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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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Samuel Milham, MD

5.0 out of 5 stars ONE THIRD OF THE ANSWER — Other Two Thirds Are Corruption, and Toxic Everything, March 8, 2013

This is an extraordinarily important book. Although other books have been written about the illnesses that are associated not just with electricity but also nuclear plants, coal-fueled plants, and so on, this one is unique in that it is the only one I have been able to find that is precisely at the intersection of electromagnetics and diseases.

See Also:

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Rob Dietz and Dan O’Neill

5.0 out of 5 stars Important Milestone, Two Gaps, February 4, 2013

I was educated in the Limits to Growth period–back in the day of telephone couplers–and have also been an ardent follower of Herman Daly’s pioneering work in ecological economics as well as complementary work spanning the last several decades, notably by Paul Hawkins among others.

On the one hand this book is very important and not to be ignored, not least because the foreword is written by Herman Daly and there are pages of glowing endorsement from serious people. The book is superbly organized and below I do my summary, as much for my own future recall as for others. First however, two gaps:

01 This book shares one troubling assumption with Limits to Growth — they thought they could micro-manage from the top down and that governments would be the principal actors. The Club of Rome, in choosing to support the Meadows and Randers, explicitly rejected the more affordable and implementable alternative that focused on educating the public with respect to true costs and creating a culture of bottom up conservation instead of a bureaucracy of top-down regulation.

02 The book is perfection incarnate with respect to being the best summary I have seen yet of what are we doing now and what should we be doing, but it skips over the hard part: how to we establish a universal appreciation for whole systems thinking, respect for feedback loops, and acute public awareness of the true cost of every product, service, and behavior? The concept of a steady-state economy is a useful one, but only if one appreciates, as Charles Perrow is at pains to document, that we are our own worst enemies, creating catastrophe at every turn, because we know not what we do or what is done in our name, and allow the hoarding of profit and the externalization of costs to future generations.

Implicit in both of the above, and explicitly not addressed in the book, is the reality that all organizations — be they government or private sector and including non-profit — are corrupt to the bone. Their leaders are focused on what benefits the leaders, not the ctizens, tax-payers, stake-holders, etcetera. I certainly agree with Lawrence Lessig that “the” fatal threat to humanity is CORRUPTION, and I have set for myself the task of further PUBLIC INTELLIGENCE IN THE PUBLIC INTEREST.

I particularly reject the carbon tax, mercury and sulfer are much more dangerous, and the last thing we need is another derivatives scheme. Please note that my praise for the book is denoted by the five star ranking and my strong recommendation that it be bought, read, and shared. By virtue of my need to also focus on what is not in the book, my critical comments may seem inconsistent with the grade but they are not — they augment this excellent work rather than diminish it.

Now to the details.

High-level objectives:

+ New measures and meanings of progress
+ Limits on material and energy consumption, waste production, plus conservation of natural lands
+ A staple population and labor force
+ A more efficient capital stock
+ More durable, repairable products
+ Better pricing including a carbon tax [NO -- just make TRUE COST pricing available at point of sale]
+ Shorter work week and more leisure time
+ Reduced inequality
+ Fewer status goods
+ More informative and less deceptive advertising [NO -- END all advertising]
+ Better screening of technology [NO -- UNLEASH all technologies now locked up for the wrong reasons]
+ More local and less global trade of goods and services [YES -- resilience at the local level]
+ Education for life, not just for work [YES, free for life as well]

The authors then go on to discuss eleven things we have too much of, and how to reduce them:

01 Throughput [use only what will renew, create no waste that will not recycle]
02 People [educate the women, make population limitation a national cultural priority]
03 Inequality [set maximum pay differentials, employee owned companies]
04 Debt [end national debt, local currencies, restructure financial institutions]
05 Miscalculation [Human Well-Being as Measure]
06 Unemployment [Full employment policies]
07 Business as Usual [Limit size of corporations]
08 Materialism [Eliminate planned obsolescence, culture of humanity instead of things]
09 Silence [Strengthen academic multi-disciplinary steady-state voice]
10 Unilateralism [Stop being the bully -- multinational consensus]
11 Waiting [sustainable scale, fair distribution, efficient allocation, high quality of life]

There are many excellent notes but no bibliography, and the index is a bit light.

The authors take a stab at a “whole system” conclusion, with the following each discussed in a paragraph:

01 Consumption
02 Population
03 Families
04 Community
05 Business
06 Cities
07 Agriculture
08 Nature
09 Energy
10 Money

This is where I identify a third gap in the book. The concept of “free energy” is not in this book, and it should be. Apart from exposing and eradicating corruption in all its forms — in the USA it is corruption, nothing more, that causes the US Government to borrow one trillion dollars a year and waste 50% of three trillion dollars a year each year — we should be doing a global Manhattan Project to create free energy, which in turn creates unlimited clean water. Throw in national call centers, an Autonomous Internet with Freedom Towers everywhere and free cell phones for life for the five billion poor, and you create a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all.

Below are ten books that complement this one.

