Misinformation & Propaganda – Page 34 – Public Intelligence Blog

Destroys the Bible as Immutable–Totally Engrossing, January 27, 2008

Gary Greenberg

I've read close to 20 books on religion in relation to politics in the past several years, and two books have consistently fallen behind in my stack: this one, and Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why (Plus). Of the two, this one, published in 2000, five years earlier than Misquoting Jesus (but not mentioned at all in the latter) is vastly better organized, more interesting, and more pointed.

I note that the publisher and Amazon do provide the entire table of contents above (101 myths, each listed in the table of contents) and I recommend that the table of contents be considered as helpful to my recommendation that anyone interested in religion and/or virtue buy and read this book.

The author himself captures the highlights in his own preface:

+ Africa and Egypt provided most of the raw material for the Biblical stories, i.e. neighboring cultures, not “God” or even the disciples, provided the original information
+ The stories were part of a long0running propagandaa war between the kingdoms of Judah and Israel
+ The author focuses on contradictions, clear and compelling evidence of Bible myths originating in earthly cultures, and stories that simply cannot be true (e.g. cities claimed destroyed that did not exist)
+ Although explained more ably by “Misquoting Jesus,” the book clearly shows how the Bible is NOT original, nor is it even accurate. It consists of stories whose origins are earthly, rewritten over and over again, and imbued with false authority.

For me, the greatest humor and wisdom came from Israel being firmly rooted in Arab (Egyptian) myths, yet being unable to be it's brother's keeper, instead genociding the Palestinians and stealing Arab water thorugh long underground pipes.

Below are other books I recommend, and two DVDs, one on Gandhi and one on Tibet. I have come to the conclusion that organized religion is inherently a sham, illegitimate and corrupt, but that the values that religion seeks to impact are good in so far as they can be adopted by communities. This is not rocket science–the Golden Rule and the Great Law of Peace actually create prosperity and well-being.

The Complete Conversations with God (Boxed Set)
Gandhi (Widescreen Two-Disc Special Edition)
Tibet – Cry of the Snow Lion
The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right
God's Politics LP
American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America
Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors

2008/01/212010/01/04

Review: Real Change–From the World That Fails to the World That Works

3 Star, Misinformation & Propaganda, Politics

Disappointing, Revisionist, Misleading, Incomplete, January 21, 2008

Newt Gingrich

Edit of 13 Feb 08 to remove extraneous negatives.

Although Newt Gingrich is one of a handful of previously elected officials who has both a brain and an appreciation for history, this book is disappointing. It is primarily a base-pleasing blast on a variety of issues that are generally described with no implementation specifics, and certainly nothing in the way of an over-all balanced budget that would show what the trade-offs are.

1) Newt Gingrich was “present at the creation” of the brutally destructive practices of extreme partisanship, and I am not surprised to read, but feel compelled to question, his “immaculate conception” in this book as being good and clear-headed, while relegating all those “left behind” to the role of “evil-doers.” Cf. Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency; The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)). In my view, the number of Republicans bailing out of Congress is starkly indicative of their realization that America is fed up with party-line corruption.

2) Claiming that most of America is center-right and that the Democratic party now represents the fringe left places this author at the edge of delusion. Presumably he has read Running On Empty: How The Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It, but I question whether he has a clue about Liberty Coalition, Reuniting America, Cultural Creatives, World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility, Bioneers, or any of the other groups that in the aggregate represent over 150 million American voters who despise BOTH the Republican and Democratic parties and are–as Lou Dobbs urges–declaring Independence.

