(Running) Book review: From Last to First- A Barometer of Success

Full book title: From Last to First: A long-distance runner's journey from failure to success.

Author: Charlie Spedding

Publisher: Aurum Press Ltd

Released: 7th April 2011

Charlie Spedding’s Official Website:
http://www.charliespedding.com/

Amazon link to buy the book:
http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/1845136284?*Version*=1&*entries*=0



In ‘From Last to First’ Charlie Spedding describes a running career full of setbacks and disappointments, race by race, injury after injury.

He is beaten again and again on a sprint finish. An achilles tendon injury keeps flaring up, stopping him from achieving his goals. An allergic reaction in hospital (where he was having an operation that was supposed to sort out his injury problems) almost kills him, and he runs in races ending up much further down the field than he ever anticipated. So much goes wrong, and a lesser man would give up, but he never settles, he always wants to improve, and eventually he is rewarded.

Charlie never gives up, because he knows that he can get better. He might have been out-sprinted, he might have come 34th in that race that he wanted to win, but it doesn’t matter. He will do better in the next race, the important race, and he will keep on running and running, until his maximum potential is achieved.

His book is about determination, will power, and getting the most out of what you have. Charlie Spedding pushed as hard as he could go, and when his legs ached and all he wanted to do was to stop, he refused, and pushed even harder.

Self-determination discipline, dedication and the desire to run to the fullest of his potential eventually paid off. 1984 was his year. He won the London Marathon, and a bronze medal (also in the marathon) at the Los Angeles Olympic games.

That’s a man that you have to admire. A man who willed himself to be the best that he could be, and succeeded.

Charlie Spedding’s book is a lesson in determination, of not coasting, of not letting negative thoughts self-sabotage your potential to be better at what you are doing, of working hard to get better, and to maximise what natural talent that you possess.

It’s full of advice, psychological and physical, advice on how to train, how to run, how to race, and how to get the most out of what you have. If you do that, if you work hard, if you refuse to give up, and if you reach your potential, you have not failed, you have succeeded.

‘From Last to First’ is a book about running, but there’s an important life lesson there as well. The lesson is about success, not how it is commonly defined, but how it should be defined. It is a definition of success as a barometer of the individual, not living and striving for something that is defined by others, but doing the best that he can, for himself, and for the pleasure of knowing that he was the best that he could have been.


Book rating: 8/10 (A book that will turn a jogger into a runner)

Book Review: Truth is a Lonely Warrior- The Meaning of Life

Full title: Truth Is A Lonely Warrior- Unmasking The Forces Behind Global Destruction
Author: James Perloff
Publisher: Refuge Books
Released: October 10th 2013
Author’s website:
http://jamesperloff.com/truth-is-a-lonely-warrior/



Have you ever read a book review that started out by discussing the meaning of life? Perhaps you have. I don’t know, but if you haven’t, you’re in for a new experience, because that’s exactly what I’m about to do here, to discuss the meaning of life.

James Perloff

I don’t even know why it’s such a mystery really, as to me it’s simple. The meaning of life is to grow, physically and spiritually. The first part is easy. It’s the second part that people have problems with.

Life is a test. You are challenged to grow from the baseness of the body, and material desires, to spiritual enlightenment, fulfilment, or Nirvana.

That’s the goal, and that’s what you are here for, to understand that you are a spiritual being having a material experience in order to learn and grow.

Do you know how you are guaranteed to get nowhere? Sit in your house, watch television, and go to work, and back. Repeat forever, don’t forget to eat, and don’t forget to vote every four years or so. Is that life? Yeah, it’s life, but do you think that you were put on this beautiful and terrible planet to do just that?

I don’t, and that’s why I come across like a pompous ass, and talk about concepts like truth, knowledge, morality and spiritual enlightenment. It makes me unpopular, but seeing as popularity is not something that I’m going for, I can deal with it. No, what interests me more than anything else is learning the truth about the world, so I read. I attempt to gain knowledge about what has gone on, what is going on, and therefore what is likely to happen in the future.

A lot of people like myself, with my thirst for knowledge, start off with history books, and that’s what I did, and continue to do. But as I continued to read and grow I saw a pattern emerging. That pattern was the control of information, through the schooling and educational and media monopoly systems that are corporate/government sponsored. It became increasingly apparent to me that knowledge was being controlled and manipulated to serve the agenda of the status quo control system structures of our society.

Examples are everywhere, from the JFK assassination, to the suspicious circumstances surrounding 9/11. The mainstream acceptance of government sources was getting ridiculous, so I began to search outside of the mainstream, to look at information that was not government approved.

This questioning of official sources seems pretty obvious now, especially after what happened with the Iraq war and the mythical WMD’s, but the process of awakening takes a long time. It’s not like the Matrix movie, you don’t wake up one day in a tank of goo. You have to read, watch videos, listen to long talks, question everything, especially the new information, and come to your own understanding of what is going on in the world. I’m not fully there yet, but compared to fifteen years ago, a time when I didn’t question anything, I’m a completely different person now.

