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Ron Paul

Paul’s Greatest, Most Daring Book Yet A. Maheshwari April 19, 2011

Ron Paul continues the noble tradition of founders and thinkers such as Thomas Jefferson, Edmund Burke, James Burnham and Patrick Buchanan in social-political conditions of the 21st Century. The book is written in lucid, vital and free flowing style without any convoluted jargon. I purchased the kindle edition and finished the book in 3 hours with several re-readings of some chapters/paragraphs.

The stage is set in contemporary America, and the intended audiences are likely the young indoctrinated subservient Americans, victims of Washington DC. This book could be the conservative bible for next two decades to effect political renewal of a tired, beaten and declining America. It deals with Paul’s unique approach as a practicing Christian, a conservative libertarian and a citizen statesman. The amoral and utopian aspects of left-libertarianism are absent in this book.

Indeed the word libertarian has been mentioned only 6 times in the text. In comparison, the word moral has been mentioned a good 109 times, and “liberty” occurs 191 times. The book emphasizes the true essence of Christianity and Christ as the prince of peace, not a messenger of aggressive/deceitful secular wars.

The writing is universal in its appeal so that a person from China, India, Africa, Islamic World or Europe will naturally relate to its contents. It defines the true meaning of Liberty, Equality and Fraternity, the three principles of humanity. It is applicable to all human societies and aggregates, not just America. It shows the essence of conservatism and social order and extensively deals with liberty’s relationship with morality, religion and ethics.

The book is tabulated in 50 chapters and covers 5 principal themes:

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Rolf Sattler

5.0 out of 5 stars The umbrella of things Sattler talk about in this book

February 15, 2001

By m.ivashkou (Eindhoven, Brabant Netherlands) – See all my reviews

In the introduction the complex approach is stressed. When someone is doing a research he should look at the system as a whole one. Some definitions: Biology is the science of life, which in turn requires the definition of science and life. To avoid that the biology is defined as science of living organisms or science of living systems.

1. Theories and hypotheses.

The aim of science. The aim of science is to gain knowledge of the world. Knowledge has many forms. Science concerns only with scientific knowledge, which is expressed in singular and general propositions. Singular proposition is also called facts, whereas general propositions are referred to as hypotheses, models, rules, laws, and theories. Laws are also well-confirmed general propositions, yet they are less comprehensive than theories. Thus any general proposition within the framework of a theory may be called law. There are two kinds of laws: deterministic and probabilistic. Most of the biological laws are probabilistic.

Scientific methodology or how do we gain scientific knowledge.

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Leland C. McCaslin

Superb Ground-level View, Less So On Context

February 23, 2011

As a former direct report to John Guenther, who served along the same lines for many years in Marine Corps counterintelligence in Europe and elsewhere, I have to admire what this author has done and certainly agree that it is useful and important perspective from a ground-level point of view.

I like the names, the photos, the details. HOWEVER, there are two contextual issues that are not well-represented in the book, which is a historical account.

First, the author was and remains unwitting of the fact that the US was funding the Red Brigades and creating a false terrorist threat within Italy in order to further consolidate the power of the fascist government in the post-war period. Only recently has all of this been exposed in the aftermath of the CIA renditions out of Italy, and testimony finally elicited from several participants in the earlier cover operations . In that context then, this book has to be seen as a partial unwitting account. For the tip of the iceberg, see Journal: Nato’s Secret Armies (It’s Not Terror if CIA Pays and Locals Do the Dirty….) at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog.

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Buckminster Fuller

6 Star and Beyond–the Essence of Fuller, the Future of Humanity

November 28, 2010

I did not truly begin to understand the breadth and depth of Buckminster Fuller’s thinking until I read this book as it deserves to be read, with full attention and detailed notes. This is one of those books that merits–and received from me, a Work Table of core concepts, definitions, obstacles, and solutions, posted online at Work Table [link live at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog].

Although I heard Fuller speak personally at Muhlenberg College and distinctly remember him saying that a housing foundation could support the Queen Elizabeth ocean liner, it was not until this book that I understood in detail exactly what he meant: that we are wasting 90% of what we put into buildings. I have previously read and reviewed Critical Path as well as Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth, and it is my great privilege to know Medard Gabel, co-creator of the analog World Brain and sole creator of the new digital EarthGame (in concept pending funding).

CORE POINT: True wealth is cosmic energy and the creation of means to deliver to humanity unlimited free energy. Among many other things this creates the possibility of applying energy to create self-contained homes that are lightweight, fully self-contained in water and sewage, and totally green.

CORE CONCEPT: Capitalism and democracy have been perverted by money–those who manage money manage those who manage politics, and they both concentrate on optimizing the false God of money, an abstract concept hardly worth its paper representation, while ignoring–even subverting–the possibility of achieving infinite cosmic wealth on behalf of all of humanity.

