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Bart DePalma

Brilliant on the problems, missing the reality of the two-party tyranny,December 30, 2011

I received this book as a gift, along with Capitalism 101. Of the two I prefer this one.

On the positive side, both books represent a growing body of citizens who understand that big government is very much alike to central government, and both are forms of fascism / socialism that are bad for the majority.

On the negative side, neither book seems to appreciate the fact that the Republican Party is every bit as corrupt as the Democratic Party.

Being already predisposed to agree with the author on the fundamentals, I found the book interesting but disconnected from a great deal of what I have been working on, including transparency, truth, and trust. Both the Republican and Democratic parties are corrupt; both have been busy borrowing a trillion dollars a year in our name while seeking to regulate our lives into misery.

There is a place for limited government, and a vital role: keeping business honest. Trust lowers the cost of doing business. The two-party tyranny has corrupted America, turned America into The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead.

The books well researched with many interesting notes, and it has an index [the same is not true of Capitalism 101, which is more like a bunch of personal stories bundled together.]

Where I have a problem with books like this (agreeing with the author on the basics) is in the denial of the raw fact that the Republicans have done as much if not more than the Democrats to loot the Republic, they just work in a different way. It was a Republican, Senator Phil Gramm of Texas, who as banking chairman put in 200 pages of lobbyist written deregulation five minutes before the bill was to be voted on, and it was the other 99 Senators, from BOTH parties, who lacked the integrity to cry foul. It is the Republicans that started the practice of borrowing a trillion dollars a year so they could earmark their way to personal wealth at our expense, charging 5% for each allocation of the public’s money to projects we do not need and cannot afford.

We live in a two-party tyranny, and the first thing my fellow lovers of liberty have to get a grip on is that BOTH the Republican AND the Democratic parties are corrupt, have sold us out, and cannot be trusted with the White House in 2012. One reason I am running for the presidential nomination within the Reform Party is because I have concluded that there is nothing wrong with America the Beautiful that cannot be fixed by flushing BOTH parties down the toilet, uniting the Independents, moderates from both parties, the Greens, Libertarians, Constitution, and others in a massive rebirth of a Republic that is Of, By, and For We the People.

So this book, and the Tea Party, are welcome voices, but both need to get a grip on reality: BOTH parties are corrupt, BOTH parties have enabled Wall Street corruption AND Welfare / Socialism corruption. I share the author’s view that three fifths or more of the federal government should be shut down, and I advocate a balanced budget and true cost economics as a means of getting all of us back in harmony with reality and one another.

See other books I have reviewed:
The Broken Branch: How Congress Is Failing America and How to Get It Back on Track (Institutions of American Democracy)
Breach of Trust: How Washington Turns Outsiders Into Insiders
Running on Empty: How the Democratic and Republican Parties Are Bankrupting Our Future and What Americans Can Do About It
Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny
Griftopia: A Story of Bankers, Politicians, and the Most Audacious Power Grab in American History
The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash
Vice: Dick Cheney and the Hijacking of the American Presidency
Weapons of Mass Deception: The Uses of Propaganda in Bush’s War on Iraq

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Daniel Goleman

Relevance, Content, Price–Solid Five,December 29, 2011

I chose this book over Ecological Intelligence: Rediscovering Ourselves in Nature and seeing the author’s note about this other book “by a physician, Jungian analyst, and poet” am certain I made the right choice.

The author’s “big idea” is called “Radical Transparency,” what the rest of us have been calling “Open Books” for decades. I like it, and in the context of his elegant story-telling, I buy in. This book also goes to a five because it is an Information Operations (IO) books, ably focused on data, information, and information-sharing as well as collective sense-making. He author anticipates most of us becoming “active agents” for change, armed with information as Thomas Jefferson understood so well.

CORE NUGGET: Life Cycle Assessment (LCA) is not done for most things, but when done right, it is mainly data and it tracks impacts on human health, ecosystems, climate change, and resource draw-down, for every single component and every single process including transport, packaging, etcetera. Toward the end of the book when the author talks about how an LCA commons is emerging, and quotes Andy Ruben of normally ultra-evil Wal-Mart as saying that LCA innovation “is the largest strategic opportunity companies will see for the next fifty years,” I am seriously impressed.