Mocking the msm idea of the paranoid 'conspiracy nut.'

That brings me to this book, ‘Truth Is A Lonely Warrior- Unmasking The Forces Behind Global Destruction, by James Perloff. The book looks at the world from a Christian point of view, and that fact alone would have put me off reading it before my slow process of awakening. Fresh from my mainstream education into atheism I would have laughed at it, mocking the very idea of Christianity and I would have refused to even read the book.

If I was forced to read it, I would have rushed through it, determined to mock it with a scathing review that I’m sure would include some reference to Richard Dawkin’s and the Flying Spaghetti Monster in the sky.

I would have done that before, but not now. With the university arrogance now just a distant (bad) memory, I look at the book with impartial eyes, and I carefully process the information, reading the facts, the details and not just what I want to read in it.

The book is not only from a Christian point of view, it’s from an American one. The writer is American, so it’s understandable that he wants to know what has happened to his country, and why it has become the global Empire of lies, war and destruction that it is today. The book takes the reader on a journey, starting with the false flag (deliberate acts designed to justify war) that define America’s history. It talks about the banking cartel that has taken over the country and how they use the media, education, freemasonry, environmentalism, terrorism and wars to control a nation. The book also discusses the ideologies of Zionism and Marxism and how they tie into Satan’s plan, the plan being the creation of a New World Order, a centralised control system for the entire planet.

A lot of this is not new to me personally. I read about this agenda all of the time. I see it being justified on my television set and newspapers by the puppet politicians, as they come and go, changing their faces, their races, their genders, but always pushing the same totalitarian control system, and the creation of this tyrannical one world government control system for the entire planet.

I’m not a fan of government. As a general rule, and with regard to my historical understanding of world history I think it’s an unarguable fact that the more government you have, the less freedom you get. So the idea of one all-powerful WORLD government controlling everything and everybody is completely insane in my eyes. Why would anybody want that? It’s madness, and I’ll fight will all I have to stop it from happening.

‘Truth Is A Lonely Warrior,’ is a concise, easy to read book that gives a historical context to what is happening in America right now. It doesn’t mess around. It’s angry, and it wants to tell you all about what is happening, and who is responsible. It’s particularly detailed when it comes to the truth behind vaccinations, giving testimonial after testimonial from Doctors and parents of children damaged by them.

Reds under the bed.

If you didn’t already know about the eugenics programme that is modern vaccinations, then this book will shock you, not because it’s silly ‘conspiracy’ opinion, but because it contains cold hard facts and detailed evidence about what is actually going on.

The book is split into tightly edited chapters, and the writer uses a kid friendly technique of using a little frowny face as a dissenter, questioning him as he goes along. It helps to clarify points, and is very useful, not just to young readers, but to adults who instantly dismiss any new information as a reflex reaction caused by their many years of mainstream indoctrination.

I sped through the book relatively quickly, and I have to applaud the writer for his clarity, for a writing style that was extremely reader friendly, enjoyable, angry, but always aware that a book with important information should steer away from being too dense and too academic.

I would give this book as a gift, to either a child (ten or above) or an adult not yet aware of what is happening in the world. I would give it as a gift that is intended to spur spiritual growth. It’s strongest on vaccines, and the influence of Marxism today, and how it has become a huge factor in mainstream educational establishments, warping the mind of supposed ‘intellectuals’ making the bright dumb, and convincing them that they are superior from the common cattle whilst doing so. 

I enjoyed the book, and now I will pass it on.

Help each other out, share what you have learnt. It’s not always going to make you the most popular person in the room, but the meaning of life is to grow in spiritual knowledge, not just in social-status and popularity. Truth might be a lonely warrior, but what else are you living this life for?


Rating: 10/10 (Reader friendly and packed full of essential information)



*The funny photos in this review are from the author's own website, showing that he has a great sense of humour and that it's important not to treat yourself too seriously. 

UK election 2015 Book review special: The Establishment- ‘And how they get away with it.’

Author: Owen Jones
Publisher: Penguin
Released: 4th September 2014


There’s a general election going on in the UK tomorrow; not that it really matters. The people have the choice between more of the same, or more of the same. The only thing up for change is the composition of the political puppets that will appear on our televisions and in our increasingly irrelevant newspapers. We’ll get to blame somebody new perhaps, or maybe we’ll just get to blame the old bloke again.

Yeah, the democratic process in the UK in 2015 is pretty messed up, broken so badly that it’s not even worth engaging with it, and that’s what most people do. They turn the channel, mumble a few curse words at the goon in the suit and watch the football instead. Why bother? They’re all the same. They’re all liars. They’re all in it for themselves.  I tend to agree with that kind of mentality. Why bother when it’s all a con?

And so the democratic process slowly dies, and the rich people who control it remain in power, relying on their repeater voters to trudge down to the local school every four years or so, voting not to make the world a better place, but voting for the same party that Mum and Dad voted for, voting based on fear because the television and newspapers have scared them and more of the same is the best that they can hope for, even though more of the same is killing everything around them, their families, communities and country as a whole.