CORE CONCEPT: Predatory capitalism on the one hand, and controlled socialism on the other, are both extremes and both fail to meet the needs as well as the possibilities of humanity. Fullerism is at root a non-zero equation.

PERSONAL POINT: This book answers the question I could not answer when a senior executive asked me “what do you do?” Now I know. I am a Comprehensive Global Architect whose objective is Prime Design: From Waste to Wealth (the title of my next book, inspired by this core reading from Buckminster Fuller). All my prior works, including my most recent, INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty, have been a preamble to what I now recognize is my life’s work…I will try to earn another 25 years (I am 58, 58 + 25 is 83 — my family history suggests I will make it.).  I am still looking for a country or global organization that wants to profit from doing this.

A few definitions up front:

QUOTE (142): WEALTH [is] the measurable degree of forwardly organized environmental control, in terms of quickly convertible energy, capacities and performance ratioed system capabilities, per capita, per diem.

Advertising destroyed public trust by pre-empting “industrial design” as code for airbrushing superficial changes to move products to market, rather than seeking integral improvements that could be shared with the consumer.

Design-improved livingry increases wealth.

Synergy is the delta between the sum of the parts and their anticipatable outcomes, and the actual outcome not anticipated.

CORE CONCEPTS

Architects deal with the externalities of man.

“At rest” science and understanding (Newton’s paradigm) have been replaced by “constant change” (Einstein’s paradigm).

Bad housing breeds bad humanity and bad science–the time/energy costs and the materials costs are too high, housing is the socio-economic “runt” of all the professions.

Challenge is IRREDUCIBLE.

Design is innovative re-assembly that adds value.

Design-preventable includes illumination and prevention of corrupt exploitation of materials for inefficient or unjustifiable applications.

Energy mass, energy radiation, energy gravitation (E3) times Intellect (E3I)

Good design would reduce the per capita consumption of building materials from nine tons per person to one ton per person [this is in the developed world--these reductions would allow the extension of the lower tonnage home designs to nine times more people and more--with mass consumption come mass efficiencies.]

Industry is *supposed to be* the organization and application of collective knowledge and action that produces synergy (added value) over the sum of the parts in isolation.

Individual freedom is ESSENTIAL to the expansion of diversity needed to enable collectives to see the whole.

Intelligence masters energy, increases energy, applies energy.

Total Thinking is the intelligent acquisition, ingestion, processing, and exploitation of all relevant information in order to produce efficiencies and effects beneficial to the mission objective.

Wealth is intellect plus energy combined to create capacity [with more free energy making more refined capacity possible].

Worldwide commonwealth credit is both needed and achievable to provide mass-produced sustainable housing for all. That in turn frees up the five billion poor to create “infinite wealth” by combining their intellect with infinite free energy to advance civilization.

OBSTACLES to advancing humanity include:

Advertising in place of genuine progress [should not be a tax-deductible expense in my own view]

“Credit” fueled the perpetuation and expansion of rotten housing at great cost.

Housing is the works of design, the worst of materials, and the worst of applied engineering

Housing as the sucking chest wound in economics [mortgages should not be tax-deductible, this both encourages waste of materials on housing, but also enables the growth of financial fraud]

Managers lack the over-all philosophical discernment to be effective at seeing the whole and building to the whole.

Politics is VERY wasteful, perpetuating inefficient industries.

Specializations are attracting the most gifted, and this leaves the less gifted dealing with integration if they think about it at all. [I always thought this was what business and public administration programs were supposed to do, but having graduated from such a program realize they do not.]

A HANDFUL OF QUOTES

p. 25 “My envisioned transcendental world design plan would be inherently nonpolitical, because it would be utterly independent of any need for authority beyond that to-self-by-self for initiation of its study and development.”

p. 95 In relation to the waste of heavy materials in housing, “…that in this war crisis it is technically treason to allow ourselves to be short sixty-five thousand freight cars weighing fifty tons of steel each, which shortage is equivalent to the number of cars required exclusively to transport the solid foundation and flooring materials unscientifically employed as frozen compression elements to structurally support the tiny weights of one-tenth-of-a-ton load of men who comprise the negligible working loads of housing, or to support machinery from below that could better be suspended, etc.”

p. 246 “The efficiency of the industrial equation is directly proportional to the numbers consuming.” [In other words, capitalism focused on the needs of the one billion rich is long overdue for a redirection of focus to the needs of the five billion poor.]

p.247 “Serve one hundred per cent will involve a world design revolution, not just design of end-products, but of the comprehensive industrial network equations including world-around-livingry-service systems, at regenerative occupancy rentals, mutually installed in anticipatory facilitation of total world enjoyment of individually respected total man.”

p. 249 “Only the free-wheeling artist-explorer, non-academic, scientist-philosopher, mechanic, economist-poet, who has never waited for patron-starting and accrediting of his coordinate capabilities holds the prime initiative today.”

SOLUTIONS

Energy investments will define the future.

