I read and started to use this book well before I started doing Amazon reviews, and was reminded of this today when I started updating my brainstorming briefing.
I know John personally and consider one of the most balanced observers of the future, and especially gifted at casting a wide net to find weak signals, and then using analysis to make sense of disparate noises.
Above Average with a Good Point, Generally Low Rent
August 27, 2007
Carol Alt
I watched this movie tonight, and I must admit, I started it expecting to hate it, and instead found the patience to watch it to the end.
It's a B movie at best, with limited script, acting cast, set sophistication. Certainly worthwhile as a source of reflections, but I'd like to see a much more skilled cinematography community spreading the Christian message.
By the by, Revelation is not in the index, and the Gospel of St. Thomas continues to be community-oriented interpretation of God on Earth in community.
One of the Great Musical DVDs, a Metaphor for Life as Well
August 26, 2007
Joaquin Phoenix
This is one of the really great musical DVDs; I list others below but because of Amazon's limitations, I can only list ten.
This is NOT a complex biographical DVD. This DVD captures the essence of love within music. It is a glorious story of a man who married well but whose wife did not “compute” music, and of the love that grew “on the road” between Johnny Cash and his eventual bride (who got him off drugs and helped him “walk the line”).
The underlying theme, of going from uncotrolled use of drugs to a straight existence within reality powered by love, is uplifting.
If you like both music and romance, this DVD is a “must have.” Below I list a few others.
I sometimes tire of non-fiction (reality) and escape into DVDs, but many of them are either reality or a sembalnce of reality that merits respect. This is such a film.
I would also add a note of caution to those who would demean this film as “corny.” NOT right. This film was ahead of its time. In this film, the moderate Islamists (represented by Sean Connery) are upset with foreign presence (Western Europe), and the USA with its bully Theodore and its aggressive Marines, are in the wrong until the Marines are led back on track by the female American protagonist (Candice Bergen) and free the Lion of Islam to fight again.
TAKEAWAY: Americans can be, are, morally wrong (as are all immoral predatory nations), and moderate Islamists are, in their own place that we have invaded, morally correct. Our God is NOT, as LtGen Jerry Boykin, one of my top five greatest generals ever (out of 75 or so I have known, most never more than a Colonel with a facelift) greater than theirs. Our God is CO-Equal to theirs, and the sooner we put Dick Cheney and Henry Kissinger behind bars, the sooner we eliminate our 750 bases overseas, the sooner the world can restore balance. Legitimacy and morality are the two strategic pillars that America has abondoned its in prostitution to Saudi oil and 42 of 44 dictators, and we can never be America the Beautiful, America the Good, unless we right ourselves.
As a patriotic estranges Republican I will say this clearly: America and Israel are the scourges of the world, followed by Saudi Aribia. We have sown the dragon's teeth, and I weep for what we have become: virtual colonialists, unilateralist military confusing might with right, and a cheating culture that ignores the class war led by our predatory immoral Wall Street band of merry thieves laundering drug money and covering up the complicity of Dick Cheney and Rudy Gulliani in the murder of most who died on 9-11 from controlled demolitions (NYC) or a missile (the Pentagon).
Where, or where, is the American Eagle that we need so desperately? See the image I have posted above to understand where we need to go if our children, if all children, are to have a future.
Vital Contribution, see also Priority One, Other Books Below
August 23, 2007
David Holmgren
This is for me a very important book, one of a handful that joins the Ecological Economics volumes crafted by Herman Daly and others, and also the Natural Capitalism endeavors of Paul Hawkin, Anthony Lovins. The author excels at rendering logical, sequential, and integrated concepts, all of which lead us to the inevitable conclusion–as the author intends–that human intellect, social networks, an appreciation for diversity as the foundation for cross-fertilization, and the enormous potential of the five billion poor–all suggest that a non-technological renaissance may be upon us, and that the bottom-up action of many minds could yet destroy the still-prevailing industrial, top-down control, centralizing of wealth through violence, and externalization of “true cost” to the unwitting public that no longer understands history or that the prevailing shadowy coalitions of bankers, corporate chieftains, private armies, spies, criminals, and terrorists.
My greatest surprise came at the very end, where the author provides a post-9/11 epilogue, and says: “There is abundant evidence that September 11 was an outcome of these shadowy coalitions, which link global energy corporations, US foreign policy, the global “intelligence community,” Islamic fundamentalists, arms dealers, and illegal drug trade. Discussion of this bizarre symbiosis [elsewhere he puns on `Bush Laden'] remains beyond the pale of mainstream media….and is the best example of the paralysis of public discourse due to an absence of language to comprehend top-down thinking and bottom-up action as a new mode of power [sustainable community-oriented end-user driven values and behavior and investments].
