Reading List


I was supply teaching in the far east end and had some time to kill during lunch. The only place to do this was the Wellington Square Mall. I haven't spent much time there so I wasn't aware that the Rad Zone not only sells records and CDs but they also sell used books at Hole in the Wall Books for a good price. Losing track of time and cut to 45 minutes later, I've got my foot on the gas, careening around corners trying to beat the bell that will ring in 3 minutes. With my arms loaded with books I just made it back as the bell sounded. Here's what I picked up:



Non-Ficiton

Enemy at the Gates by William Craig - This book is an account of the Battle of Stalingrad, the battle that turned the tides for the West. I've read stories of people resorting to eating wallpaper paste and shoe leather due to the unrelenting siege of the city. Also, a sub-par movie took it's title from this book.

Synergetics by Buckminster Fuller - Looks like pretty heavy stuff. We'll see how far I get into this one.

From Wikipedia: Synergetics is the empirical study of systems in transformation, with an emphasis on total system behavior unpredicted by the behavior of any isolated components, including humanity’s role as both participant and observer.

Babylon's Banksters by Joseph Farrell - Couldn't be my book list without a bit of a conspiracy reading.

From the Product Description on Amazon.com: In this latest installment of his remarkable series of books of alternative science and history, Joseph P. Farrell outlines the consistent pattern and strategy of bankers in ancient and modern times, and their desire to suppress the public development of alternative physics and energy technologies, usurp the money creating and issuing power of the state, and substitute a facsimile of money-as-debt. Here, Farrell peels back the layers of deception to reveal the possible deep physics that the “banksters” have used to aid them in their financial policies.

Cultivating the Energy of Life by Liu Hua-Yang - Seems like good information to know, no?

From the Product Description on Amazon.com:
Here is the Hui-ming Ching , a classic Taoist manual on the circulation of internal energy by means of meditation and the inspiration for many techniques of Qigong. It is one of the few Taoist treatises to describe the landmarks of spiritual development and document the process of spiritual transformation from start to finish.

Life on the Mississippi by Mark Twain - Twain's account of achieving his dream and piloting a Riverboat on the famous river.

Fiction

The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin by Mark Twain - I don't think I need to describe this one. It's one of the classics I've been meaning to get to so I got it.

Rise Again by Ben Tripp - The new AMC TV series "The Walking Dead" has renewed my interest in the Zombie genre.

The Mammoth Book of Private Eye Stories - Hard-boiled private eye fiction with the first story by one of my favourites, Raymond Chandler.

The Man from Skibbereen by Louis L'Amour - Louis L'Amour always guarantees a quick read with plenty of testosterone-fueled action.

The Fourth Turning

Note: This is my second attempt at this blog posting after having the computer freeze when I tried to open a pdf file. My get-up-and-go got up and went after I had put in the work for this. I don't feel like mustering up much of an effort a second time so this posting will be quote heavy.

Well it looks as if the web bots big tipping point has failed to manifest, which is good for us, I guess. I'm not sure I'd want to be involved in some doom of a magnitude 2 times larger than 9/11. I'll just have to bring that extra bag of rice to the soup kitchen for Xmas.

The next conspiracy theory to be discussed is light on the conspiracy but heavy on the theory. Neil Howe & William Strauss are the generational historians and authors of the book written in 1997 called "The Fourth Turning".

From a review of the book on Amazon:

"This book speaks of the Saeculum, to use the ancient term, the great cycles that stretch approximately the span of one long human life. There have been seven of these in the last 500 years of "modern" history. Each of these large cycles is divided into four parts, or "turnings." Think of them as generational seasons. And then each of these generational turnings is associated with one of the four classical human archetypes (prophet, nomad, hero, and artist.)"

The authors believe that throughout modern history these four archetypes can be found in order. They name each generation throughout history. For example, the Nomad generation from 1822-1842 were labeled the Gilded generation. The Artist generation from 1925-1942 were called the Silent generation. The Nomad generation from 1883-1900 were called the Lost generation and so on.

From the book's website:

Strauss and Howe base this vision on a provocative theory of American history as a series of recurring 80- to 100-year cycles. Each cycle has four "turnings"-a High, an Awakening, an Unraveling, and a Crisis. The authors locate today's [late 1990's] America as midway through an Unraveling, roughly a decade away from the next Crisis (or Fourth Turning).

• *The First Turning is a High, an upbeat era of strengthening institutions and weakening individualism, when a new civic order implants and the old values regime decays.
• *The Second Turning is an Awakening, a passionate era of spiritual upheaval, when the civic order comes under attack from a new values regime.
• *The Third Turning is an Unraveling, a downcast era of strengthening individualism and weakening institutions, when the old civic order decays and the new values regime implants.
• *The Fourth Turning is a Crisis, a decisive era of secular upheaval, when the values regime propels the replacement of the old civic order with a new one.

  Each turning comes with its own identifiable mood. Always, these mood shifts catch people by surprise.

  In the current saeculum, the First Turning was the American High of the Truman, Eisenhower, and Kennedy presidencies. As World War II wound down, no one predicted that America would soon become so confident and institutionally muscular, yet so conformist and spiritually complacent. But that's what happened.

  The Second Turning was the Consciousness Revolution, stretching from the campus revolts of the mid-1960s to the tax revolts of the early 1980s. Before John Kennedy was assassinated, no one predicted that America was about to enter an era of personal liberation and cross a cultural divide that would separate anything thought or said after from anything thought or said before. But that's what happened.

  The Third Turning has been the Culture Wars, an era that began with Reagans mid-'80s 'Morning in America' and is due to expire around the middle of the Oh-Oh decade, eight or ten years from now. Amidst the glitz of the early Reagan years, no one predicted that the nation was entering an era of national drift and institutional decay. But that's where we are.

Of course with any good conspiracy theory there is always big DOOM involved and according to Strauss & Howe, the Fourth Turning is that doom with the time of Crisis. Followers of the pair can point to the skirmish coming out between North and South Korea, the mystery missile fired off the coast of California and the Fed's QE2 program shaking the financial world up.

So is this the fourth turning?

ummm...meh.....insert some closing here that ties up this posting. This is what happens when your baby wakes you up at 3:00am....you can't come up with a coherent post.