Review: Understanding Knowledge as a Commons–From Theory to Practice

Almost a Three–Ambitious Title, Narrow Focus November 29, 2009 Charlotte Hess An MIT publication from 2007, this is actually knowledge from the 2000-2004 timeframe, and it is annoying narrow knowledge written from legal-economic point of view. Well-intentioned, no doubt, this is not the “inter-disciplinary” work that it claims to be, and I demonstrate restraint in …

Review: Not by Genes Alone: How Culture Transformed Human Evolution

Boring, Original, Don’t Know Enough to Give Less Than Five Stars November 28, 2009 Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd I found this book boring, and not nearly as breath-taking and inspiring as Robert Wright’s Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny, which altered my perception of everything else, and is right up there with E. …

Review: Nonzero–The Logic of Human Destiny

 7 Stars–Nobel Prize (Of Old, Before Devalued) – Life Transformative Insights November 28, 2009 Robert Wright QUOTE: “Non-zero-sumness is a kind of potential–a potential for overall gain, or for overall loss, depending on how the game is played.” This book is one of the most sophisticated, deep, documented, and influential I have ever read, right …

Review: Agenda for a New Economy: From Phantom Wealth to Real Wealth

A Four Pumped to Five to Stave Off the Ideologues November 27, 2009 David C. Korten I would normally rate this book a four because of its lack of reference to Buckminster Fuller (see Critical Path; the Open Money movement; or the literature on wealth of networks, fortune at the bottom of the pyramid, and …

Review: Global Warming False Alarm–The Bad Science Behind the United Nations’ Assertion that Man-made CO2 Causes Global Warming

Righteous Good SLAM of IPCC Fraud & Intimidation November 26, 2009 Ralph B. Alexander I read a lot, and I confess to have been among those who “bought in” to the celebrity alarmism of Al Gore, but I never displaced the totality of the threats to Earth for an obsessive focus on carbon emissions. Among …

Journal: Conflict Over Resources–Over the next 20 years, demand for food and energy will rise by half

The Madagascar model Nov 13th 2009 From The World in 2010 print edition By John Parker Conflicts over natural resources will grow In the world’s earliest written legal code, dating from 1790BC, Hammurabi, the king of Babylon, laid down rules governing the maintenance of irrigation systems and the amount of water people could take from …