The fresh faced young author

The Establishment ‘And how they get away with it,’ is a book by that posh young bloke (Owen Jones) who appears on BBC Question Time every now and then. It’s a book from the mainstream point of view, even though it’s supposedly attacking the mainstream. Everything is a coincidence, nothing was planned, and the rigged world that we have found ourselves living in today just needs a bit of reorganisation, a change of a couple of policies here and there, and then everything will be okay.

The story is that in the 1970’s a bunch of academic ideological outsiders (the author calls them ‘the outriders’) kept going on about privatisation, individualism and free market ideas. These ideas were thought of as crazy at the time (by the establishment as it was then) but rich people saw an opportunity, funded the outriders, and got their buddies into political positions where they could put the outriders intellectual justifications into practice in order to massively enrich themselves. The book talks about Thatcher, Reagan, New Labour and the current Cameron led Tories, and how they all share the same neo-liberal ideas that were started by the outriders. The problem now that is that we are living in a neo-liberal world as envisioned by the 1970’s outriders, and it’s bloody horrible, well, unless you are a very rich person or working in the neo-liberal establishment yourself.

What has been created is a world of selfishness, greed, Darwinian survival of the fittest ruthlessness and everything that is potentially wrist cuttingly depressing about the human species. That’s the status quo of 2015, and if you go up against it you are the crazy one, the loon, the person to be shunned by all right thinking people.

Owen Jones spends the book talking to the people who make up what could be loosely termed as the ‘establishment.’ As a whole they are a pretty smug bunch of a*** holes really, and why shouldn’t they be? They’ve won, and it doesn’t look like they have anything to worry about as all opposition to them is fragmented and at a very early stage of development. They own the mainstream media, they own the politicians, they own the banks and corporations, and think tanks, and universities and PR agencies. THEY OWN EVERYTHING.

The current gang of corporate sponsored goons

Their mentality is that of a bloody cartoon villain. They think that ‘All resistance is futile,’ and as I finished up this book I had that sinking feeling that bar a massive bloody, worldwide revolution they may just be right.

Jones details their mountain of spewing corruption, from the university intellectual yes men, the career obsessed politicians and journalists and PR agencies, the revolving doors between politics, finance, regulatory boards, tax cheating, writing the tax laws, then advising on how to get around those laws. He talks about how the Police were used as hired thugs but are no longer important as resistance is declining, and the cops themselves are targets of the neo-liberals now. He talks about the state, and how it is used to finance private interests, and to take the fall when things go badly. He details how the state steals money from the people, handing it over to private corporations, then demanding more and more as the desperate working class youth die in wars of corporate profit, whilst their grand parents die in hospitals that are being purposefully destroyed and prepared for privatisation.

Get those dead paupers out of here. We have some money to make. It’s a nightmare, and the mainstream media is there to give you scapegoats, and to divert your attention from the people really responsible for the dehumanising machine that is rolling over us all. They tell us that it’s the fault of those at the bottom, not those at the top. It’s those immigrants and single mum’s to blame, not the state bailed out banks that were given over a TRILLION pounds in bail-out money in 2008. That nice lady on the television sells the disinformation, with a friendly fake smile on your lonely television. She’s a nice lady, and she wouldn’t lie to you.

Owen Jones could depress for Britain, but what he has detailed here is truth, the harsh truth that our entire mainstream media exists to spread lies and to turn the poor against the poor, shielding real villains from public scrutiny.

With a book so heavy weighed down in its depressing, but awfully true lists of lies aimed against the public (that’s the 99% of us not in the neo-liberal corporate club-house) you need some big ideas, big arguments to leave the book on a high. We already know that the political system is rigged, that’s why we don’t give a crap about this election in 2015, so give us something, give the reader the feeling that things are so unfair, so upside down that things have to change.

I was waiting for that moment to come at the concluding part of the book, but it never really did. What did happen was a list of pitter-patter policy details that could be changed to make things better for us all. These ideas were to be talked about in think tanks, and hopefully they would filter through into the mainstream, much like the outrider’s ideas of the 1970’s.

The ideas themselves are good, but who is going to listen to them? The outrider’s ideas of the 1970’s were useful because they helped to justify the greed of the corporate elites. Why would the ideas that Jones discusses in this book, that talk about a ‘democratic revolution,’ even be listened to? In other words, why would the rich and powerful change what to them is already a perfectly satisfactory situation?

My opinion is that they won’t change, because change doesn’t benefit them. It doesn’t matter how much you talk about fairness and the restoration of the trade unions etc because the very people who would be damaged by these changes OWN EVERYTHING and are going to fight to the death to hold onto what they have.

Same as it ever was.

When these people OWN EVERYTHING the only way that change is going to happen is revolution, when masses of people all over the UK take to the streets and say, no more. Until that day happens, nothing changes. The establishment is too powerful, it OWNS EVERYTHING, and pitter-patter policy changes are not enough.