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Gordon Cook

I am honored that Eva Waskell has entrusted me to present The Privatization of Our Democracy, a work that I regard as her Profile in Courage. For 25 years she has labored to correct what is possibly the most significant public policy failure of the computer age—the privatization of vote counting carried out under the rationale that computers are simply automatic calculators that can tabulate votes more cost effectively than old analogue machines. I have known her for 19 of those years.

. . . . . .

People think they know that something is wrong with the way elections are conducted in this country.  They are correct. There is. But readers only now will get access to a full history of the abuse of public trust by the elected politicians of the United States of America. That’s a large claim to make, but see for yourself.

Click on Image to Enlarge

I believe that there are multiple publications here in what Eva has to say. The scholarly monograph. An Elections for Dummies paperback. A paperback of humorous tabby cat photos where the kitties are running elections.  Eva is a national treasure and I am proud to be able to use the Internet to make her story known. Fortunately, there are many, many public spirited citizens left.

Full Report (PDF 160 Pages)

Cook Report Home

Table of Contents and Selected Quotes Below the Line –

A SPECTACULAR Piece of Work

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Joan Valerie Bondurant

This could quite well be the best book ever written about Gandhi’s philosophy of conflict: satyagraha. Bondruant’s book is systematic and thorough. She lived in India for years and even got a chance to interview Nehru and many of Gandhi’s other colleagues about the nonviolent action they were mutually involved with, which eventually brought about Indian Independence. This book was first written either in 1953 or 1958. But this edition was revised in 1988 and includes new, important commentary and afterthought by the author.

The book is everything the other reviewer said, and more. Because the author takes such a systematic approach, I can’t imagine a better introduction to Gandhi’s philosophy of conflict. But the truly unique and most vitally important aspect of this book, in my opinion, is due to the author’s orientation. Her field is political science. She was a researcher who held a high position at the University of California at Berkeley. And she claims that Gandhi’s philosophy made a contribution to political science that no system of political theory has ever adequately dealt with before. In that sense, she says, that Gandhi’s greatest contribution to the world may have been overlooked. And this, I think, is what makes this book one of the most important books of the 20th century.
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Colin Woodard

Phi Beta Iota:  Elevated to four stars on recommendation of Chuck Spinney.  Synopsis of book in article for:  A Geography Lesson for the Tea Party

Many people think of the United States as a nation with two regional or sub-national entities — the North and the South. The two sub-nations have identifiable differences in outlook. The South, a traditionally rural and agricultural region, has always been perceived to have a relatively conservative and individualistic outlook, oriented toward small government and states rights. The North, dominated by urbanized commercial centers, has always been relatively more aligned with big government agendas, a natural characteristic of densely populated areas where most people’s livelihoods are derived from industry and commerce.

The geographical, political, and cultural divides between the North and South have been fairly well defined by the “Mason-Dixon Line” — approximately the line of the Ohio and Potomac Rivers . Indeed states like Kentucky and Maryland are called “Border States” as if they were on an international frontier. And of course a military frontier DID materialize between the North and South when the Southern sub-nation attempted to assert its sovereignty during the Civil War.

This great divide between the Northern and Southern sub-nations continues to this day. I’ve read commentaries from foreigners who explain the politics of the United States as consisting of a struggle for dominance between the Northern and Southern sub-nations. We Americans refer to this as the “Red State / Blue State” divide. So the idea of the USA consisting of two sub-nations is well established.

The question this book addresses is whether it makes sense to subdivide the United States into MORE THAN TWO subnational entities. Others have asked this question before. Joel Garreau wrote about it in 1981 in his book THE NINE NATIONS OF NORTH AMERICA. I read NINE NATIONS then and concluded that it was partially valid in an economic sense, i.e. relatively more Westerners earn their livelihoods from mining, relatively more people on the Great Plains earn their living from growing wheat and corn and livestock, and relatively more Northerners earn their living from Industry. So from that perspective there are arguably nine economic nations in North America. But Garreau did not convince me that there are more than two political sub-nations inside the USA.