3) Neither Dick Cheney nor Lou Dobbs appears in this book, nor is there any mention of the manner in which Congress and the White House have deceived and misled the public for over a century (Cf. Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush's War on Iraq, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil)

4) His specious recommendations on Iraq are completely inconsistent with reality as I have observed it across many many reviews. He fails to point out that the Chief of Staff of the Army, General Shinseki, correctly told Congress that 400,000 were needed to assure orderly stabilization & reconstruction, and that it was Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and Cheney who over-ruled the Army and insisted on listening to a combination of Ahmed Chalabi (an Iranian agent of influence) and the Israeli government all too eager to have us do their dirty work. He natually avoids discussing the fact that we were snookered by Iran into doing what they could not do for themselves. Cf. A Pretext for War : 9/11, Iraq, and the Abuse of America's Intelligence Agencies)

Now for the substance, such as it is:

1) Platitudes on steroids. This is a facile book that explodes a YouTube video into a 242-page double-spaced booklet (not counting the last third of the book, appendices).

2) There are no footnotes, endnotes, or bibliography. This is a massive Op-Ed that is totally disconnected from the need to take account of any larger reality.

3)He touches lightly on young people, education, the judiciary, privatizing social security, immgiration (never mind that he consistently failed as Speaker to funded urgently needed border patrol positions), and green conservatism. “National security” gets two double-spaced pages, other topics as many as four to six. Whoopee.

3) His approach to a balanced budget is disingenius as well as mis-directed. He chants the four mantras: 1) cut taxes; 2) increase spending on what I like, decrease it on everything else; 3) end pork barrel spending; and 4) smarter spending. He certainly has a point with respect to the idiocy of rewarding Lockheed Martin for consistently failing NASA, but the last time I looked, the President and Congress had an Office of Management and Budget and a Government Accountability Office, so this is pontifical. He has no serious observations on how to eliminate income taxes (introduce the Tobin tax on Federal reserve transactions); increase revenue (end the import-export pricing fraud, the crop insurance and other frauds, different corporate books for IRS versus stockholders, the list is long and he does not have it).

4) He calls for citizen leadership and more entrepreneurship without any reference to what has been going on for over a decade in the way of World Cafe, Nexus for Change, National Online Deliberation, Wisdom Councils, Wealth of Networks, etcetera.

The book asks three relevant questions and fails to answer them to my satisfaction as a broadly-read person who believes that transpartisanship, not bipartisanship, is the necessary solution:

1) Whom do we serve?

2) What do we value?

3) How do we measure achievement?

The book contains scattered impulses, some good (Hart-Rudman emphasized that the failure of US education, especially in mathematics and science, was a major threat to the future of the Republic), and some bad (several blatant overtures to evangelicals).

Enough.

By way of larger context for those who believe non-fiction can be useful:

1) There are ten high-level threats to mankind identified by LtGen Dr. Brent Scowcroft and other members of the High-Level Threat Panel, as reported out in A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General's High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change:

01 Poverty
02 Infectious Disease
03 Environmental Degradation
04 Inter-State Conflict
05 Civil War
06 Genocide
07 Other Atrocities
08 Proliferation
09 Terrorism
10 Transnational Crime

Bush-Cheney, and Gingrich, ignore the first 8 threats as well as the last. The global war on terrorism is a fraud. What we *should* be doing is orchestrating a $250 billion a year program against the first seven threats, stop being the world's largest arms merchant, and start phasing out the 44 dictators, all but two our best pals (see Breaking the Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025.

2) There are twelve policies that must be harmonized if we are to stabilize and reconstruct our own country:

01 Agriculture
02 Diplomacy
03 Economy
04 Education
05 Energy
06 Family
07 Health
08 Immigration
09 Justice
10 Security
11 Society
12 Water

3) Nothing the USA or EU in the next ten years will matter EXCEPT AND UNLESS they create an EarthGame, an Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, that compellingly demonstrates to the eight demographic challengers (Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela, and Wild Cards like the Congo) how they can avoid our mistakes.

