05.16.08
Our ‘Managed Democracy’
Chalmers Johnson on Our ‘Managed Democracy’By Chalmers Johnson
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Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, ed. Richard Dawkins
The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing, ed. Richard Dawkins
by Independent UK
Thanks to SPS for the link.
http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/the-oxford-book-of-modern-science-writing-ed-richard-dawkins-828939.html
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05.14.08
Palestine
by Mostafa Omar
International Socialist Review
ISR Issue 57, January–February 2008
Review of:
Ilan Pappé, The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine
(OneWorld Publications, 2006, paper 2007)
320 pages, $15 (paper)
05.11.08
Voices of Conscience
Dissent: Voices of Conscience (Paperback)
By Ann Wright and Susan Dixon, Foreword by Daniel Ellsberg
05.10.08
Holder of the White Lotus
Holder of the White Lotus: The Lives of the Dalai Lama by Alexander Norman
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the 14th Dalai Lama by Pico Iyer
The Dalai Lama is the most influential person in the world, according to Time magazine. He draws crowds that no other spiritual leader or politician could hope to match, and sits there laughing, exuding an infectious joy, despite the suffering that he and the Tibetan people have known. Unique, celibate, idealistic, compassionate, exotic - he seems to look at life in a different way to everyone else. What is his secret? According to these two books, it lies in the fact that his mind was trained from an early age in an abstruse religious tradition that makes no distinction between the spiritual and temporal worlds.
05.09.08
When Technology Fails
From R-G
by Richard Heinberg
from MuseLetter #193 / May 2008
Foreword to When Technology Fails: : A Manual for Self-Reliance &
Planetary Survival (second edition) by Matthew Stein
Technology will fail. You can count on it.
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05.08.08
NYRB: Thunder from Tibet
Thunder from Tibet
By Robert Barnett
The Open Road: The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
by Pico Iyer
Knopf, 275 pp., $24.00
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Inbox: two books, Kauffman and Berlinski
Just got a hold of Kauffman’s Reinventing the Sacred and Berlinski’s The Devil’s Delusion. The latter has had so much mud thrown, it is hard to assume detachment. We’ll see.
Here’s a press release on Kauffman’s book:
Finding God with biocomplexity
Renowned systems biologist redefines spirituality through science in new book Read the rest of this entry »
The post-american world
The Post-American World (Hardcover)
Fareed Zakaria
The current bestseller about the need for America to recognize that we are in a post-American empire economic period of history.
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05.07.08
Crunch
Crunch: Why Do I Feel So Squeezed? (And Other Unsolved Economic Mysteries) (Hardcover)
Jared Bernstein
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05.06.08
The Great Derangement
The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire (Hardcover)
Matt Taibbi
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05.05.08
S. Kauffman: New book, Reinventing the sacred
Stuart Kauffman: Rethink Evolution, Self-Organization Is Real
Column: Suzan Mazur
In his new book, Reinventing the Sacred, legendary complexity pioneer Stuart Kauffman continues to challenge the view of most biologists that natural selection is the only source of order. However, Kauffman is more charitable than hundreds of other evolutionary scientists (non-Creationists) who contend that natural selection is politics, not science, and that we are in a quagmire because of staggering commercial investment in a Darwinian industry built on an inadequate theory.
True to his research roots in self-organization, Kauffman says life is not based on the replication of DNA and RNA. He also questions whether biology can be reduced to physics, writing that lovers walking along the Seine are not just particles in motion.
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05.04.08
Nixonland
Nixonland: The Rise of a President and the Fracturing of America (Hardcover - A Whopping 896 Pages)
Rick Perlstein
Why is this May 2008 book relevant today?
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04.30.08
New Sober book: Evidence and Evolution
Evidence and Evolution
The Logic Behind the Science
Elliott Sober
University of Wisconsin, Madison
Hardback (ISBN-13: 9780521871884)
Also available in Paperback
04.27.08
Stairway to heaven
Stairway to heaven is paved with books
By Carlin Romano
He never left.
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South America and the Rise of the New Left
Revolution!: South America and the Rise of the New Left (Hardcover)
Nikolas Kozloff
Oh, Hugo Chavez is not the only leftist headache for Bush and Cheney, not by far, as Nikolas Kozloff (author of Hugo Chavez: Oil Politics, and the Challenge to the U.S.” ) shows us. While Bush and Cheney have been trying to continue pursuing their Middle Eastern war for oil (that has lasted longer than WW II), South America has generally returned to democracy (Colombia and its Bush puppet leader is one exception).
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04.26.08
Violent Language of the Right
Outright Barbarous: How the Violent Language of the Right Poisons American Democracy (Paperback)
Jeffrey Feldman
BuzzFlash.com’s Review (excerpt)
Posting this premium seemed most appropriate the day after Rush Limbaugh told his listeners that he was hoping for riots at the Democratic Convention in Denver.
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04.25.08
How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America
Right Is Wrong: How the Lunatic Fringe Hijacked America, Shredded the Constitution, and Made Us All Less Safe (Hardcover)
Arianna Huffington
BuzzFlash.com’s Review (excerpt)
Arianna’s New Release (April 29)
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04.23.08
Bad money
Bad Money: Reckless Finance, Failed Politics, and the Global Crisis of American Capitalism (Hardcover)
Kevin Phillips
BuzzFlash.com’s Review (excerpt)
Kevin Phillips went from designing the infamous Nixon “Southern Strategy” to becoming one of the foremost analysts and critics of capitalism run amuck. It is one of the most fascinating transformations of a political appartchik in recent decades. And his writing is well-researched, cogent and sweeping in its overview.
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04.21.08
Bush vs Chavez — Washington’s war on Venezuela
From R-G
REVIEW
Behind the US war on Venezuela
Review by Roberto Jorquera
19 April 2008
http://www.greenleft.org.au/2008/747/38631
Bush vs Chavez — Washington’s war on Venezuela
By Eva Golinger
Monthly Review Press, 2008
$26.00 (pb), available at
04.17.08
The China Price
Just looking at: The China Price: The True Cost of Chinese Competitive Advantage (Hardcover)
by Alexandra Harney
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04.12.08
Ruse: Darwin on my mind
Darwin on My Mind
Evolutionary theory best explains how—and why—we reason.
A REVIEW
by Michael Ruse
Why Think? Evolution and the Rational Mind
Ronald de Sousa
Oxford University Press
194 pages, hardcover
ISBN 9780195189858
de Sousa seems to acknowledge that natural selection is not adequate to explain our mathematical abilities. This kind of insight was started by Alfred Wallace who saw that human potential was far greater than what Darwinism indicated.
Consider the Axial Age, then the eonic effect, we see that ‘different evolution’ behind these deeper potentials
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Open Road
The Open Road
The Global Journey of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama
By Pico Iyer
Knopf; 275 pages; $24
A rabbi now lives in Dharamsala, India, the home-in-exile of the Dalai Lama. Apparently too many young Israelis who come there after their military service are straying over to Buddhism.
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