Writer Owen Jones criticises ‘The Establishment,’ but he himself would be the first to admit that he’s very much a part of it. Like Russell Brand he is surfing that wave of popular discontent, telling us what we already know, but I don’t see any long-term solutions here.

What I have read is a list of grievances, a coincidence narrative (please don’t call me a ‘conspiracy theorist’) and a concluding chapter that tells the working suckers/masses to calm down and to work for change within the already rotten system. It’s a very well researched book, and the information it contains is immense, but what is it really doing? It’s telling us that we have been screwed over, but we already knew that.

What actions can I personally take after reading this book? I can vote, can’t I? Will that change anything? No. So what else can I do? Join a think tank, become a new ‘outrider?’ That’s not enough. I’ve already talked far too much about things, and we are getting to the stage where talk is not enough.

It’s time for action, it’s time to get to the streets, to actually do something, and good as this book is, that is one thing that it is not advocating, and for that reason alone the book isn't quite as 'revolutionary' as you might think. Put this one in the Russell Brand section, and label it as an establishment reaction to what it fears is coming. The information here is valuable, but I can’t see any genuine solutions other than to continue to work within what is already an utterly broken system. It needs to call for a revolution, and it doesn’t do that. The minor changes that it is calling for are all very nice and polite, but the time for being nice and polite is over. It’s time to take things back. The talking has been done. It’s time for action.

Rating: 7/10 (Worth reading for the detailed information on corruption that it contains)

Book review: Parecomic- Who wants an alternative to exploitation and immorality?

Writer: Sean Michael Wilson
Artist: Carl Thompson
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
Released: May 14th 2013
Website:
http://catalog.sevenstories.com/products/parecomic-michael-albert-and-the-story-of-participatory-economics


When you are born into a system it can feel that things have always been that way, that the system is organic, natural, and just the way that things are. Going against it can seem absolutely absurd, a bit like complaining that when you go swimming you tend to get a bit wet.

That’s the feeling you get when you complain about something called ‘Capitalism.’ A system where everybody is competing, everybody is stabbing each other in the back, everybody is exploiting, everybody is devious, nobody is to be trusted. It’s an economic system that encourages selfishness. Get what you can before somebody else gets it first. Morality is irrelevant in capitalism. It is Darwinian. Eat or be eaten. But is that really natural, is that what we are as human beings?

Some would argue that human beings are selfish, immoral animals, and that Capitalism is therefore perfectly in tune with the nature of humanity. Capitalism is selfish, harsh, immoral and violent because that is what humanity is. I disagree with that analysis, but I’ve always been a bit ‘weird,’ a bit different to everybody else. Call me a hopelessly deluded romantic, but I hold humanity in a higher regard than that. I see people as eminently mouldable, and if you place us in an immoral system and tell us that immorality is the norm from a very young age I see it as perfectly natural for us to act with no regards to anyone other than ourselves.

But what would happen to our species as a whole if we were born into a system structured around moral fairness and human happiness rather than exploitation and immorality? Would humanity, being the nasty brute that it is, reject it? Or would it flourish and ostracise anybody still clinging to the old capitalist model of selfish exploitation? I still have hope for humanity, so I’m going for the later, but even if you disagree with my assessment wouldn’t you like to give humanity a chance before consigning it to the dustbin of history? I want to give us a chance, and that’s what this comic book is all about.

Parecomic offers a moral alternative to Capitalism. The narrative follows the life story of Michael Albert, and explores his idea of a ‘Participatory economics.’ In this system, which is explored through conversations between Albert and various individuals, people are rewarded for the duration, intensity and onerous (does it benefit society, or not?) of their work. This is very different to our current system where 20% of the working population exist as a ‘co-ordinator.’ This class of managers and decision-makers monopolise empowering work, and rewards itself way out of proportion to the actual good that they do in the world. They exist as a new privileged class above the 80% of workers who spend their lives doing routine, powerless work with no say, no power, no control over their lives other than doing what the 20% order them to do.

There are two aspects of the ‘Participatory Economics’ model that particularly appeal to me, coming from an anarchist mindset as I do. The first was that there are no centralised governing bodies. All of the decision making in this model is done on the local level through democratic committees arguing through their problems, and then voting on it. There is no central committee telling them what they must, or must not do. It is democratic and empowering, as opposed to the current top down control system that we are currently living under.

The second aspect that stood out to me was the idea (that I introduced above) of a ‘co-ordinator’ class monopolising decision making, and therefore power in the current capitalist model. Albert’s new model dissipates this disparity in power by making work more varied, allocating a mix of empowering and routine jobs to everybody. No longer would there be only 20% of people doing all of the fulfilling work, with 80% doing the routine dis-empowering work. In a participatory economic society people would not monopolise empowering work, they would have to do some of the hard, socially beneficial work as well. Does this mean that a surgeon would have to spend some of his time answering the phone and cleaning the toilets then? Yes, it does. It also means that the person who spent 100% of their work life cleaning toilets or answering the phone will have increased opportunities to reach their full potential rather than wasting away their lives doing a job that sees them as a resource rather than as a human being.