Need a world housing industry. We do NOT need water, sewer, and electrical infrastructure. Distributed housing and small cities connected by high-speed rail should be the norm.

Harvesting of scrap is the next needed Manhattan Project/Marshall Plan.

A HANDFUL OF RELATED BOOKS

Radical Man
The exemplar: The exemplary performer in the age of productivity
Communitas: Means of Livelihood and Ways of Life
Human Scale
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny
The Knowledge Executive
Reflections on Evolutionary Activism: Essays, poems and prayers from an emerging field of sacred social change

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Jesse Eisenberg (Actor), Andrew Garfield (Actor), David Fincher (Director)

Review by Jon Lebkowsky

The David Fincher/Aaron Sorkin film collaboration called “The Social Network” is not about technology, though there are scenes that suggest how code is produced through focused work (which actually looks boring when you’re watching it “IRL” (in real life), without Fincher’s hyperactive perspective – but is so engaging you can lose yourself totally in the process when you’re the one actually producing the code).  The film is more about the entrepreneurial spirit, what it takes to have a vision and see it through. The real visionary in the film, Mark Zuckerberg, appears far less intense IRL than Jesse Eisenberg’s interpretation would suggest, but his drive and work ethic are undeniable. It’s not an accident that a guy in his twenties produced a billion-dollar platform; he could have been derailed if he’d lacked the persistence of vision and intent that the film shows so clearly. And, of course, he was kind of a jerk, probably without meaning to be. That kind of focus and drive tends to override comfortable social graces, kind of ironic when you’re building a social platform.

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Serious People Believe This Nails the JFK Assassination for Real

February 28, 2010

As a recovering spy who went on to champion Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), whose mantra is “the truth at any cost reduces all other costs,” I read this book long ago, found it very creidble (I was in Viet-Nam from 1963-1967 and historically have always been morally and intellectually ashamed of how CIA–not JFK–allowed and encouraged the internal assassination of Ngo Dinh Diem, the Catholic Mandarin from whom we voilated the Geneva Convention and trashed Viet-Nam for a decade.

This book, I found recently, while discussing the below JFK books I have reviewed, is taken very seriously by individuals close to two Presidents. Personally I think the CIA tacit consent, Cuban exiles out of Miami trained by CIA is much more likely–the fraudelent Secret Service credentials that allowed the killers and associates to escape are one indicator for me. In any event, this novel is terribly, terribly on target with respect to the possibilities.

See also:
A Farewell to Justice: Jim Garrison, JFK’s Assassination, And the Case That Should Have Changed History
JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters
Someone Would Have Talked: The Assassination of President John F. Kennedy and the Conspiracy to Mislead History

My many book reviews on Viet-Nam are easily accessed at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, all my reviews lead back to their Amazon home page.

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Real Life From Building the Boat to Being Captured by the Chinese

February 16, 2010

David J. Steele

I watched my father build the Piver Tri-Maran in his garage and front yard of our home in Saigon, South Viet-Nam (at the time). This book is a still exciting story of an oil engineer and manager (at the time in charge of all Esso supply for all of Viet-Nam) who built a boat from scratch and sailed it from Saigon toward Hong Kong.

20 miles off the coast of Hainan (by his calculations) he was rammed by militia-pirates and the boat sunk, leaving him in the water. He was taken prisoner and vanished from the public eye. Months later he was released into Hong Kong with some photos of pieces of his boat washed up on shore, and his sextant.

The best part of the book for me has always been his account of being treated as a guest rather than a prisoner in China, and when asked what Americans drank with their meals, his response “a big bottle of beer.” That’s what he got, and he claims that is why he only lost 40 pounds or whatever it was.

I still have the “little red book” he was given to read while a prisoner. My positive opinion of the Chinese has been shaped in part by their very dignified treatment of my father as a quasi-prisoner, combined with my finishing high school in Singapore at a time when Minister-Mentor Lee Kuan Yew was just hitting his statesmanlike-stride.

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REVIEW BY  Russell J. Geoffrey (East Greenwich, RI)

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars INTEGRITY: easy to lose, hard to restore

February 4, 2008

He was a Navy officer serving on the USS Yorktown by the age of 22, in law school at 26, a staff assistant to the counsel to the president at 29, and Undersecretary of Transportation at 33. At 34, he was in jail. How could this happen to a man raised in a highly moral family, with an excellent education, with Christian Middle American values and a strong sense of patriotism? Yet here was Egil “Bud” Krogh at 33, starting a prison sentence for violating the civil rights of Dr. Lewis Fielding, a California psychiatrist. Bud says the principal cause was the collapse of integrity of those members of the White House’s Special Investigative Unit (SIU) who conspired, ordered and carried the break-in of the doctor who had been consulted by Dr. Daniel Ellsburg, the “leaker” of the Pentagon Papers” to the New York Times in early 1971.

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