. This DVD is a superb starting point and I have total respect for what has been presented here.
Righteous Good SLAM of IPCC Fraud & Intimidation