Earth Intelligence Network is offering a free book online today that will be available on Amazon in late Feburary, “COLLECTIVE INTELLIGENCE: Creating a Prosperous World at Peace.” Here is the bottom line: the age of top-down elite “management” of complex societies, using secrecy, scarcity, and fear to concentrate wealth and abuse the majority, is over. There is a broad literature on the emergence of bottom-up consensual citizen power including localized wisdom councils, and I have over 70 lists that can guide the earnest reader, but I will content myself for now with my last alloted link: The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All.

This book will, I hope, make money for the author. It will not, however, do anything for the Republic. Below I list seven REAL changes:

1) Electoral Reform Act (One-Page Outline at Earth Intelligence Network

2) Debates Open to ALL Parties, Not Just the Two Corrupt Parties

3) End Winner Take All in Both Cabinet and Congress

4) No Legislation Without Prior Public Posting in Detail

5) End Individual Income Taxes, Substitute Tobin Tax on Federal Reserve

6) End CEO Greed, Top Salary No More Than 1000X Lowest Salary

7) End Secrecy, Make All Government Decisions Transparent

To end on a positive note, I am quite certain that Speaker Gingrich would be a most valuable participant in any transpartisan cabinet that brought together leaders from across the spectrum. Our Nation needs more than platitudes–it needs a Transpartisan People's Trust that buys back the government; and an EarthGame in which each person has full access to all relevant information and we can self-govern in the context of the ten threats, twelve policies, and eight challengers. It does not help that we have lost an entire generation to lazy rote mediocrity in our schools.

The bottom line is that this book does not reflect the demonstrated breadth and depth of the Speaker's knowledge. It's a shallow quickie.

2008/01/192009/12/04

Review: The Social Life of Information

6 Star Top 10%, Information Operations, Information Society, Information Technology, Misinformation & Propaganda, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Superb Primer for Any Age

January 19, 2008

John Seely Brown

I come to this book eight years after it was first published, and with all the accolades and superb reviews that it has already accummulated, my primary focus here, apart from flagging the book for those that follow my reviews, is to suggest that it is one of the finest overviews available and easily exploited as a primer for undergraduates, graduates, or adults pursuing their own continuing education via Amazon, which is now the hub of the World Brain.

As is my custom, I provide here a few highlights from my flyleaf notes, and then link to ten books that can be used to study discrete aspects of the digital age as I have come to understand it.

This is one of the best books I have found that makes the case that “fiber to the forehead” is next to worthless, it is not about acquiring more information, but rather about the nuanced networking and social interpretations of information in context.

Indeed, they say that with all the technologies now pushing and creating digital information, consumption of this information is only increasing among individuals by 1.7 percent a year.

I value this book, in part because I have seen the U.S. secret intelligence community lose its mind, today spending $60 billion a year of the taxpayer's hard-earned money, to create monstrous and often counter-productive technical program that access the 4% of the information we can steal, while ignoring the 94% that is in 183 languages we do not speak, and more often than not, NOT online.

The authors write well, and gifted turns of phrase about, such as “the radical instability of infopunditry.”

They do a superb job of addressing the ills of technology-centered tunnel vision, a point that Peter Drucker made in Forbes ASAP 28 Aug 98, and I repeated in my keynote in Vegas to the National Security Agency (NSA) IT conference, in the early 2000 timeframe. We've spent the past 50 years on the T in IT, we need to start focusing on the I now.

The authors are eloquent in saying that more of the same is not the answer, and I totally agree. Returning to the secret world, I paraphrase an Australian journalist commenting on the pathologies of secret programs, who said that giving more money to dysfunctional secret agencies is like pouring gasoline on a fire. Right on. I want to reduce the secret budget to $12 billion a year, and redirect everything else to US education, global access to open sources in all languages, and free on demand education to the five billion poor via a network of 100 million volunteers with skype and internet access who can answer a cell phone question in any of 183 languages: education “one cell call at a time.”

The authors point out that at its best, technology augments and enhances human capabilities, it does not replace them (less the truly repetitive mechanical aspects).