High Noon 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
A More Secure World: Our Shared Responsibility–Report of the Secretary-General’s High-level Panel on Threats, Challenges and Change

Philosophy and the Social Problem: The Annotated Edition
The Lessons of History

Shoveling Fuel for a Runaway Train: Errant Economists, Shameful Spenders, and a Plan to Stop them All
Valuing the Earth: Economics, Ecology, Ethics

The Future of Life
Designing a World That Works for All: How the Youth of the World are Creating Real-World Solutions for the UN Millenium Development Goals and Beyond

Blessed Unrest
Empowering Public Wisdom: A Practical Vision of Citizen-Led Politics (Manifesto Series)

Governments have failed and are not the answer. There are eight “tribes” of knowledge: academic, civil society, commerce, government, law enforcement, media, military, and non-government/non-profit. We are at the very beginning of an era of hybrid governance that must be enabled by open-source decision-support. That is the center of gravity for creating a prosperous world at peace, a world that works for all, and that is not something the ecological economists have grasped just yet.

Best wishes to all,
Robert David STEELE Vivas
INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainability

Vote and/or Comment on Review

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Tony Juniper

5.0 out of 5 stars MUST READ, gift and share — a roadmap for true cost valuation at citizen level, January 12, 2013

I have long been a fan of Herman Daly’s ecological economics and E.O. Wilson’s concept of consilience, a form of holistic analytics, and of course Buckminster Fuller and Russell Ackoff, among other systems thinkers. This book, just published, is quite extraordinary, and in the absence of a Look Inside the Book offering, one of Amazon’s best features, I want to list the chapters here and point to an online resource that provides compelling information supportive of buying this book and then sharing it or gifting it to others.

Chapter 1: The Indispensable Dirt
Chapter 2: Life from Light
Chapter 3: Eco-innovation
Chapter 4: The Pollinators
Chapter 5: Ground Control
Chapter 6: Liquid Assets
Chapter 7: Sunken Billions
Chapter 8: Ocean Planet
Chapter 9: Insurance
Chapter 10: Natural Health Service
Chapter 11: False Economy?

To get right to the web page that does NOT offer the book for free, only provides the supporting references and comments on each reference, search for:

what-has-nature-ever-done-us-sources-and-references

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Jospeh P. Farrell

5.0 out of 5 stars This is an Information Operations / Counterintelligence Hidden Gem, December 23, 2012

The cover does this book a dis-service. This is a SERIOUS book that should be used in serious courses of instruction for both Information Operations (IO) and Counterintelligence (CI). The book lacks an index, a terrible mistake on the part of the publisher, but I have to say the notes are world-class and this book earns my intuitive respect quickly.

This book is a bit rough but I put it at a solid five stars and even considered six (my top ten percent across 1800+ books) because this book does something extraordinary:

01 It makes the case for UFOs being a terrestial Information Operations (IO) Psychological Operation (PSYOP — never plural).

02 It connects US underground tunnel civilization (a possible explanation for the Pentagon’s missing 2.3 trillion) and advanced technologies including “Nazi physics” versus “Jewish physics”

03 It connects the Rockefeller-Morgan Nazi-philes, Latin America, Switzerland, the Bank of International Settlements, and the drug cartels — in other words, this is also an excellent reading for Counterintelligence (CI).

I draw two major insights from this book:

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Michael Klare

4.0 out of 5 stars All the Negatives, None of the Positives,October 22, 2012

I know and admire Professor Michael Klare and have given his earlier books such as his first blockbuster, Resource Wars: The New Landscape of Global Conflict With a New Introduction by the Author rave reviews. This book is valuable as a resource but I fear that it is the last beating of the dead horse Michael has been riding for the past decade. His other books also merit reading,

Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (American Empire Project)
Rising Powers, Shrinking Planet: The New Geopolitics of Energy

but the theme remains the same:

01) We’re at Peak Everything

02) Special Interests own Governments

03) Governments go to war for Special Interests

While Michael calls for changes in our consumption, this book is missing both the convergence of the evil extractive interests and the emerging good of collective intelligence aka crowd sourcing, and the astonishingly fast forwarding of information technologies and “Open Source Everything” as a meme that I anticipate the Pirate Party (a party that went from non-existent to 50+ countries in 3.5 years) may adopt.

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Joseph Mangano

Nuclear Lies, Cover-Ups and Secrecy

by JANETTE D. SHERMAN, MD

Do Governments and Corporations lie, cover-up and maintain secrecy as they harm our planet and us?  Joe Mangano’s new book Mad Science – The Nuclear Power Experiment clearly lays it out that they have done so for more than half a century.

This book is a page-turner, filled with useful information that many of us don’t know or have forgot.   His chapter “Tiny Atoms, Big Risks” explains the various forms of nuclear energy in terms that anyone can understand, and details the harm that has come to all life on our planet as a result of nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants.

Among the many nuclear catastrophes that Mangano chronicles  - from Three Mile Island, the Nevada and Marshall Island nuclear bomb tests to Chernobyl and Fukushima- is the nuclear accident at the Santa Susana site in Ventura County, close to Los Angeles, CA. Santa Susana is one of the best-kept secrets in the history of nuclear power. The Santa Susana site had 10 sodium-cooled reactors the 1959 accident spewed radioactivity, tetralin – toxic naphthalene, and other chemicals into Simi Valley, the Pacific Ocean and eastward that are still detected over a half-century later.

