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.”
4.0 out of 5 stars Lacks Visualization and Genealogy, A Good Start,March 3, 2012
I eagerly anticipated receipt of this book, but when it arrived I had two immediate reactions:
01) A serious work that offers new information about American corporations betraying the public interest; and
02) Totally lacking in visualizations and “trees” showing both the family trees of those like the Bushes that started out and stayed Nazi sympathizers; and those who entered the USA under CIA sponsorship after the war, and spawned multiple generations of neo-Nazi mind-sets with assets able to influence public policy.
Then I noticed Howard Zinn's jacket blurb (“A valuable history…shocking and sobering…deserves to be widely read”) and I mention that to make the point that my four star grade is one of disappointment at what could have been, NOT disappointment at what is. This is a very useful serious book, it needs to be redone.
I totally agree with another reviewer who expresses a desire for footnotes rather than endnotes. For works of this kind that are both controversial and revelatory, the notes needs to be as close to the text as possible.
This entire book strongly reinforces my long-standing view that every nation needs to have a very strong counterintelligence cadre to guard against both religious and corporate treason. The US was clearly infected with Nazi ideology, sympathy, and corruption, and this has clearly carried over into today's corporate immunity from government regulation, and the achievement of the virtual corporate state in the USA — in a word, neo-fascism.
The book is an excellent mix of material I was not familiar with, and material I have have encountered before. The latter tracks with what I have read from others, thus in my lay view authenticating the mew material.
For myself, the most interesting materials covers corporate treason in refusing to provide materials or allocate man-hours and machine-hours as requested for the war effort — this is another side of the corporate face, complementing the side that gains great profit from war.
What is missing from this book that would have fascinated me — apart from the visualizations and timelines — is the deeper story of how US corporate nazi sympathies and international banking zionist sympathies eventually converged into the 1% against the 99%.
The CIA is a constant in this book, but having worked for the CIA myself, I have to remind the reader that there are at least five CIAs: the White House CIA, the Wall Street CIA, the “nice” CIA that really does try to do good intelligence, the covert operations CIA (paramilitary, influence operations) and the rendition and torture CIA. A future President might well wish to break up the CIA and start over — I absolutely consider 90% of the CIA to be earnest and honest. A proper counterintelligence agency (what the FBI is supposed to be but is not) would be nailing down government, corporate, and religious traitors.
Allen Dulles is made out to be a traitor in this book. For me this is a useful teaching point. If one takes every major leader across the public and private sector, and examines their actual decisions, what are the criteria for establishing the degree to which they are loyal to the Constitution, what are the sources one must develop to make that determination, why are those sources not in use? To this one must add the deeper question of how education, intelligence / counter-intelligence, and research should be managed to achieve the highest possible ethics and avoid “contamination” by authoritarian and genocidal mind-sets.
So I suppose my bottom line on this book is that it is an eye-opener, but it does not go far enough in “processing” and in “visualizing” the information to help us lay people understand with greater precision the degree to which our public and private sectors are corrupted by the Nazi orientation – to which one must add today the Zionist orientation, the “new world order” orientation, the neo-Nazi eugenics/Forced Population Reducation orientation, and so on. Who actually represents “We the People” appears to be unclear and dangerously distant from the public interest.
5.0 out of 5 stars Nobel Level Foundation for Resilience & Sustainability, February 1, 2012
Dr. Herman E. Daly may well be a future Nobel Prize winner …he is especially well-regarded in Norway and Sweden, where he has received prizes one step short of the Nobel. He is the author, co-author, or primary contributing editor of many books that fully integrate the disciplines of economics and ecology. I bought the three most recent for the purpose of selecting one to give out at my annual Global Information Forum. I ended up choosing For The Common Good: Redirecting the Economy toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future, in part because it is available in paperback and is not a more expensive “trade” publication; and in part because it is strong in laying out specific ecological policy areas in the context of a strong theological or ethical perspective. More on that in its own review.
Of the three books (the third one that I reviewed is Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics) this, the text-book, is assuredly the most up-to-date and the most detailed. If you are buying only one book for yourself, this is the one that I recommend, because these are important issues and a detailed understanding is required with the level of detail that this book provided. It should, ideally, be read with “Valuing the Earth” first (see my separate review of that book, from the 1970s updated with 1990s material and new contributions), then “For the Common Good”, and finally the text book as a capstone. But if you buy only one, buy this one.
1) The publisher has been completely dishonest in failing to illuminate the fact that this is a book Of, By, and For Monsanto, the greatest force of evil to ever hit farming.
2) The author (naturally) does not address the total corruption of the US Government and most other governments with respect to all issues, not just food. Corn as fuel, corn as fake sugar, corn as inedible cattle feed that puts cattle feces into spinach, the poisoning of our children and our environment by pesticides and other toxins that substitute poison for intelligence, are not covered.
3) Finally, the author is completely lacking in a systemic approach to all of these matters. Here are the twelve core policies that must be harmonized if they are to be effective: Agriculture, Diplomacy, Economy, Education, Energy, Family, Health, Immigration, Justice, Security, Society, Water. This book is abysmally oblivious–no doubt for the convenience of Monsanto–to the fact that agriculture that is based on fossil fuel consumption, inter-continental transport, poisoning for both growth and packaging; that destroys small farmers and community-related farming; that destroys the health of entire nations; that destroys the chain of life in seed that gives birth to new seed (instead substituting suicidal seeds); and finally, the cost-benefit ratio of water use in relation to all that is grown or raised–none of this is to be found in this book, ergo this is a dishonest, incomplete, rather ignorant book.