They observe (in 2000) that 1-2 exabytes of information per year are created, but that much of this is not useful, and there is a major short-fall in sense-making and precision access.

They discuss, most usefully, the reality that designers underestimate what people do (and I would add, what they want or need).

“Information fetishism” is defined as the belief that information and information technology can replaced nuanced relations among people and their individual and shared insights. In Body of Secrets, link below, Jim Bamford ends his second book on NSA by saying that with all the trillions they have spent, they have still not built the ultimate computer, one that runs on a tiny amount of energy, weighs less than a few pounds, and can make petabyte calculations per second: “the human brain.”

The authors respond to earlier criticism about not addressing LINUX, and point out that LINUX is social innovation, not technical innovation. See Wealth of Networks below.

They note that the primary advantage of IT is that it enhances both local and global access. On the downside, it neglects periphery and context.

The authors reassert, compellingly, the value of intermediation, and I am reminded of our earlier criticisms of the Internet, still valid, in that most information is unedited, unformatted, unpaginated, undated, and lacking in source bias insight. This is still true, and Google is making it worse.

By the authors own account, this book addresses:
1) Limits of infopunditry
2) Challenges of software agents
3) Social character of work and learning
4) Limits of management theory
5) Resources for innovation
6) Unnoticed aspects of the document
7) Implications for design
8) Future of information, especially for university

I have a couple of nits, but not enough to warrant removal of one star. This is clearly a seminal work of lasting value.

Nit #1: Organizational Intelligence (Wilensky, 1967) is not to be found in this book. The authors do not go past Quadrant III (see loaded images).

Nit #2: While they have a superb bibliography and include works by Barlow, Kelly, Strassmann, Toffler, and Turkle, they do NOT include the seminal works directly relevant to this book, specifically, Barlow's seminal manifesto, and the following:

Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World
Information Payoff
Powershift: Knowledge, Wealth, and Power at the Edge of the 21st Century
The Second Self: Computers and the Human Spirit , Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Amazon limits us to ten links. See my earlier lists (the first ten) for 300+ books covering information and intelligence. Here are six more:
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
Body of Secrets: Anatomy of the Ultra-Secret National Security Agency
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom

I regret the limitation on links. See also such gems as Forbidden Knowledge; Voltaire's Bastards; Age of Missing Information; etc etc.

2008/01/172010/01/04

Review: The God Delusion

4 Star, Culture, DVD - Light, Misinformation & Propaganda, Religion & Politics of Religion, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Five for Science, Three for Humanities, Four on Balance

January 17, 2008

Richard Dawkins

I have seen this argument so many times over the past 40 years; it's as if each new generation has to condemn God to find its own soul. I myself wrote a poem in college once, “Our Father, who art in hell….” You can imagine the sophomoric rest.

There are so many other reviews, I want to use this space to highlight three ideas, point to one posted image, and link to several books that demonstrate that Mike Huckabee has it exactly right: we need God (not the high priests that steal our money to live lavishly) as a foundation for the community of man, as an absolute measure of our morality.

Idea #1: God is or should be a moral standard. Fundamentalists of any stripe that claim to be the sole religion, calling all others unbelievers or heathen or worse, are nothing more than a cult.

Idea #2: Religions are bad in so far as they incite hatred toward others or enrich a few at enormous cost to the many. We do not need intermediaries nor do we need interpreters. God loves us all (including Adolph Hitler and Dick Cheney) and God's love is immutable. We are what we are, and within God's love, we must simply strive to be better, longer.

Idea #3: Engineers and scientists have a very hard time understanding any constructive role for religion. E. O. Wilson has answered the question, “why do the sciences need the humanities,” and I will sum it up in one word: Humanitas. There is a spiritual, artistic, ethical, quantum aspect to life that is often best explained through either myths or conventions.

Here are ten books that have informed my appreciation for God, whom I found again, very strongly in my life, six months ago, when everything started going in the direction that I had been struggling to achieve for twenty years, not for myself, but for my children and the future of life.