I like this model. I like how it empowers people. I like how it is based on social good, on morality over greed and selfishness. I like how it sees the best in humanity and wants to help people reach the fullest of their potentialities rather than fit them into a disempowering system that exists to keep a tiny number of the population rich beyond belief whilst the rest have to struggle in a dehumanising system just to survive. I like how it takes the classic Marxist model of class conflict (Bourgeoisie versus the Proletariat) and adds a third class, that being the new 20% ‘co-ordinator’ class, a class that currently monopolises empowering work, and subjugates the majority through their increased levels of self confidence and access to decision making. But what I like best about this model is that it offers solutions to our current predicament that are non-centralised, democratic and based on morality and trying to make the world a better place for everybody.

Parecomic details this model in much more detail than I do here, so if you are in any way intrigued with what I have just discussed, then please buy the book. It’s part biography and part dissertation on the new economic model of participatory economics as outlined by Michael Albert. It’s a surprisingly entertaining, page-turner of a book, so don’t get hung up on the idea that you are going to be reading a dry academic book about economics. It’s clear, concise, enlightening, world expanding, entertaining and it will have you thinking about solutions to the current capitalist model of exploitation of the masses on behalf of the most ruthless, most privileged, most inhumane, most immoral, most selfish, most satanic of this planet’s population.

If you want solutions rather than complaints then this is a must purchase book. It fascinated me, and I read it as I would read any Stephen King page-turner. That says two things. Firstly, that writer Sean Michael Wilson and artist Carl Thompson did a fantastic job, and secondly, that Michael Albert has a model of change that resonates with truth.  Real change has to be economic change, not political rhetoric, and that is what is offered here. The ideas expressed within are world changing. If you have time for Batman then you certainly have time for this.

Rating: 10/10

Book review: Austerity (The Demolition of the Welfare State and the rise of the Zombie Economy)- Or, how a cross-party neo-liberal consensus continues to screw you over for corporate profit.

Author: Kerry-Anne Mendoza
Released: 15th January 2015
Publisher: New Internationalist
Website:
http://newint.org/books/politics/austerity/


I’m well aware of how annoying it is to read a review that begins with a sentence going something along the lines of ‘You have to read this book,’ but that’s exactly what I need to do here. You need to read the book. There you go, done it, sorry.

Having said that, we humans are notorious for acting in ways that are obviously detrimental to our own well being. We all need to reject the mainstream political parties in the UK this year, but what do you reckon will happen? My bet is that compromise will be the name of the game, and the sadly duped and propagandised masses will vote for the same old criminals that got us into this austerity mess in the first place.

Prove me wrong. Please, please, please please prove me wrong.

Anyway, so reading this book is something that you should do, and I guess it’s my job now to try and convince you that doing something that is good for you is a good thing.

Should be an easy sell for me, but humans are very strange creatures, and they’ve been programmed so well by their masters to not do what is good for them. So, whilst being fully aware that most people who read this review will spend their money on something frivolous rather than this eye-opening, essential, powerful, well-researched, concise and easy to read book I’ll nonetheless attempt to convince them to give it a chance.

So, why should you read the book?

Because it lets you know exactly why the world is so screwed up, tells you how it was screwed up, and names the people that actually did it, and continue to do it today. There’s no mention of the occult, of secret groups, of the new world order, of the globalists, or any of that stuff, instead the book talks details, and tells you what the political puppets did, who paid them to do it, and why continuing to vote for ANY of them is a total waste of time.

Why is it a waste of time? Because they are all following the same ‘neo-liberal’ policies that basically amount to using taxpayers money to subsidise private banks and corporations that are screwing us all over. The politicians are doing this with help from their complicit buddies in the educational institutions, mainstream media and (obviously) in the banking/regulatory (same thing) business.

Why are they doing this? Because they work for private corporations, not for the people who are conned into voting for them every four years or so, that’s why.

There’s no ‘conspiracy,’ they simply do what’s best for their own careers, and what’s best for their careers is to privatise everything, empowering the private sector through deregulation and to create cartel monopolies to maximise corporate profit. People are irrelevant. Load your pockets whilst you still can lads/ladies.

That’s how it works, and that is what this book is all about. It details how our elected political puppets follow neo-liberal economic policies that are destroying the world, all for corporate profit, screw the people, they don’t count anyway. That is the world, and that is what you are voting for in the ballot box, no matter where you put you little cross.

The book is extremely easy to read, and is broken up into short, easy to digest sections. These sections place the current situation in it’s proper historical context and detail how every institution in the UK (education, welfare, health, criminal justice) is being destroyed by a cross-part neo-liberal economic consensus.

