This is such an extraordinary movie that I watched it twice and then ordered it from Amazon as a permanent part of my library.
Ed Harris moves into the very top ranks of male actors. He is nothing less than brilliant, an Oscar on steroids. Diane Kruger is utterly lovely and talented and surely a rising star of great importance and nuance.
The music is devastatingly perfect, there is so much life in this movie that I am inspired.
“The vibrations are God's breath. Music is God's message.”
Just behind Le Carre at the latter's best (George Smiley)
October 7, 2007
Charles CUMMING
This book is quite satisfying. It is not as good as John Le Carre at his best (the George Smiley series), but on balance, for an author that evidently lacks a professional background in intelligence, it filled time crossing the Atlantic and I could not ask for more.
A few highlights that struck me as worthy of a note:
The author does a good job of depicting the pain and discomfort of car surveillance, but completely misses the most important part: the stench of two human beings and assorted drinks and foods after 10 hours can be quite over-whelming.
He does a good job of pointing outthat historical repression is not forgotten and highly relevant to evaluationg today's events.
He does a fine job of outlining how rogue counter-intelligence operaitons, unsanctioned murders of suspected terrorists, makes the perpetrators no better than those they seek to neutralize. I was among those who signed the letter to Senator John McCain against CIA's practice of rendition and torture, CIA Director Mike Hayden's second violation of the Constitution and his oath of office (the first was his warrantless wiretaps when Director of NSA, a decision since ruled illegal by the courts).
Thee author addresses the questions: how do you fight terror if out of control rogue elements adopt terror as their own tactic?
There are enough Spanish-language phrases to justify the tax write-off the author undoubtedly took for his travels to Spain.
I absolutely love his point toward the end, “the terrorists did not count on the government's covering up.” This is what happened when President Kennedy was assassinated by a CIA-trained and CIA-equipped team of Cuban exiles who murdered our President for his “betrayal” at the Bay of Pigs.
He touches on how 20-30 families control Spain (this is generally true in many countries, in El Salvador they refer to the “14 families.”
Bottom line: decent and recommended. When the author absorbed more professional trade-craft and focuses more on the story line and less on the scattering of tax-deductible Spanish phrases, he just might exceed John Le Carre. I will watch for his future offerings, and plan to buy and read anything he writes in the future.
I strongly disagree with the reviewer that says that there is not much here that has not been said elsewhere. While I am new to baseball, at the age of 55 vastly more familiar with soccer, football, and basketball, my youngest son loves the game, and I have spent time looking for the perfect book that can both help him see the nuances, and help me follow the game.
This book is nothing less than extraordinary. It would be a superb gift for any high school or college student who loves the game, and for any parent or grandparent new to the game. Personally I think it has a great deal of information that those who consider themselves avid fans have NOT noticed, but you can decide that better than I.
Here are some of the nuggets in this book, which is the tactical complement to the strategic companion by another author, “Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game.” The two books together constitute an instant reference library from any baseball affecionado.
1) 1 in 100,000 make it to major leagues from among those who strive to get there.
2) Going to college is a superb way to perfect your skills and shorten the time to selection for minor leagues–a tiny handfull get to go straight to the majors.
3) Five tool players can field well, throw hard (and accurately), run fast, hit home runs, and hit a high batting average.
4) Any major leaguer, however “bad” they might appear on a given day, is the best of the best and has spent a lifetime getting there.
5) Awesome concise clear description of the many kinds of balls that a pitcher can throw to a batter.
6) Runner on second can see catcher's signals and signal to the hitter more often than not. I had no idea.
7) When bases are loaded, a fast ball is more likely, hit to it and improve your batting average.
8) Amazing list of all the *many* reasons a coach might walk out to talk to a pitcher.
9) Leg strength is critical for all players and helps power the ball.
10) Run bases on a CURVE for faster rounding of bases.
11) A catcher can be the team's reference librarian, a goldmine of knowledge about hitters built up over a lifetime of observation.
12) Strike zone defined by each player, not a fixed box. From the kneecaps to a line halfway between the belt and the shoulders.