01 The Complete Conversations with God (Boxed Set) The Bible is useful as a point of departure. It is not a substitute for being right with God, direct.

02 The Lessons of History Morality is a strategic asset of incalculable proportions (a Nobel Prize was awarded in the 1990's to a man who proved that trust lowers the cost of doing business).

03 The Left Hand of God: Taking Back Our Country from the Religious Right Rabbi Lerner's book touched me deeply. God is code for compassion, for doing the right thing, for avoiding partisan and fanatic differentiation.

04 God's Politics LP Buy this used, I hope it is reprinted. Religion is like a gun–it is the person who chooses between an exclusive “true believer” role that is hateful, or an inclusive compassion that is respectful of all. I end my review saying he has my vote for Chaplain to the Nation.

05 Faith-Based Diplomacy: Trumping Realpolitik The author is a Navy Captain (O-6) Retired, I know him, and he taught me that faith is a tangible value that can be demonstrated in a peaceful respectful manner, and doing so yields enormous dividends when negotiating or interacting with those whose faith is strong but different.

06 Thank God for Evolution!: How the Marriage of Science and Religion Will Transform Your Life and Our World This is a joyous and worthy celebration of how to deconflict religion and science.

07 Dogs of God: Columbus, the Inquisition, and the Defeat of the Moors I am often shocked by how little the average American knows of history, to include our genocide of the Native Americans, the Puritan exorcism of women as witches, the Catholic Church's inquisition, the crusades, and their all too eager collaboration with the Nazis in administering the Holocaust. This book is as good as any for reflection in that direction.

08 The Lucifer Principle: A Scientific Expedition into the Forces of History Howard Bloom is a friend, and also the author of Global Brain: The Evolution of Mass Mind from the Big Bang to the 21st Century. I learned from the latter book that a human brain “locks down” by the age of 30 or so, and whatever good or evil thoughts have been introduced to that mind, are there to stay. He anticipated the Sunni Shi'ite wars (Iran, which is Persian, and the Iraqi Shi'ites, are terrified because they are surrounded by extremist Sunnis led by Saudi Arabia which the US is stupidly arming, and Pakistan, which has the SUNNI bomb, as well as Egypt and Syria, two of the bloodier dictatorships in that region: remember, CIA put the Shah into power, overturning a democratic election in Iran. See also my review of Web of Deceit.

09 Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror There are so many other books I could recommend, but Amazon limits us to ten. See also Looming Tower, The Fifty Year Wound, Sorrow's of Empire, and Wilson's Ghost as well as the DVD Why We Fight. The bottom line is that the US Government and its secret intelligence agencies (I've done it all across that world) are inherently pro-dictator (see Ambassador Mark Palmer's Breaking The Real Axis of Evil: How to Oust the World's Last Dictators by 2025. There are 44 dictators remaining, 42 of them are best friends with Bush-Cheney, and of the remaining two, North Korea and Cuba, both are benign in my view, and Cuba has a great deal to teach us about sustainable agriculture, full employment, and free public health care. I have no patience for demagogues, and pray for the day when we can restore the Constitution, the Republic, We the People as sovereign, and Thomas Jefferson's original vision of commerce and peace.

10 American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War On America is the top book on the evil that is represented by cult-like fundamentalist movements whose preachers can be (not all) hypocritical miscreants who favor homosexuals and drugs when traveling at our expense. American Theocracy and Tempting Faith also fall into this last category, useful for understanding where religion went wrong.