A near meltdown of the Fermi-1 nuclear reactor nearly destroyed Detroit in 1968.  It was a sodium-cooled reactor, as were the ones at Santa Susana.  Located at the western end of Lake Erie, a Fermi meltdown would have crippled or destroyed much of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence River as well.  As has occurred since the Chernobyl meltdown, in the southern lake areas of Belarus, fish and boats travel upstream as well as down-stream.

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Gerald O. Barney, Council on Environmental Quality

5.0 out of 5 stars Intelligence with Integrity Ignored by Government and Private Sector,September 20, 2012

This treasure was included in my donation to George Mason University of my entire library, and only now do I wish I could pull it down to look at the table of contents and the conclusions. It *is* available online as a free pdf but I strongly recommend buying one of the used copies offered above, there is no substitute for the hand-eye-brain engagement with a physical book.

There has been no lack of intelligence in the USA, either in the IQ sense of the decision-support sense. What has been lacking is integrity at all levels. Junior bureaucrats follow orders from senior bureaucrats who follow orders from political appointees who follow orders from elected officials whose only priority is to get re-elected, to keep the USA in a two-party monopology, and to retire without having actually addressed any real problems.

I do not agree with the excessive conspiratorial thesis of the other review–none of the conspiracies would work if our electoral system and our government retained their integrity. That is in my view the central problem of our time: restoring integrity to government so that We the People may be well-served by all organizations, public and private.

VITAL POINT: The USA has been both the 25% innovator and the 25% waste producer including a plentitude of toxins beyond most people’s imaginations. The onlything we might reasonably offer the Americas, Asia, Africa, and the Middle East is a model for getting it right — for ceasing with doing the wrong things more expensively, and instead doing the right things with applied intelligence — design — replete with integrity that produces sustainable outcomes. Absent that, Brazil, China, India, Indonesia, Iran, Russia, Venezuela and Wild Cards like Turkey will rule the world and we will — as they have been to the USA — mere collateral damage.

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Berto Jongman

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SUMMARY AND COMMENTS ON JORGEN RANDERS’ GLOBAL FORECAST FOR NEXT 40 YEARS

2052: A Global Forecast for the Next Forty Years. Report to the Club of Rome. Jorgen Randers (Prof of Climate Strategy, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo). White River Junction VT: Chelsea Green, June 2012, 392p, $24.95pb. (www.2052.info)

A report to the CoR commemorating the 40th anniversary of The Limits to Growth, written by one of the four original authors.  This broad forecast is “an informed guess tracing the big lines in what I see as the probable global evolution toward 2052…the most likely global roadmap to 2052 so that I would know what I am in for.”  Since publication of Limits in 1972, “humanity remains in solid overshoot…and we can discern the early signs of the coming gradual destruction of the ecosystem.”  (p.xv)

Five Big Issues toward 2052

“The big question is how fast the transition to sustainability will happen…the sustainability revolution has started, but is still in its infancy.” (p13)  The transition will require fundamental change to a number of the systems that govern current world developments.  The next 40 years will be strongly influenced by how we handle five central issues:

1) The End of Uncontrolled Capitalism: “slow and insufficient response to our challenges will dominate”; old-fashioned capitalism will survive in parts of the world, but will be strongly modified elsewhere;

2) The End of Economic Growth: continuing technological advance will come to our partial rescue, but lack of space and cheap resources will force solutions with a lower ecological footprint to fit within the carrying capacity of the planet;

3) The End of Slow Democracy: the fundamental question is whether democracies will agree on a stronger state and faster decision-making before we run into the brick wall of self-reinforcing climate change;

4) Intergenerational Conflict: the era of generational harmony will come to an end, leading to slower economic growth and a smaller pie to share;

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The Spread of Sacrifice Zones

By David Swanson

Chris Hedge’s and Joe Sacco’s new book, Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, is a treasure. Hedges wrote the plain text. Sacco produced the text-heavy cartoon sections and other illustrations, which even I — not a big fan of cartoon books — found to enrich this book enormously.

Hedges and Sacco visit Pine Ridge, South Dakota, to examine the misery of the Native Americans who remain there. It’s nice to think that we’ve corrected our crimes through political correctness, and yet they continue uninterrupted — unconscionably, intolerably, tragically. Here the human stories are told, and told by those affected and by those resisting and struggling to set things right. Ironically, the victims of the United States’ first imperial slaughters are now disproportionately suffering the pain common to veterans of recent U.S. wars. That same pattern of widespread military experience is found in each of three other sections of the book as well, while other communities in this country have virtually no participation in the military.

Hedges and Sacco go to Camden, New Jersey, to examine the world of impoverished and ghettoized African Americans, whose lives have worsened by many measures over the past generation, despite the successes of the civil rights movement. Poor whites and others figure into the story as well, with special attention to those struggling to improve the world, whether on a small or large scale. Michael Doyle’s voice is one of those from Camden residents that tell the story of decline and devastation that city has experienced:

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