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Robert Peckham

Book Description

April 2, 2013

Imperial Contagions argues that there was no straightforward shift from older, enclavist models of colonial medicine to a newer emphasis on prevention and treatment of disease among indigenous populations as well as European residents. It shows that colonial medicine was not at all homogeneous “on the ground” but was riven with tensions and contradictions. Indigenous elites contested and appropriated Western medical knowledge and practices for their own purposes. Colonial policies contained contradictory and cross-cutting impulses. This book challenges assumptions that colonial regimes were uniformly able to regulate indigenous bodies and that colonial medicine served as a “tool of empire.”

Review

Europeans in Asia developed powerful anxieties about contagion and made many plans to keep it at a safe distance. Commercial ventures depended on mobility of people and goods, yet for the personal safety of their members, the Europeans in Asia wished to stabilize and control the spaces they inhabited and the behaviors of those around them. By exploring the tensions and contradictions that arose from these efforts to stay safe, the authors — among the best authorities now writing — offer not only fascinating accounts of historical events but fresh views of the processes often termed colonial or imperial.

(Harold J. Cook, author of Matters of Exchange: Commerce, Medicine, and Science in the Dutch Golden Age )
This substantial collection greatly enriches our understanding of medicine, disease, and policy in colonial Asia. The contributors, from a range of disciplines, grapple fruitfully with questions surrounding medical space and the shift from enclavism to public health. In doing so, they make important theoretical and empirical contributions to medical and imperial history.

(David Arnold, author of Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India )

About the Author

Robert Peckham is codirector of the Centre for the Humanities and Medicine and an assistant professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.

David M. Pomfret is an associate professor in the Department of History at the University of Hong Kong.

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Joseph G. Bock

5.0 out of 5 stars Pioneering Work, Deserves a Great Deal of Attention, April 29, 2013

I am shocked that there are no reviews of this book. Brought to my attention by Berto Jongman, one of the top researchers in Europe with a special talent at the intersection of terrorism and related violence (e.g. genocide) and Open Source Intelligence (OSINT), he knew this is an area that is of very high interest to me.

The book passed my very first test, with more than ample references to Dr. Patrick Meier, a pioneer in crisis mapping, SMS translations and plotting by diasporas, and humanitarian ICT generally. I strongly recommend his blog and expect him to produce a book of his own soon.

The primary focus here is on social media via hand-held devices. It assumes a working Internet and does not have a great deal of focus on the urgency of achieving an Autonomous Internet, and more fully exploiting Liberation Technology and Open Source Everything (OSE), the latter my special interest along with M4IS2 (Multinational, Multiagency, Multidisciplinary, Multidomain Information-Sharing and Sense-Making).

Use Inside the Book to see the chapters and appendices. The author makes clear two major points early on:

01 Grassroots is where its at, not top down macro

02 Technology alone is not enough, organizing — the hard long road of grassroots organizing — is essential.

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Neil Postman

Book Description

Postman suggests that the current crisis in our educational system derives from its failure to supply students with a translucent, unifying “narrative” like those that inspired earlier generations. Instead, today’s schools promote the false “gods” of economic utility, consumerism, or ethnic separatism and resentment. What alternative strategies can we use to instill our children with a sense of global citizenship, healthy intellectual skepticism, respect of America’s traditions, and appreciation of its diversity? In answering this question, The End of Education restores meaning and common sense to the arena in which they are most urgently needed.

Table of Contents

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Neil Postman

Book Description

Shirley Turkle

5.0 out of 5 stars No robot could have written this February 16, 2011

Diana Senechal

That was one of my thoughts as I read Sherry Turkle’s Alone Together: no matter what robots learn to do, they will never learn to write a book as thoughtful, informative, and intense as Alone Together. They would not know how to pose the questions, let alone use such discernment in addressing them.

It is interesting that Turkle chose to discuss robots in the first part of the book and the Internet in the second part. By presenting the “strange” part first, she gives us a sense of how strange our everyday lives actually are, how far we have moved away from enjoying each other’s presence.

Turkle quotes children and adults who hesitate to use the phone because it seems awkward and intrusive; it is much easier, they say, to dash off a text or email. At the same time, Turkle points out, because of this very convenience, people expect quick responses. She describes the anxiety of teenagers when they do not get an immediate reply to their text messages. One girl talks about needing her cell phone for “emergencies”; it turns out that what she means by “emergency” is having a feeling without being able to share it.

Turkle shows how our Internet communications mix the deliberate with the unconsidered. On the one hand, people put great effort even into short email messages. On the other, they “test” ideas and expressions in formation to see how others react. Some create fake online profiles just to try out different sides of their personality. The problem with such experimentation is that it is conditioned almost entirely by online reactions, often reactions of strangers. There is little room to form thoughts independently.

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Fernando Pargas

STUNNINGLY Intelligent, Timely, A Study in Ethics, Business, & Governance, April 20, 2013

I received this book as a gift because I have been telling people for over a decade that the 21st Century is going to be the Century of women, whose compassion, intuition, and smaller egos make them so much superior to men in an age that will be vastly more complex and nuanced than the Industrial Era with its willful ignorance of the true cost of everything including the true cost of colonialism, unilateral militarism, and predatory capitalism.

First, for context, a few of the books that have caused me to appreciate this one and recommend it without reservation, the bottom line being that muscle (and blind heavy metal militaries) are out, brains and heart and “non-zero” are in.

Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition
THE DAWN OF THE AGE OF AQUARIUS
Improper behavior
The Chalice and the Blade: Our History, Our Future
Mapping the Moral Domain: A Contribution of Women’s Thinking to Psychological Theory and Education
Nonzero: The Logic of Human Destiny

First off, the author’s background is relevant: business professor and corporate time with Time-Warner. This is a serious guy that has done hard time in both the academic and corporate media worlds–he is inteimately familiar with the pretensions and limitations of men, and with the cavalier manner in which we have treated women. I like to point out to people that it used to be legal to abuse women and people of color, and to deprive both groups of voice and vote. This is also an author with a very broad international perspective, who teaches for the United Nations and understands the challenges and the requirements for stabilization & reconstruction.

I am quite taken with the author’s discussion of “tribalism” and how modern tribalism combined with media manipulation make us all both stupid and dangerous. As one who has studied the origin of the state (including matriarchs as the first leaders, because lines of inheritance from women were absolutely known) and also the preconditions of revolution (concentration of wealth and huge disparities of income being number one), I see the author’s introduction as long overdue common sense. I have been charting what I call “information pathologies,” my reflections on this are easy to find online, they boil down generally to men being able to get away with insanely criminal corruption because of secrecy and the willingness of men to assume that they are entitled to deprive others for their own advantage.

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Publisher’s Page

The Emperor Wears No Clothes

Book Chapters (Free)

This is the book that started the hemp revolution. More than 600,000 copies have been sold to date. Jack wanted this information to be available to everyone, so he published the text of the book here on the internet for free.

Chapter 1 – OVERVIEW OF THE HISTORY OF CANNABIS HEMP

Chapter 2 – BRIEF SUMMARY OF THE USES OF HEMP

Chapter 3 – NEW BILLION DOLLAR CROP

Chapter 4 – THE LAST DAYS OF LEGAL CANNABIS

Chapter 5 – MARIJUANA PROHIBITION

Chapter 6 – MEDICAL LITERATURE ON CANNABIS MEDICINE

Chapter 7 – THERAPEUTIC USE OF CANNABIS

Chapter 8 – HEMPSEED AS THE BASIC WORLD FOOD

Chapter 9 – ECONOMICS ENERGY & ENVIRONMENT

Chapter 10 – MYTH, MAGIC & MEDICINE

Chapter 11 – THE (HEMP) WAR OF 1812, NAPOLEON & RUSSIA

Chapter 12 – CANNABIS DRUG USE IN 19TH CENTURY AMERICA

Chapter 13 – PREJUDICE: MARIJUANA AND JIM CROW LAWS

Chapter 14 – MORE THAN SIXTY YEARS OF SUPPRESSION

Chapter 15 – THE OFFICIAL STORY: DEBUNKING “GUTTER SCIENCE”

Chapter 16 – THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES

Visit book page for source materials and to donate to author of the above book, Jack Herer.

Scott Lively and Kevin Abrams

5.0 out of 5 stars Please Appreciate the Difference — Much Misunderstanding Here, March 8, 2013

I notice the stark conflict between 30+ 5 star reviews and 30+ 1 star reviews.

I humbly offer a clarifying comment based on my broad reading.

There are two kinds of gays and lesbians that I know of:

The “good” kind are those associated with the normal gay and lesbian liberation movement who strive to make gay and lesbian an open, loving, accepting and accepted way of life that is biologically rooted and culturally stable — not seen as a threat by anyone, appreciated the way one appreciates a genius or an artist or someone with a special gift. To the best of my knowledge, this larger movement does NOT reject God, and just as we separate church and state, we should separate biology and theology.

The “bad” kind are those associated with the Nazi Brown Shirts who wanted to make their form of “manly” gay, including pedophilia and sadism against other men, women, children, and animals, what Mrs. Kay Griggs calls the “existentialists” that arose out of a mix of Nazi and French sadists who believe they are above the law, that murder is a form of precision war, and that only those that accept the macho gay cult should be fully trusted and promoted. The really scary part about this group is that they demand that their condition stay in the closet, unknown to others, and this cult appears to have infected the highest ranks of the US Marine Corps, the US Army, the Joint Special Operations Group, the NATO Gladio special channel rooted in Italy (the Vatican Church and very young Italian orphans have played a very special role in the Naples, Milan, and other Mediterranean all male party houses frequented by these people, and in the NY-NJ-CT crime and cloth circuit with Yale’s Skull and Bones and Princetons Cap and Gown secret societies as the axis of evil in America.

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Amazon Page

David Bollier and Silke Helfrich (editors)

We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners have organized to defend their forests and fisheries, reinvent local food systems, organize productive online communities, reclaim public spaces, improve environmental stewardship and re-imagine the very meaning of “progress” and governance. In short, how they’ve built their commons. In 73 timely essays by a remarkable international roster of activists, academics and project leaders, this book chronicles ongoing struggles against the private com­moditization of shared resources – often known as market enclosures – while docu­menting the immense generative power of the commons. The Wealth of the Commons is about history, political change, public policy and cultural transformation on a global scale – but most of all, it’s about individual commoners taking charge of their lives and their endangered resources. “This fine collection makes clear that the idea of the Commons is fully international, and increasingly fully worked-out. If you find yourself wondering what Occupy wants, or if some other world is possible, this pragmatic, down-to-earth, and unsentimental book will provide many of the answers.” – Bill McKibben, author of Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and The Durable Future

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Trevor Aaronson

5.0 out of 5 stars Orange Alert! January 10, 2013

By Scott

Prosecutions of *actual* terrorists in America since 9/11/01 can be counted on one hand (Moussoui, Zazi, Shazad, Abdulmuttalab). All of the rest are bogus, with at least 50 being straight-up entrapment jobs by the FBI and their handsomely paid (by you) informants.

The next time some real terrorists plot to blow something up in America, the FBI will no doubt miss it, being too busy tricking the slowest kid down at the Islamic bookstore into praising Osama for the promise of $20,000.

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