It’s a quick read at just under 200 pages long and arms you with essential FACTS that will help you to disentangle yourself from the web of lies that has been woven by politicians as they blame easy targets for the consequences of their actions. These facts will make it clear that a lot of scapegoating is going on, and that vulnerable groups (single mums, asylum seekers, the unemployed etc) are victims of neo-liberal policies, rather than the villains as portrayed in the disgustingly complicit corporate whore mainstream media.

If you care at all about the world around you then get the book. If you don’t care then keep on reading comics, watching football, playing video games or whatever the Hell you do to distract yourself from the things that are important in life. I’m sure that what happens in the world around you will have no impact whatsoever on your life, and that you and your family are going to be immune from everything that is happening around them.

Yeah, I’m being purposefully provocative. Just get the book, read it, learn, and lets start doing something about these scumbags who are screwing us all over. If we continue to do nothing then they’ll continue to get away with what they are doing. They are making a fortune, whilst we are arguing amongst ourselves, blaming the blameless and grinning for the NSA with lonely, self absorbed selfies. It’s time to wake-up, and time to sort this mess out.

Rating: 10/10

Book review: The Leaderless Revolution- ‘How Ordinary People Will Take Power and Change Politics in the 21st Century’

Author: Carne Ross
Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK
Release Date: June 2012

Official book website:
http://theleaderlessrevolution.com/



Books aren’t what they used to be. People still read, but they do so for enjoyment, not to gain knowledge. So what gets read in depressingly large numbers is a shade of perversity, or teenage vampires or boy wizards, or ghost written celebrity memoirs. Not books of worth, but books of banality.

I don’t read banality. I don’t read Marvel comics and I don’t read books that are meant to titillate rather than educate. I read books that tell me something, books that have something to say. That’s why I read books like ‘The Leaderless Revolution’ by former British diplomat Carne Ross. This guy worked for the establishment, building his life by serving the agenda of unaccountable elite’s. It was his job to keep rolling the boulder up the hill, to make it look like things were getting done, when in reality the boulder never progresses, never even moves, and at the end of his shift it goes back to the start again.

He was rewarded monetarily, and in terms of social status. Women, apartments and the uniformed order followers saluting him like he was a big deal, a good man who was doing his duty for his country.

The reality was that Carne Ross was an ambitious, overgrown schoolboy, taking a dream job because of ego and selfish careerism. He wanted to be a fighter pilot, but his eyesight wasn’t good enough, so he became a diplomat instead. Rather than bombing people from the air he spent his time justifying the bombing from the ground.

His life as a diplomat involved drinking too much, popping anti-depressants, doing what he was told, engaging in morality free group think, ignoring reality, and giving politicians diplomatic cover in order to invade Iraq. A country that they all knew had no weapons of mass destruction, had nothing to do with the 9/11 attacks, and had nothing to do with the so-called ‘war on terror.’

Carne Ross was a willing tool of the establishment. Morality was not a factor in what he did. He did what was expected of him, and he did it very well. He knew that the organisations he worked for were boulder pushers, but he had a career, he had status, so he just went along with it all. He was not a brave man. He had a chance to stand up and say no, but he didn’t do so. He went along with the lies, retiring quietly when all of the damage had already been done, when one of his best friends (Dr David Kelly) had committed suicide for showing some backbone and trying to expose the lies of the globalist war machine.

Carne Ross was a coward, and he lives with that guilt today. After he quietly ended his career as an establishment yes man he set up a group called ‘Independent Diplomat.’ This group now acts as a facilitator, helping people to talk to each other, away from the deliberate boulder pushing of official channels of communication. Carne Ross is fully aware that what he used to do was wrong, and he is now trying to make up for it.

His political philosophy has changed dramatically. No longer is he a government-worshipping schoolboy, a diplomat who wanted to be a fighter pilot. Today he is an anarchist, a man who knows that government is a useless vehicle for human advancement because he used to be a part of it.

His book is an easy read with a simple message. That message is to do things for yourself, to stop relying on government, to talk to each other on a one to one basis, to stop relying on government to protect you, to stop living a life based on fear. That is all that ‘anarchy’ really is. It’s not riots or masks, or chaos. It’s talking to your neighbours to sort out your problems. It’s sorting things out away from the useless control system of government. This book concludes with the following quotation:

‘Our dream of safety has to disappear.’ 

That’s the message. Government relies on fear to control you. Abandon fear, and change is inevitable.

Rating: 9/10 (A revealing glimpse into the world of international diplomacy by a man that has been there, and seen that things can only change when we rid ourselves of the control system that is government, and start to do things for ourselves). 


Independent Diplomat official website: 
http://www.independentdiplomat.org/about-us/our-staff/carne-ross

Book review: War God- Return of the Plumed Serpent- Unrelentingly brutal

Author: Graham Hancock
Publisher: Coronet
Release Date: 9th October 2014

Website:
http://www.grahamhancock.com/wargod/vol2-synopsis.php

Graham Hancock on the Joe Rogan Experience (Highly recommended)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ygWxXphYRos

***Spoilers in review***

‘War God II- Return of the Plumed Serpent’ is a difficult book to read, but not because it isn’t very well written, and not because it isn’t very cleverly structured. It is in fact extremely well written, expertly structured, tightly edited and extensively researched. It also has helpful summaries of previous events that nudge the reader’s memory, making it easier for him/her to understand what is happening in the relevant context.