America is in a desperate condition right now because We the People forgot that democracy requires our constant tending–a Republic, if you can keep it. When we allowed the Democratic and Republican parties to disenfranchise the League of Women Voters so they could shut out third, fourth, and fifth parties; when we allowed the FBI to ignore Steve Emerson's PBS special in 1994 on imams on US territory calling for the murder of Americans and the overthrow of the secular government; when we allowed Jeb Bush to disenfranchise 35,000 to 50,000 people of color in Florida, with a brilliant exposure THREE MONTHS BEFORE THE ELECTION, and Al Gore chose to “go along” with this “reasonable dishonesty” so as to reap wealth and celebrity (rather than being shunned for spoiling the party), We the People gave up our Republic.

The image I am loading says it all. That is where a number of us are headed, and we carry God with us in mind and heart and spirit. Most churches and non-profits are nothing more than scams to separate the sheep from their money. Free men, real men, *are* God to the extent that they respect the brotherhood of man, follow the Golden Rule, and respect the Ten Commandments, which are the most helpful guide possible for life in a complex society.

A note on Mike Huckabee: he represents faith in a good way, not the evil way that Cheney harnessed and then dismissed. Mike Huckabee has a vision for a return to a Christian, family-oriented Republic. I share that vision.

2007/11/282010/07/27

Review: An Enormous Crime–The Definitive Account of American POWs Abandoned in Southeast Asia

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Diplomacy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

USG Has Betrayed Us All

November 28, 2007

Bill Hendon, Elizabeth Stewart

Edit of 26 Jan 08: see the comments for additional give and take that illuminates the treason of our own government against those “left behind.”

I recommend my review of Is Anybody Listening?: A True Story About POW/MIAs In The Vietnam War and also Kiss the Boys Goodbye: How the United States Betrayed Its Own POWs in Vietnam.

This book is more of a scholarly work and has eye-glazing detail. However, as best I can tell, this is the single best and most carefully documented book, with the stellar advantage of having as a co-author the Honorable Bill Hendon, who is not only a former Representative (R-NC) but was on the POW/MIA beat while there.

I am very very very angry. Our politicians, both Republican and Democratic, have betrayed us all, and this brings me to tears, betrayed the honorable warriors who became POWs or were MIA in Viet-Nam.

There are several points that grab me:

Over 1,500 POWs still known to be in Viet-Nam and probably alive.

Viet-Nam had a clear strategy for capturing AND KEEPING ALIVE our personel in order to charge the US for reparations after the war was inevitably won by the Vietnamese

The authors explicitly suggest that Senator John McCain has been fully witting of the reality of how many have been left behind, and complicit in our federal government's deliberate decision to abandon them rather than pay Viet-Nam the compensation they appear to fully merit given our violation of the Geneva Convention and our intrusion into the civil war between North and South.

I hold the authors of this book, and the excrutiating detail that they have assembled, in the greatest regard.

It is now clear to me that the Federal Government as it is now constituted, cannot be trusted. We need Electoral Reform, open books, and an end to secrecy.

2007/11/272010/07/27

Review (Guest): Kiss the Boys Goodbye–How the United States Betrayed its Own POWs in Vietnam

5 Star, Atrocities & Genocide, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Insurgency & Revolution, Intelligence (Government/Secret), Misinformation & Propaganda, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

To the right is the current mass paperback cover that is available. Below is the cover of the original hard-copy, and a guest review (Amazon is deleting top reviewer's old reviews to make room for new reviewers, we missed this one when creating this web site to counter that “lost history”).

5.0 out of 5 stars Stunning Expose Of Government DesertionOf Its Vietnam Vets!

May 20, 2002

William Stevenson, Monika Jenson-Stevenson

Review by Barron Laycock “Labradorman”

This is a book that should make ordinary American citizens exceedingly sad and angry. Although some may argue that its message is old news, and certainly very dated information, the horror and outrage it should occasion is neither old nor dated. For what the authors contend, and go on to impressively prove, is that our national government deliberately and maliciously betrayed its own soldiers trapped as Prisoners Of War (POWs) in Vietnam, abandoning them in favor of a quick and otherwise painless exit from the war in Southeast Asia. This, as the authors argue, is a truly devastating indictment of the Nixon administration, and one for which they cannot be forgiven.