13) Outstanding section on umpires, who can spend thousands on a school and endure 8-12 years in the minors on bare subsistence salaries. If they do make it to the majors, then they earn a six-figure salary.
14) Lovely section that clearly illustrates and explains all of the symbols needed to record every move in a baseball game.
15) Umpires WILL remember every slight over the years, and when borderline calls need to be made, the slights will come home to roost.
Superb glossary.
I am giving this review and the book to my 12-year old, in the hopes that he will read every word and refer back to this book many times in the years to come.
This book is a GEM. Ignore the faint praise by other reviewers.
Easily one of the top ten on the death of the American dream
September 30, 2007
Naomi Klein
I read this book while crossing the Atlantic. The author has done something extraordinary, the equivalent of Silent Spring for industrial-era capitalism as an immoral form of human organization. This book is unique but also tightly linked to the books that I list below.
The conclusion of the book focuses on how Wall Street has discovered how to profit from mega-disasters and financial melt-downs, and contrary to popular belief, Wall Street makes money from these economic down-turns. It is the individual, and the indigenous owners who are forced to sell below market, that lose, every time.
The author's opening focus is on privatization, deregulation, and deep cuts in social spending, each as mandated by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, with other nasty triggers demanded by the World Trade Organization, that have been systematically used to loot entire nations and their commonwealths–this is apart from the immoral predatory capitalism that uses bribes to clear areas of indigenous peoples so they can steal all the gold or other natural resources, and their only cost is the bribe, while the host peoples lose billions in natural resources.
The author teaches us that “disaster capitalism” is the next step above immoral predatory capitalism, in which wars and disasters have been privatized and the global military-industrial-prison-hospital complex has moved one step closer to displacing all governments.
She spends time discussion torture by dictators as a silent partner to the free-market crusade, and this is a good time to mention that the book is a standing condemnation of all that Milton Friedman and “the Chicago boys” inserted into the IMF and World Bank via their students.
She provides a helpful discussion of how believers in Armageddon, including the neo-conservatives, are motivated by the belief that there is such a thing as a clean slate, and that Africa without Africans, or Iraq without Iraqis, are both desirable for that reason.
She does a tremendous job of outlining the three shock waves of disaster capitalism:
1. Government Disaster/War out-sourced
2. Corporate looting
3. Police terrorism
A portion of the book focuses on the urgency of restoring unions and the middle class, unions because they protect fair wages that create a middle class. She stresses that the 1970's through the 1990's saw a global (but particularly southern hemisphere) campaign to use the cover of counter-terrorism to murder and terrorize union leaders. As a graduate of the Central American and Andean wars, I can certainly testify to the fact that government death squads were as about looting and killing opposition leaders, and I for one saw no terrorists, only indigenous people's at the end of their rope.
Interestingly the author singles out visionaries as being among the top targets for being hunted down and “disappeared.” Visionaries counter the government lies that seek to rule by secrecy, impose scarcity, and concentrate wealth within a small elite.
The author damningly documents how eager corporations have been to work with dictators to create police states that eliminate unions and enslave peoples at wages that cannot support a family, much less create a middle class.
She focuses on national debt and on government corruption as the two pillars of social destruction. As a student of E. O. Wilson and Medard Gabel, and many others, I can testify that there is plenty of money for all of us to be virtual billionaires, but it is corruption and greed at the top, enabled by secrecy, that have allowed a handful to create a global class war and impoverish the 90% that do the hard work (see my list on this one).
I am utterly blown away by the author's overall assessment, in the middle of the book, to wit, that crisis is now used routinely to side-step reasoned democracy and completely halt political and social reform while furthering the ends of those who seek to concentrate wealth and power exclusive of the larger body of We the People.
The author is damning across the board of the failures of neoliberalism, which has been a “second pillage” of the looting of state-owned enterprises, following the first pillage, the looting of the natural resources of the commonwealth being targeted.
As part of this the author explicitly accuses the IMF of deliberately fostering crises in part by fabricating and manipulating statistics, or as the author puts it, “statistical malpractice.”