The book is very good, but I didn’t enjoy reading it, and when I came to the final page I felt a wave of relief come over me. It was a relief that I would no longer have to read about disgusting, self-serving, avaricious sociopathic leaders instructing their order following subservients to carry out acts of inhumanity that they were very obviously revelling in.

Graham Hancock

This is not the fault of the author, as what he is doing in this book is using fiction to tell the real-life story of the Spanish conquest of the modern day Mexico. The problem is that we know how the story ends, and it’s difficult to see anybody in a positive light, not just the Spaniards, but the sacrifice crazed Mexica as well.

Author Graham Hancock understands that this is going to be a huge problem, and he does his best to surmount it, but I feel that the task is impossible. There are no heroes in this story, just sides.

A young girl named Tozi is introduced (in the first book) as a potential sacrificial victim to the wicked Mexica. She ends up as a servant of the wicked Spanish, as does her best friend Malinal, an attractive translator who sleeps with the psychopathic Cortez, helping him to deceive, manipulate, butcher and conquer the native people. A brave warrior name Shikotenka ends up utterly defeated and emasculated by the Spanish war machine. He doesn’t sleep with Cortez, but he might as well do. He finishes the book as little more than another concubine/vassal to the psychopathic Spanish leader. A good hearted and innocent young boy named Pepillo is taught how to kill, as is his pet dog Melchior. Innocence corrupted, incorporated and made into a tool to be used by the blood and gold thirsty Spaniards.

All of the characters that I could relate to, all of the individuals that I could empathise with in the first book have now joined the Spanish war machine of death and conquest.

Hernan Cortez himself is disgusting. He orders massacres, the burning of villages and the killing of civilians for tactical reasons. The individual human lives are not important to him. He is complex and cunning, but that does not interest me. He is simply disgusting, as is his rival Moctezuma. The former delights in getting his hands bloody on a one to one basis, whilst the latter is a coward, but both men revolt me. I don’t like reading about them, I just don’t.

UK book cover

The novel contains detailed accounts of massacres where the heavily armoured Spanish use their superior technology to slaughter the local tribes whilst having a whale of a time doing so. I could take no enjoyment from what I was reading here. This is a narrative for fans of splatter movies and serial killer books. They’ll love the descriptions of hand to hand butchery, the piled up human bodies, the torture, the stench of rotting flesh, the pulled out fingernails, the disemboweled wailing victims, the skin torn off screaming bodies.

To me it was unrelentingly brutal. It is historical fact, but there is no redeeming message here. Its just humanity at it’s worse. Order following, greed, deception, butchery, war and death. The gods look on, revelling in the bloodshed, but I don’t.

War God II- Return of the Plumed Serpent is a harrowing book to read. The young heroines and brave warriors of the first book are now just vassals of the Spanish Conquistadors. The streets are lined with rotting corpses and rivers of blood as Cortez the butcher enjoys the prettiest girl in town whilst dreaming of wealth and power.

History is harsh, it can leave you feeling hopelessly depressed that this is what our modern civilisation and cultures have been built upon. Graham Hancock has woven a brutal account of some terrible times here, but it just left me feeling cold. As Hancock himself puts it in the amendments of his book:

‘It is a historical fact that within fifty years of the Spanish conquest, the indigenous population of Mexico had been reduced through war, famine and introduced diseases from thirty million to just one million.’ 

There was no happy ending in Mexico. The gods of war enjoyed themselves, and the humans suffered. This brutal book tells the awful truth.

Rating: 9/10

Book review: Black Terror White Soldiers: Islam, Fascism & the New Age

Author: David Livingstone
Publisher: Sabilillah Publications
Released: June 2013


There’s too much information presented in this book, and at over 600 pages in length it’s an interminable chore to slog through it all.

Simply put, there’s too much going on here, and there’s no narrative thread that ties everything together. The research carried out for this one book could easily be used to create 10,000 other books. The books created from this information would be far more valuable than their original source as they could look at their individual subject matters in a far more satisfying manner than the original.

Bin Laden the acknowledged CIA agent

A typical sentence in ‘Black Terror White Soldiers’ goes something like this:

‘Bob knew Arnold, who knew Fred, who knew Charlie, who worked for X who believed in Y, and Y is related to W and W discusses the idea of Tom and Tom is related to Tracey who was connected on her maternal side to Trevor who was influenced by the teachings of Bob.’

This sentence structure is extremely taxing to follow, and it makes the end point almost completely redundant as you forget what it was all about in the first place. This is probably the least reader friendly book that I’ve ever read. From page to page it goes on and on in this highly complicated, scatological manner, barely bothering to link one idea to the other or putting anything of a narrative or ideological branch around any of it.