Every page of this book offers up useful insights and compelling arguments for stopping the current immolation of the Earth and going back to 1491 and the holistic integration of systems ecology, landscape geography, ethno-biology, and cybernetics, along with the co-integration of ecological, cultural, economic, and political. Later in the book the author mentions the importance of integrating religion and science.
He is quite clear, quoting Stuart Hill, that first values must be defined, and only then can sustainable design begin. I have a note on holistic methods that use culture to integrate and promulgate psycho-social knowledge and wisdom with bio-ecological sustainable design.
The author provides a sharp critique of education today as reductionist, fragmented, rote, and disconnected from experience. In this vein, let me note that a World Bank official told me on the 21st of August that the CIA analysts that come to the World Bank in search of knowledge are “too young, lack knowledge, and have a propensity to put forward hypotheses (e.g. about Darfur and the region) that are frightening in their ignorance.” On a positive note, while I have always been the #1 Amazon reviewer for non-fiction, I only entered into the top 100 and then the top 50 over-all, when Dick Cheney succeeded in frightening a significant portion of the population back into reading non-fiction. I consider it my sacred duty to be a human version of the Cliff Notes for all serious readers concerned about the future of the Republic.
The author specifies that the general public (that is to say, the 90% of us that have not looted the commonwealth but rather been subtly enslaved) is back to 1978 in terms of quality of life and sufficiency of income. All our hard word has enriched a few and left the Republic with bridges that collapse for lack of sustained investment in the public interest.
The author slams “just enough, just in time” logistics as unsustainable madness, and throughout the book, with both text and illustrations, shows how we must balance between “slow, steady, small” and “fast, random, big.”
I liked the references to the role of the landscape as a means of storing energy, water, nutrients, and carbon. The author stresses the importance of understanding entropy (example from other work: water can be desalinated, but the energy cost, in the absence of renewable energy, is unaffordable over time). The author quotes Natural Capital many times, and I regard this book as a perfect complement to that strategic work–this is the operational, tactical, and technical counterpart. See also Priority One.
The author provides both maxims and principles in this book.
The maxims:
1. All observations are relative
2. Top-down thinking, bottom-up action
3. The landscape is the textbook
4. Failure is useful so long as we learn
5. Elegant solutions are simple, even invisible
6. Make the smallest intervention necessary
7. Avoid too much of a good thing
8. The problem is the solution
9. Recognize and break out of design cul-de-sacs
Permaculture design principles:
1. Observe and Interact
2. Catch and Store Energy
3. Obtain a Yield
4. Apply Self-Regulation and Accept Feedback
5. Use and Value Renewable Resources and Services
6. Produce No Waste
7. Design from Patterns to Details
8. Integrate Rather than Segregate
9. Use Small and Slow Solutions
10. Use and Value Diversity
11. Uses Edges and Value the Marginal
12. Creatively Use and Respond to Change
The author tells us that self-reliance is a form of consumer boycott and also a form of political action.
In addition to sustainable design, the author believes that maintenance engineering has a bright future.
He points out that recycling uses much more energy than re-use.
He notes that the failure of the elites to self-regulate their greed is a recurring problem (violent comprehensive revolutions are often set off when a precipitating outrage follows a long precondition of concentrated wealth and externalized waste).
The sins of the father will curse seven generation (similar to Native American concept of making consensual decisions that are known to be relevant seven generations into the future–what Stewart Brand calls the Clock of the Long Now.
The author emphasizes that the world's poor represent a vast pool of human resources and capabilities as well as (CKP's point) a four trillion dollar marketplace.
This DVD was recommended to me by one of the Amazonians that follows my reivews, and as I often do with intelligent recommendations, I bought it.
The movie is both brilliant and funny. The stage setting is incredibly cool. The minds behind this movie have brought us an absolutely first rate combination of great actors depicting stupidity in the future, of “future” scenes that are both complex and credible, and of an outcome that is rather endearing.
It depicts what happens when the smart people put off having babies (by all means including abortion), and the poor less educated people, for whatever reason, keep having babies.
Wow. Over 250 Reviews. My wife was there, my third son loves this movie as do I
August 22, 2007
Denzel Washington
I have three sons, one of whom is a traditional wide receiver fellow. He loves this movie, as do I. My wife was attending Marshall High School at the time that the Titans were integrated, so this is a very personal movie of us.
I will never ever be able to thank the United States Marine Corps enough for putting me in a barracks with “dark green” Marines. The USMC settled for me, once and for all, the brotherhood of man in all colors. This movie is uplifting, and I have tears in my eyes as I think about it.
I use this movie in classes training international officers. This is the ULTIMATE teamwork DVD. It is in a class of its own, and a treasure of lasting value.
Note: I don't recommend We Are Marshall (Full Screen Edition) unless you know up front that the first half of the movie is about the death of the entire team and the struggle to recover.
Compelling, Sensible, Easily Understandable
