Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design – Page 7

2014/03/242014/03/24

Review: Collapsing Consciously – Transformative Truths for Turbulent Times

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Culture, Research, Economics, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Carolyn Baker

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Best Book to Both Catalyze and Deepen Your Awakening, March 24, 2014

This is a 6 star book (my top 10% across the 98 categories in which I read), and I consider it a book to be stunningly effective. At the age of 61 with no pensions on top of a rich life, I have found myself in unemployment over several years, and as this book so powerfully suggests, this may have been the best possible state for me at this point in time. I specifically recommend the book as a gift for any unemployed person, but I also consider it essential reading for any entering class of college students.

The author is extremely well-read in this domain, and the book is priceless for the combination of her insights and the manner in which she weaves many other selections into the work.

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2014/03/21

Review: Guinea Pig B – The 56 Year Experiment

6 Star Top 10%, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Education (General), Future, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

Buckminster Fuller

5.0 out of 5 stars 6 Star Starting Point for Life Work of a “First Thinker”, March 21, 2014

I've read a number of books by Buckminster Fuller, but it was not until this one that I realized he is the only person that writes longer sentences than I do. He is also, as his daughter notes in the preface, a man who uses words with great precision, and invents words when he is certain none already exist. So many words in fact, that he has his own dictionary, Synergetics Dictionary, the Mind of Buckminster Fuller: With an Introduction and Appendices (4 Vols.).

I drew three big ideas from this slim volume:

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2014/03/162014/03/16

Review: Other Inconvenient Truths Beyond Global Warming

5 Star, Complexity & Resilience, Economics, Environment (Solutions), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Survival & Sustainment, True Cost & Toxicity, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Alan F. Rozich

5.0 out of 5 stars HUGELY Valuable Book with Color Photographs, Embedded Yellow Highlights, March 16, 2014

This is one of the most useful, most intelligent, best presented and most timely books I have ever held in my hands. I am astonished by the affordable price in relation to both the substance and the cosmetics of the book. This is a focused holistic book that is a joy to read — easy to read — and it offers the single best text I have found for both graduate and undergraduate reading, and book clubs as well as government employees struggling to understand the lies and mis-representations of those seeking to avoid or undermine regulatory oversight.

The print size and use of white space is complemented by something I have never seen in a mass market paperback, full color photographs, full color diagrams, and the selective use of yellow highlighting embedded across the book.

This is a book steeped in integral consciousness, with a clear understanding and articulation of the fact that global warming is a symptom, not a root cause, and that global warming is but one of multiple inconvenient truth, all of which much be understood as a whole.

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2014/03/142014/03/14

Review (DVD): THRIVE

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atlases & State of the World, Change & Innovation, Complexity & Resilience, Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Cosmos & Destiny, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Environment (Solutions), Health, Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Intelligence (Spiritual), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Priorities, Reviews (DVD Only)

Foster and Kimberly Gamble

5.0 out of 5 stars Free Online and Worth Buying to Support the Endeavor, March 14, 2014

This is a riveting movie with phenomenal visuals. I'd rather it had been an hour long instead of two, but in the spirit of slow food and slow Internet, certainly worth two hours of your time as an inspiration to change how you live for the rest of your life.

The movie is a personal contribution of Foster Gamble of the Proctor & Gamble family, but he grew a soul starting in elementary school and by the time he finished at Princeton, he was on his way to being a full-blown radical thinker with libertarian tendencies.

The first third of the movie is focused on free energy and all the pioneers from Telsa to Trombly to Bedeini to Hutchinson to Mallove who created proven sources of free energy only to suffer raids from the FBI (we do not make this stuff up) and other abuses including in some cases the torching of their labs and murder. I am hugely impressed by this portion of the movie, which includes short interviews, and I strongly recommend the movie for this part alone if you lack patience for what follows.

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2014/03/142014/03/14

Review: Cool Tools – A Catalog of Possibilities

5 Star, Culture, Research, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Technology (Bio-Mimicry, Clean), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

5.0 out of 5 stars An Education, Bank, and Theater All In One — This is NOT a “Coffee Table” Book, March 14, 2014

I received this book as a gift from the author — we go back many years, and I was glad to review one of his earlier books,Out of Control: The New Biology of Machines, Social Systems, & the Economic World, later also reviewing New Rules for the New Economy.