The author suggests that unlike the Mexican bail-out, when Rubin was seeking to protect Wall Street investments, Asia was allowed to collapse financially because the US wanted to put an end to the prospects of their being a “third” way that was more balanced than either capitalism for the few on one side, or socialism for all on the other. This is especially noteworthy because Latin America is today pursuing a similar “third way” and very likely to succeed.
The author declares that Donald Rumsfeld's over-riding objective as Secretary of Defense was the privatization of war. The author tells us that he declared war on the Pentagon bureaucracy on 10 September (this is the same day that Congresswoman McKinney's was grilling him on the missing 2.3 trillion dollars). On 11 September the missile won Rumsfeld his war with the Pentagon bureaucracy *and* it destroyed the computers with all the records on the missing money.
The author goes on to document how the Bush Administration privatized Homeland Security across the board.
As the book draws to a close she reviews the history of corporate-driven foreign policy, summing it up in three steps:
1. Corporation suffers set-back in a foreign country
2. Politicians loyal to the corporation demonize the foreign country
3. Politicians “sell” US public on the need for regime change.
The author scorns political appointees, noting that their “service” these days is little more than a pre-raid reconnaissance.
She concludes by suggesting that disaster apartheid is leaving 25-60% of the populations as an underclass, destroyed middle classes, and creating walled cities for the elite, death and suffering for everyone else. Dubai is one such walled city.
Corporations are red-lining the world, using stocks, currency, and real estate markets to crash economies, buy cheap, and then restore with a sharp re-concentration of wealth.
Ending on a positive note, she suggests that We the People are in the process of reconstructing our own world, and while I did not see mention of the World Index of Social and Environmental Responsibility (WISER) or Interra and the other community-oriented systems, I believe she is correct, and that the Earth Intelligence Network, the Transpartisan Policy Institute, the People's Budget Office, are all part of taking back the power and the commonwealth.
This is a great and necessary book. Others (the first two DVDs) listed below reinforce her findings.
I am forty books behind in actual reading, but I had the pleasure of scanning this book while on the sidelines of my son's football practice, and it is, as so aptly described by the best of the reviews, breathtaking.
The sentence that grabbed me is in the final paragraph, where the author sums up the roots of the Middle Eastern troubles as being directly on the heads of the English in particular, who lied, cheated, and stole without mercy. He says of Loyd George: “His political deviousness and his moral and financial laxness were never forgotten.” Would that this were so, for Dick Cheney and George Bush are our Lloyd George.
I have written a full summative review of a book that complement's this author's sensible account, and reading that review before reading this book could be helpful. The other books also support the view that we are our own worst enemy, that there is plenty of money with which to make the world heaven on earth, but rule by secrecy, predatory capitalism, and fascism disguised as democracy has looted the planet and picked the pocket of the individual taxpayer while destroying the middle class. We are repeating history, in part because we have one of the most poorly educated populations with respect to history and global cultures, than ever before. The Director of the Central Intelligence Agency has taken to complaining recently that he cannot find enough qualified recruits in our shallow pool of “worldly” talent.
The key point of the above book is that the Treaty of Westphalia and the creation of nation-states as soverign entities with unrestricted powers within their own borders–borders created by the English and other invasive colonizing powers with the US the most active in the last 200 years–were huge mistakes. We should instead have at least made Indigenous Peoples co-equal, and understood, and respected, tribal boundaries established over centuries. Ignorance and hubris/arrogance combine with greed at the corporate and dictator levels (see Ambassador Palmer's book on “Breaking the Real Axis of Evil” to understand why our White House loves 42 of the 44 dictators on the planet, and Tim Weiner's “Legacy of Ashies” for why CIA went straight into the business of supporting dictators as proxy bullies). Paul Bremer had it right: the root cause of terrorism is us. See my comment for a note on Chinese Irregular Warfare that just took force off the table as a US option.