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Sheldon S. Wolin

Editorial Review:

Of the many books I’ve read or skimmed in the past seven years that attempted to get inside the social and political debacles of the present, none has had the chilling clarity and historical discernment of Sheldon S. Wolin’s Democracy Incorporated. Building on his fifty years as a political theorist and proponent of radical democracy, Wolin here extends his concern with the extinguishing of the political and its replacement by fraudulent simulations of democratic process. — Jonathan Crary, Artforum

4.0 out of 5 stars Managed Democracy, Superpower, and alas, even, “Inverted Totalitarianism”, June 17, 2008

ByJohn P. Jones III (Albuquerque, NM, USA) – See all my reviews  (VINE VOICE)    (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

This is a seminal work which “tells it like it is” concerning the current power arrangements in the American political system, as well as the political leadership’s aspirations towards global empire. Prof. Wolin sets the tone of his work on page 1, with the juxtaposition of the imagery of Adolph Hitler landing in a small plane at the 1934 rally at Nuremberg, as shown in Leni Reifenstahl’s “Triumph of the Will,” and George Bush landing on the aircraft carrier “Abraham Lincoln” in 2003. Certainly one of the dominant themes of the book is comparing the operating power structure in the United States with various totalitarian regimes of the past: Stalinist Russia, Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy. Prof Wolin emphasizes the differences between these totalitarian powers, and the softer concentration of power in the United States, which he dubs “inverted totalitarianism.”

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Phi Beta Iota:  Below the line are covers and product descriptions for the following books:

Now You See It, by Cathy N. Davidson

A New Culture of Learning by Douglas Thomas and John Seely Brown

21st Century Skills by James Bellanca and Ron Brandt

Rethinking Education in the Age of Technology by Allan Collins and Richard Halverson

Teaching Digital Natives by Marc Prensky

The Innovative University by Clayton Christensen and Henry Eyring

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Derrick Jensen (Author), Aric McBay (Author), Lierre Keith (Author)

About the Authors

Activist, philosopher, teacher, and leading voice of uncompromising dissent, DERRICK JENSEN holds degrees in creative writing and mineral engineering physics. In 2008, he was named one of the Utne Reader’s “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing Your World,” and in 2006 he was named Press Action’s Person of the Year for his work on the book Endgame. He lives in California.

Writer, activist, and small-scale organic farmer ARIC MCBAY works to share information about community sufficiency and off-the-grid skills. He is the author of Peak Oil Survival: Preparation for Life after Gridcrash and creator of “In the Wake: A Collective Manual-in-progress for Outliving Civilization.”

LIERRE KEITH is a writer, small farmer, and radical feminist activist. She is the author of two novels, as well The Vegetarian Myth: Food, Justice, and Sustainability, which has been called “the most important ecological book of this generation.” She’s also been arrested six times. She lives in Humboldt County, CA.

What is different about Deep Green Resistance is that it is the first book that offers a solution that is scaled to the size of our predicament.

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Thomas R. Flannagan, Kenneth C. Bausch

2011 Workbook 49 Problems, 10 Clusters, & Software,July 22, 2011

Stephen E. Arnold

Stephen E. Arnold: The New Landscape of Enterprise Search. A Critical Review of the Market and Search Systems. Published by Pandia, Oslo, Norway, 2011.
ISBN: 978-82-998676-0-3

Pandia Book Page

The following enterprise search companies are covered in detail:

Autonomy
Endeca
Exalead
Google Search Solutions
Microsoft and Fast
Vivisimo

Book Page

Phi Beta Iota:  For over fifteen years Steve Arnold has been the “virtual CTO” for OSS.Net (ceased operations at end of 2010) and Earth Intelligence Network, of which he is a founding partner.  We have reviewed the 154-page document, and as with all publications by Steve Arnold, author of the still-trenchant Google Trilogy, have found it to be deeply helpful including sharp but polite eviseration of both Google and Microsoft (Microsoft comes out ahead of Google, but has its own sucking chest wounds).  What is clear to us is that none of the major vendors are serious about  the necessary migration to open source software that integrates information sharing, multi-media analytics, cross-disciplinary directories, and deep web applications, for example, integrating c drives and emails across all poverty stakeholders.  The big new trend in this book–and in our own research–is the compelling nature of five minute videos as documents of lasting value.  We are seeing this in open education and non-government decision-support.  Combine that with on demand translation and the way is open for someone to create the M4IS2 system of the future.  We doubt it will be Google, and we are certain it will include OpenBTS for the three billion poor, the center of gravity for future knowledge.