This is not a story. It’s a list, and who wants to read a list that goes on for over 600 pages? I’ve climbed a bloody mountain here, and it kind of sucked the entire way up. Crap, I’m not even sure why I bothered climbing the mountain in the first place.

But now that I’ve done it, what did I make of it all? What did I learn?  In one sentence, I learnt the following:

Everybody is lying, and those not deliberately lying are foolish dupes, and there’s not much that you can do about it.

That’s all I could get out of the book. Everybody who is trying to spread some truth into the world are linked to some group or other that we shouldn’t trust, so even when people are trying to tell us the truth they are just useful idiots being manipulated by shadowy occulted groups.

Corporate fascism, all wrapped up in political correctness

I did enjoy the part of the book that covers the occult theology of the elite’s, as it ties into my growing realisation that western democracy is a fraud, and that we are being manipulated by a tiny group with ties to intelligence agencies and occult secret societies.

I also enjoyed the section of the book that exposed how the Salafi/Wahabi death cults originating from Saudi Arabia have been manufactured from the start to serve western imperial objectives. However, this informative material is contained within reams and reams of dense, almost unreadable text, so the enjoyablity factor I got from reading this book, as a whole, was very, very low.

Despite all of the valuable information that it undoubtedly contains, I cannot recommend this book. It might even put you off exploring some of the topics discussed as it is so coldly and humourlessly written it’s almost like it was put together by a team of researchers rather than one human individual. If you want to read about any of the subjects collected within the chapters of this book then I’d strongly suggest you get a book that focuses exclusively on that one subject.

‘Black Terror White Soldiers’ will give you lots of references, but it’s almost unreadable and comes to no definitive conclusions about anything, other than the already painfully obvious fact that most of the people with mainstream platforms are lying to you. It doesn’t even try to present the subject matter in an enjoyable, reader friendly narrative form and is an absolute slog to get through, from beginning to end.

Rating: 5/10 (For the research material that it contains) 

Book review: War God- A devil pretending to be a God

Author: Graham Hancock
Publisher: Coronet
Released: 30th May 2013

First off, this is an extremely enjoyable and emotionally engaging book. It's not history, but it takes historical events and brings them to life through the fictionalised first person point of view narratives of various people set in historical settings. There is the gold and conquest crazed Spanish, who are seen through the eyes of a fourteen-year-old slave boy, as well as a bloodthirsty psychopathic lieutenant, and Cortez himself, who is written as an ambitious, conquest hungry violent man who justifies his actions through a highly dubious and unconvincing reading of the Bible, and instructional dreams of `Saint Peter,' who is most probably a demon intent on causing as much death and misery as possible.

The Mayan, Aztec and Mexica people are seen through the eyes of a slave girl witch who escapes the gruesome `fattening pen,' a beautiful courtesan/prostitute, a rival war chieftain who opposes the sacrifice crazed Mexica, and the leader of the Mexica, the historical Moctezuma, who is portrayed as a cowardly psychopath who is being manipulated by a blood thirsty demon who has disguised itself as a God.

The most interesting thing about this book is not the individuals themselves, but the `Gods' who are manipulating the story through their influence on the main characters in the narrative. These `Gods' appear in different forms to the different characters, but they all appear to have one thing in common. That being, they want blood, and they want as much blood as is possible. Gods, or demons pretending to be Gods?

It's a fascinating question, and one that has as much relevance today as it did back in the times of Cortez and Moctezuma. This book is just the beginning of the story of the Spanish conquest of Mexico. It follows the Spanish into their first major battle, and as it ends they have their eyes on the big prize. The city of Tenochtitlan, the capital city of the Mexica, and the land that promises the Gold that the Spanish are prepared to butcher and murder for. It's a fantastic beginning, and the epic first battle between the technological advanced Spanish war machine and a woefully unprepared and overmatched Mayan tribe is awful, yet highly informative. Telling the reader exactly how such a small band of just five hundred men defeated a huge army of tens of thousands of brave but technologically overmatched warriors.

In conclusion, this is a fantastic page turning work of historical fiction. The big problem was always going to be that the Spanish were obviously murderous scumbags, and the Aztecs themselves were human sacrifice hungry scumbags as well. How do you pull for either side, when both sides consist of serial killing, murderous psychopaths who are perfectly willing to butcher thousands of people to serve their own war Gods, who are almost certainly the same demons pretending to be Gods, in order to get both sides butchering each other?

It could have been an insurmountable problem, but by telling the story through characters on both sides who are essentially slaves, the author (Graham Hancock) largely gets around this problem, as the reader can pull for the individual rather than either sides of the psychopathic, blood thirsty, warring armies.

When you finish a book and your first reaction is disappointment that you've finished and there's nothing more to read, you know the author has done his job. That's how I felt after reading War God: Nights of the witch. Luckily for me, and anybody else reading this fantastic book, this book is just the beginning. The story will continue in, War God: Return of the plumed serpent. Put my name down for that one as well. I'm looking forward to reading it already. Rating: 10/10