On the positive side, but Amazon only allows ten active links, see
Yochai Benkler, Wealth of Networks
Barry Carter, Infinite Wealth
C.K. Prahalad, The Fortune at the Bottom of the Pyramid
J. F. Rischard, HIGH NOON: 20 Global Problems, 20 Years to Solve Them
Robert Steele, The New Craft of Intelligence
Robert Steele, The Smart Nation Act: Public Intelligence in the Public Interest
Thomas Stewart, Wealth of Knowledge
Alvin Toffler, Revolutionary Wealth
E. O. Wilson, The Future of Life
Medaard Gabel, Seven Billion Billionaires (forthcoming)
I hope this contextual connecting of some dots is viewed as helpful. This is not a “pretend” review!
I am sorry to say that with all the reading I do, this is the first time I have come across Paul Levinson. This is a gem of a book, and I will attend to anything else he write, and hope to hear him in person someday.
The author, the book, and by the authors account, California, converges four vectors:
– Cyberspace where its just information, not “real”
– Outer Space, where he believes we need to go
– Inner Space, with hightened spiritual awareness being important
– RealSpace, which only live beings with all their senses can engage
I found this gem to be absorbing and it rounded out my Sunday morning reading quite nicely. Some bullets I took away:
– No senses of smell, touch, taste in cyberspace
– Knowledge is not Experience
– Walking and talking are intertwined
– Cell phone is antidote to Interent, restores ability to work in the real world and not be chained to a computer or cubicle
– Makes care for business, not governments, to fund space exploration
– Discusses robots as useful for some things but no substitute for humans
– Discusses how much we missed in our evaluation of Mars until we actually had a real soil sample with traces of bacteria
– Wants a World Spaceport Center at WTC site in NYC, adds chapter on terrorism and sspace.
The selected bibliography, with annotation, is quite remarkable. I am only familiar with a third of what is catalogued there.
This book helped me understand Jeff Bezos better, and that is always useful.
The author buys into the myths of 9/11. This is disappointing.
I bouight this book partly on a whim and partly because a new non-profit a bunch of us have created, Earth Intelligence Network, is about to start fund-raising from the foundations. For the one page list of the top foundations and what they focus on, alone, I was fully satisfied.
However, and this was a very pleasant surprise, the book suggests that in the Forbes 400, average worth of those without a college degree is 5.96 billion, while those with a degree have a lesser averaage wealth of 3.14 billion. I have an extremely bright and talented who scorns most structured classes, and I am going to give him this book as a way of considering his options. I am certainly coming to believe that online education and “free universities” need to explode, and structured classroom learning reduced at the same time that all learning should become open books team learning, not competitive rote learning. This book actually reinforces that view.
The book opens by emphasizing that a great deal of the wealth today came about because of the equivalent of the Oklahoma land rush, the combination of President Reagan cutting taxes, the wireless “landgrab”, and smart people, generally already rich, borrowing money to buy under-valued assets (in contrast to the subprime mess we are in now).
The book examines factors in success, and after luck or intuition it lists drive, a willingness to take risks, self-confidence, and even obessive attention to detail. A lack of ethics and a willingness to commit crimes against stockholders, employees, and the government are featured in perhaps 10% of the Forbes 400 caught and convicted, and I would speculate another 30% in gray areas. The book cites one person's view that a major recession is coming, and the public's perception of the super-rich as having gotten there by greed and abuse, a factor to be reckoned with in the near future.
Part I focuses on individuals, and we learn that three families, Buffet, Gates, and Walton, hold 14.5% of the total wealth represented in the Forbes 400 list.
Part II focuses on specific economic sectors where fortunes have been made.
Part III was the most interesting part for me, it focuses on how the super-rich spend their money. Heir and trophy wives, how to stalk and marry a billionaire, yachts (over 200 feeet long, the top ones being over 400 feet), helicopters at eleven million, art, competing for the America's cup, a multi-year cost, all quite interesting.
Best of all is the chapter on Giving It Away, and the table on page 278, listing 36 top givers and their interests.
Bottom line: I do not consider this a voyeur type of book, but rather a book that is enjoyable to read on a Sunday morning, and one that could spark useful reflections in both adults, and seniors in high school, or those in college. I regard this as a very fine gift, and will be passing my copy on to my oldest son.