Talking with Kevin after I received and went through the book, I learned that it is being described as a “coffee table” book in some circles. Let's kill that idea right away. This is NOT a coffee table book! Coffee table books in my own mind are slick superficial collections of photos with big print, meant to keep people occupied for a few minutes while they wait for their appointment.

This book is an education. Yes, it is a successor to the Whole Earth Catalog and a logical follow-on to that catalog and the Whole Earth Review's tools section, but on top of that is the existing modern website kk.org/coooltools/. It is not just about “tools.” More or less the Whole Earth is covered in this book, with treehouses being one of my favorities (also underground houses). It covers books, methods, gardens, communications, design, places, and the family.

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2014/03/112014/03/11

Review (Guest): How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World? A Scorecard From 1900 to 2050

2 Star, Atlases & State of the World, Complexity & Resilience, Economics, History, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Bjorn Lomberg et al

2.0 out of 5 stars It just gets better and better!, November 15, 2013

By David Wineberg “David Wineberg” (New York, NY USA) – See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)

Milton Berle once appeared for an interview on a morning TV show in New York. After, his interviewer threw to the weather woman. Berle left his seat and took over doing the weather. His analysis? A line of tornados ripped through New Jersey last night, causing $100 million in IMPROVEMENTS. That is the feeling I got with How Much Have Global Problems Cost the World?

Lomborg's Copenhagen Consensus got a bunch of academics to look at issues from a common denominator. Everything has to be evaluated as a percentage of GDP. Everything has to be monetized to make the models work. Lives, disease, biodiversity – everything gets a dollar value in these studies. Lack of historical data is not a problem either; the models “backcast” to 1900. The conclusion is that our worrisome problems are an ever shrinking cost to us, relative to GDP.

But of course, prices have never reflected the ecological cost of production or use, so we've been freeloading, with GDP expanding while costs have been controlled. The bill will go to our grandchildren. These models don't reflect that. Instead, the ballooning GDPs of the last century simply leave the cost centers in their wake, taking an ever smaller share.

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2014/02/202014/03/08

Review: The People’s Advocate – The Life and Legal History of America’s Most Fearless Public Interest Lawyer [Danny Sheehan]

6 Star Top 10%, America (Founders, Current Situation), Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Military & Pentagon Power, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Danny Sheehan

6 Stars on Substance, Revolutionary Illumination, February 20, 2014

This is a book for smart people who care about the Constitution, the Republic, and America the Beautiful — the America of good people with big hearts and strong souls who do the best they can while trapped amidst a complex of corrupt systems that now include most labor unions, most non-profits, and most religions — all the safety nets are gone. It is not an easy read but it could be the most important book you could read right now, as we prepare for the 2014-2020 civil war between the 99% and the 1%. For a sense of where I see Danny Sheehan in modern US history, see my review of Arsonist: The Most Dangerous Man in America. Danny Sheehan's is to the second American revolution as James Otis was to the Founding Fathers. The 1% and their political bi-opoly (the best of the servant class in the eyes of the 1%) are the target for a massive apolitical cross-cultural uprising rooted in natural law, social justice, and common sense.

The book cannot be fully appreciated without first understanding that the author has been a major player in every fundamental Constitutional case having to do with public agency — the sovereignty of the public versus the assumption by the “government” that it has inherent powers once reserved for kings, and that the citizens “donate” (abdicate) their powers once they “elect” said government. I highly recommend Wikipedia's biography on Daniel Sheehan (attorney). This — or the timeline below — is what should have opened the book in the first place. I take the trouble to do this because the value of this book lies with the next generation, the generation now in college and graduate school (or unemployed and unOccupied), not in the generation that rose with Danny and failed to beat down New York money, Texas energy, and the Nazi hydra combined with elite embrace of drugs, money laundering, and pedophilia, among other high crimes against the Republic.

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