From where I sit, the publisher, the publisher has disgraced their brand. Here are ten links to books I recommend instead of this book.
5.0 out of 5 stars America Desperately Needs More Illumination Such as This January 16, 2012
I received a review copy of this book [note to publishers: always ask first] and was glad to be offered a chance to read something as important as this. America desperately needs more illumination on the corruption in our government, and the evil done in our name without our permission but very much at our expense.
As a career veteran of the national security community–the Marine Corps and the Central Intelligence Agency–followed by seventeen years teaching 90 governments — 66 directly — how to get a grip on Open Source Intelligence (OSINT) that provides 95% of what we need to know at 2% or less of the cost of what we spend now on secret intelligence–I am well-qualified to read this book from a patriot's point of view.
A strong national defense capability does NOT exist in the USA today. Posturing fools such as Senator Rick Santorum have no idea what they are talking about when they seek to discredit those of us who do. The infantry, four percent of the force, takes eighty percent of the casualties and receives ONE PERCENT of the Pentagon budget. Within the other 99%, half–at least–is fraud, waste, and abuse that makes America weaker, not stronger.
This book, edited by David Swanson, is a very good deal at $25. Its 368 pages include chapters from thirty other authors besides the editor, and include contributions from Ray McGovern and Karen Kwiatkowski, whose work I have admired in the past. If there were one flaw in the book, but not so serious as to lose a star, it would be its isolation from the pioneering work done by Pierre Sprey, Chuck Spinney, and Winslow Wheeler, with a genuflection toward John Boyd, the real pioneer of smart sufficient national security.
What is uniquely valuable about this book, something I have not seen elsewhere, is its provision of a holistic examination not just of the military-industrial process and fraudulent, wasteful, abusive bad design, bad performance, and bad cost, but of the costs that the military-industrial complex imposes on all of us and our economy and our society. This is a world-class book that should be translated into other languages to help others avoid our long-running mistakes.
Here are the blinding flashes of solid insight that stayed with me and merit the broadest possible public understanding:
A new book suggests that “It's the economy, stupid,” may be more than political strategy; it may also be the key to environmental sustainability. The book is Green Washed: Why We Can't Buy Our Way to a Green Planet, by Kendra Pierre-Louis. The argument developed is not just that the consumer choices of an individual won't save the planet without collective action, but also that the only collective action that will save us is abandoning the whole idea of consumer choices.
Pierre-Louis lays the groundwork for her argument by walking us through the hazards of supposedly environmental approaches to numerous fields. First is clothing, in which a big trend is toward organic cotton. While reducing pesticides is all to the good, Pierre-Louis writes, growing cotton — any cotton — is a rapid way to exhaust the earth's stores of fresh water. Among the preferable proposals the author suggests is creating or altering your own clothing so that it means more to you and you throw it away less rapidly. The low-hanging fruit in improving our clothing practices is in quantity, not quality: buy less clothing!
Amazon Page
Next comes diet. Our poisonous farming practices are killing the Mississippi River, exhausting our underground water supplies, drying up the Colorado (on this I recommend the 3-D movie “Grand Canyon Adventure”), eradicating biodiversity, eliminating soil, and consuming fossil fuels. Genetically modified crops are outrageous failures on their own terms, resulting in increased, rather than diminished, use of pesticides and herbicides. Last week, I would add, the Obama administration approved new Monsanto corn despite 45,000 negative public comments and 23 positive, corn that will mean the widespread use of a major ingredient in Agent Orange as herbicide. According to Pierre-Louis, we cannot ethically shop our way out of this, not even by buying local, and we couldn't even if products were meaningfully labeled and the accuracy of the labeling was verified. Instead the easiest solution lies in the fact that, in the United States, we throw away 40 percent of the food we buy. Stop doing that! Start buying and using only what you need.
Now the world is noticing. He appeared on Russia Today TV, which has eclipsed BBC as the English-language trusted source (and also excels at migrating its TV shorts to the web and to print), and here are some of his own words that illuminate how important his book is:
He says:
The ultimate goal of the US is to take the resources of Africa and Middle East under military control to block economic growth in China and Russia, thus taking the whole of Eurasia under control, author and historian William F. Engdahl reveals.
The crisis with the US economy and the dollar system, the conduct of the US foreign policy is all a part of breakdown of the entire superpower structure that was built up after the end of WWII, claims Engdahl.
“Nobody in Washington wants to admit, just as nobody in Britain a hundred years ago wanted to admit that the British Empire was in terminal decline,” claims the author, noting that “All of this is related to the attempt to keep this sole superpower not only intact, but to spread its influence over the rest of the planet.”
William F. Engdahl believes the uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa is a plan first announced by George W. Bush at a G8 meeting in 2003 and it was called “The Greater Middle East Project”.
The US Government is out of control, and it is out of control because a two-party tyranny (less turnover than the Politburo, in Peggy Noonan's great line for use by Ronald Reagan) has nurtured a combination of Wall Street legalized greed and neo-con military-industrial complex that has sold out the US taxpayer — 5% earmarks “buy” a 95% corporate hand-out, one third of that money borrowed in our name.
Occupy Wall Street is incoherent right now – when they get their act together, it is my hope they will focus on an Electoral Reform Act of 2012 – in my view, there is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful — all these enormous crimes against humanity not-withstanding – that cannot be fixed quickly by restoring integrity to our electoral system, hence our govenrment, hence our society and economy.
Disappointing at Three Levels, January 25, 2012
