Philosophy – Page 8 – Public Intelligence Blog

2012/05/152012/05/15

Review (Guest): I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Complexity & Catastrophe, Consciousness & Social IQ, Country/Regional, Culture, Research, Economics, Education (General), Empire, Sorrows, Hubris, Blowback, Environment (Problems), Future, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Religion & Politics of Religion, Science & Politics of Science, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized), War & Face of Battle, Water, Energy, Oil, Scarcity

Mark Dery

Bad Thoughts, Great Book March 27, 2012

By Supervert<

I find it impossible to discuss Mark Dery's I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts in anything other than the first person. The book speaks so eloquently of its time that, uncannily, I can't help but feel it speaks of me. So many of my own interests and obsessions rise from its pages — death, deviance, intellect. I recognize my iTunes library in Dery's tours de force on David Bowie and Lady Gaga. I recognize my bookshelf in Dery's essay on Amok Books, whose productions were once textbooks in the éducation sentimentale of the counterculture. I recognize my own rhetorical strategies in the move Dery makes in “Toe Fou,” updating George Bataille's meditation on the big toe by riffing on a picture of Madonna's bare feet. Weirdest of all, I recognize what I thought was my own obscure fondness for “invisible literature” in Dery's essay on the New York Academy of Medicine Library — a place I too have plundered in quiet hours of mad and horrible research. Was I sitting across the table from you, Mark? I feel as though you, like Baudelaire, have addressed your book to “mon semblable, mon frère.”

Continue reading “Review (Guest): I Must Not Think Bad Thoughts: Drive-by Essays on American Dread, American Dreams”

2012/04/27

Review: The Lessons of History (First Edition)

6 Star Top 10%, History, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy

cover lessons of history first edition — Amazon Page

Will and Ariel Durant

Beyond 6 Stars, So Fundamental as to be Priceless April 27, 2012

By Robert D. Steele HALL OF FAME TOP 500 REVIEWER

When I donated by 2500 volume library to George Mason University (down from 5000 in earlier years), this is one of a tiny handful of books I held back, along with Buckminster Fuller's Ideas and Integrities: A Spontaneous Autobiographical Disclosure.

This edition is the FIRST edition. The reprinted currently in stock version The Lessons of History is more readily available, but if you can get the first edition, it is priceless at multiple levels.

This is the first book that I discuss in my national security lecture on the literature relevant to strategy & force structure. It is a once-in-a-lifetime gem of a book that sums up their much larger ten volume collection which itself is brilliant but time consuming. This is the “executive briefing.”

Geography matters. Inequality is natural. Famine, pestilence, and war are Nature's way of balancing the population.

Birth control (or not) has *strategic* implications (e.g. see Catholic strategy versus US and Russian neglect of its replenishment among the higher social and economic classes).

History is color-blind. Morality is strength. Worth saying again: morality is strength.

They end with “the only lasting revolution is in the mind of man.” In other words, technology is not a substitute for thinking by humans.

See my various lists. Other books I recommend:

2012/04/17

Review (Guest): Gandhi and the Unspeakable

5 Star, Biography & Memoirs, Culture, Research, Justice (Failure, Reform), Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Religion & Politics of Religion, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution

James W. Douglass

Reviewed by Christian Newswire

Ghandhi and the Unspeakable looks upon the father of the Indian independence movement and examines why a prophet of nonviolence was assassinated by Hindu nationalists during a prayer meeting in New Delhi.

From James W. Douglass, the bestselling author of JFK and the Unspeakable (Orbis 2010), Ghandhi and the Unspeakable shines new light on the untimely death of Mohandas Gandhi. Following the theme of his study about the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, Mr. Douglass shows how the people who conspired to kill Gandhi hoped to destroy a compelling vision of peace, nonviolence and reconciliation.

By tracing the story of Gandhi's early “experiments with truth” in South Africa, Mr. Douglass shows how Gandhi confronted and overcame the fear of death. He also explains why, as with the case of JFK's death, this story matters today and what can be learned from Gandhi's truth and its opposition to the powers of his time.

Mr. Douglass is a scholar and peace activist. His book about the JFK assassination is widely acclaimed by historians and political scientists as one of the most important books written about the subject. Gandhi and the Unspeakable, according to Publisher's Weekly, “provides readers with a slim, elegant volume containing explosive insight into who conspired to assassinate the father of modern nonviolence and why.”