However, it is more than that. It is also a bizarre story of men left behind for the sake of political expedience and due to a number of highly classified clandestine operations, which were purposely kept from the American people. The story line begins with the sad saga of a young ex-marine who escaped from Vietnam on the late 1970s and claimed to have seen a large number of fellow American servicemen still being held by the Vietnamese. However, he was quickly charged with desertion and collaboration with the enemy, in what seemed to be a desperate effort on the part of governmental officials to bury both him and his story of American prisoners as deeply as possible from public view. From here the plot takes a number of bizzare twists and turns.

As the authors began to investigate the young marine's story, layers of deception, half-truths, and active censorship began to emerge. What they finally uncovered was an amazing tale of official deception from the highest levels in government, and also a very well organized and relentless abuse of official governmental power. This book reveals convincing evidence of American soldiers and sailors deliberately abandoned for political expedience, and of families torn apart by these acts. It also raises quite provocative questions concerning the very nature of democracy, and the corruptibility of ordinary men given such power. Similarly, they show how the use of claims of national security were used to derail efforts to learn the truth, and of an active conspiracy to keep the public from discovering the truth.

There are many of us who have long believed that Nixon and Kissinger made a pact with the devil himself in order to to extricate the United States fro the ongoing horror of Vietnam. What is truly mind-boggling is to discover just how right we were to suspect that they, and many others in the government since that time, would take such drastic action as they have to conceal these facts and to evade the truth. This is a worthwhile book, and one that demands to be read. I hope you can approach it with an open mind. Its arguments and the evidence associated with it are, in my opinion, very convincing. Enjoy!

2007/09/222009/10/17

Review: RealSpace–The Fate of Physical Presence in the Digital Age, On and Off Planet

5 Star, Consciousness & Social IQ, Future, History, Information Operations, Intelligence (Collective & Quantum), Misinformation & Propaganda, Philosophy

A Gem of Reflection

September 22, 2007

Paul Levinson

I am sorry to say that with all the reading I do, this is the first time I have come across Paul Levinson. This is a gem of a book, and I will attend to anything else he write, and hope to hear him in person someday.

The author, the book, and by the authors account, California, converges four vectors:

– Cyberspace where its just information, not “real”
– Outer Space, where he believes we need to go
– Inner Space, with hightened spiritual awareness being important
– RealSpace, which only live beings with all their senses can engage

I found this gem to be absorbing and it rounded out my Sunday morning reading quite nicely. Some bullets I took away:

– No senses of smell, touch, taste in cyberspace
– Knowledge is not Experience
– Walking and talking are intertwined
– Cell phone is antidote to Interent, restores ability to work in the real world and not be chained to a computer or cubicle
– Makes care for business, not governments, to fund space exploration
– Discusses robots as useful for some things but no substitute for humans
– Discusses how much we missed in our evaluation of Mars until we actually had a real soil sample with traces of bacteria
– Wants a World Spaceport Center at WTC site in NYC, adds chapter on terrorism and sspace.

The selected bibliography, with annotation, is quite remarkable. I am only familiar with a third of what is catalogued there.

This book helped me understand Jeff Bezos better, and that is always useful.

The author buys into the myths of 9/11. This is disappointing.

Some other books that his is a complement to:
The Tao of Democracy: Using Co-Intelligence to Create a World That Works for All
The Age of Missing Information
Fog Facts: Searching for Truth in the Land of Spin
Lost History: Contras, Cocaine, the Press & ‘Project Truth'
The Landscape of History: How Historians Map the Past
The Lessons of History
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Voltaire's Bastards: The Dictatorship of Reason in the West
One from Many: VISA and the Rise of Chaordic Organization
Imagine: What America Could Be in the 21st Century

Category: Misinformation & Propaganda

Review: 101 Myths of the Bible–How Ancient Scribes Invented Biblical History