2012/02/182012/02/18

Review: The Information Diet – A Case for Conscious Consumption

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Communications, Consciousness & Social IQ, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Education (General), Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Information Society, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Media, Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Survival & Sustainment, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Truth & Reconciliation, Values, Ethics, Sustainable Evolution, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Clay Johnson

5.0 out of 5 stars Gift Book, Gift Idea, Gift Economy, Get a Grip,February 18, 2012

I received a copy of this book as a gift, and gladly so since the top review at this time is unfairly dismissive while also confessing that the reviewer only read the first third of the book (but evidently not the preface (first page) that states plainly (first sentence, actually), “The things we know about food have a lot to teach us about how to have a healthy relationship with information.”

Having just reviewed The Telescreen: An Empirical Study of the Destruction and Despiritualization of Consciousness, and so many other books here at Amazon, I easily connect the point in last night's reading: that food, medicine, education, and the media are all “co-conspirators” in dumbing down a human population whose brains started out as enormous pools of potential creativity, to this book. The information — and the food and the medicine and the tabloid garbage we are ingesting — is killing us.

What the first reviewer completely misses is that this is the first manifesto, beyond The Age of Missing Information, to actually focus on how out of control our relationship is to the world of information. As a lifetime professional in these matters I can state clearly that not only are governments substituting ideology for intelligence and corruption for integrity, but so are all the other communities of information (academia, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government / non-profit. We live in a totally corrupt world where — right now — banking families (Rothschild et al) own the banks and the banks own the two-party tyrannies (or the outright dictators) that own government, and they own the the corporations, with the 99% being expendable fodder for 1% theft from the commonwealth. This book is a cry from the heart, and an eloquent one at that.

Continue reading “Review: The Information Diet – A Case for Conscious Consumption”

2012/02/172012/02/18

Review: The Telescreen – An Empirical and Philosophical Study of the Destruction of Consciousness in America

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Atrocities & Genocide, Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Censorship & Denial of Access, Communications, Congress (Failure, Reform), Consciousness & Social IQ, Corruption, Country/Regional, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Culture, Research, Democracy, Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Intelligence (Public), Iraq, Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Nature, Diet, Memetics, Design, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Politics, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Public Administration, Secrecy & Politics of Secrecy, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Jeffrey Grupp

5.0 out of 5 stars You need a brain to read this book; if you have one, the book will scare you,February 17, 2012

I have been keeping in touch with “alternative” sources for some time, ever since I realized in about 1988 that neither the US secret intelligence world nor the US media were at all reliable — they are each very good at what they choose to do, but that does not include the public interest.

The author refers very often to his 2007 book, Corporatism: The Secret Government of the New World Order, to the point that I do recommend that be bought and read before this book.

I am hugely impressed by this author. He does detailed, meticulously documented research and the presentation is excellent. I especially like footnotes I can see while reading the body instead of endnotes.

Continue reading “Review: The Telescreen – An Empirical and Philosophical Study of the Destruction of Consciousness in America”

2012/02/052016/05/19

Review: Leverage – How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World

5 Star, America (Founders, Current Situation), Banks, Fed, Money, & Concentrated Wealth, Budget Process & Politics, Capitalism (Good & Bad), Complexity & Catastrophe, Congress (Failure, Reform), Corruption, Crime (Corporate), Crime (Government), Economics, Executive (Partisan Failure, Reform), Impeachment & Treason, Intelligence (Public), Justice (Failure, Reform), Misinformation & Propaganda, Peace, Poverty, & Middle Class, Philosophy, Power (Pathologies & Utilization), Priorities, Public Administration, Threats (Emerging & Perennial), True Cost & Toxicity, Voices Lost (Indigenous, Gender, Poor, Marginalized)

Karl Denninger
STRONG FIVE – Original, Award-Winning, Major Contribution, February 5, 2012

On the very last page of the book I learn that the author received the Reed Irvine Accuracy in Media Award for Grassroots Journalism, for his coverage of the 2008 market meltdown. This confirms my own already formed very high estimation of the author and his work. In fact, although I normally do links at the end of the review, let me open with some other books that are world-class and within which I place this work as comparable:

The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism
The Soul of Capitalism: Opening Paths to a Moral Economy
Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
SAVAGE CAPITALISM AND THE MYTH OF DEMOCRACY: Latin America in the Third Millennium
Democracy Incorporated: Managed Democracy and the Specter of Inverted Totalitarianism (New in Paper)

Here is the author's three-line conclusion to the longer chapter that ends the book (my own notes in parenthesis):

01 Federal and state governments KNEW what was going on, and are COMPLICIT. (This introduces me to the reality of “control fraud,” where the government commits impeachable acts that are not sanctioned; I also learn in this book that when Congress passes laws it does not include sanctions for failure by the GOVERNMENT to uphold those laws.)

Continue reading “Review: Leverage – How Cheap Money Will Destroy the World”

2012/01/29

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

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.