The service offered by Batchelor is to get to what he regards as the core of Buddhist practice, free of “accretions” imposed by various Asian traditions. Of course, some westerners are attracted to Buddhism in part by the rich Baroque trappings of the Tibetans, the subtle Theravada traditions of southeast Asia or the spare paradoxes in Zen cultures. But other westerners want a practice they feel is more suitable for a scientific and democratic society.
Having been a monk in two of three Asian traditions (Tibetan and Korean), Batchelor sought what he regards as Buddha's basic realization. In his writing, he even set aside such crucial elements of traditional Buddhism as rebirth and karma, not denying that the founder taught these doctrines, but attributing them to the Hindu world in which he'd grown up and arguing that they aren't necessary to Buddha's genius as expressed in the “four noble truths.”
Within Buddhism, Bachelor's heresy is not to do without the concept of divinity (the founder was agnostic about metaphysics), but rather to set aside any realm other than our life on earth and to accept the possibility of death as oblivion. This is a delicate point because the prestige of Tibetan religious leaders, starting with the Dalai Lama, depends in part on the claim to be reincarnations and because the finality of death is almost unimaginable to most of us.
What a waste to obtain the necessities of life, guard against danger, form attachments to other humans and accumulate knowledge, and then poof, it's all gone like photo albums when a house burns down. This would be almost as unthinkable as a process of evolution. What human would design so slow, wasteful and unfair a process? Batchelor's point here would be that the gist of Buddhist dharma practice is being aware of what's here, now, rather than placing hope, without evidence, in a happier life after death.
Since its publication in 1946, George Orwell's fable of a workers' revolution gone wrong has rivaled Hemingway's The Old Man and the Sea as the Shortest Serious Novel It's OK to Write a Book Report About. (The latter is three pages longer and less fun to read.) Fueled by Orwell's intense disillusionment with Soviet Communism, Animal Farm is a nearly perfect piece of writing, both an engaging story and an allegory that actually works. When the downtrodden beasts of Manor Farm oust their drunken human master and take over management of the land, all are awash in collectivist zeal. Everyone willingly works overtime, productivity soars, and for one brief, glorious season, every belly is full. The animals' Seven Commandment credo is painted in big white letters on the barn. All animals are equal. No animal shall drink alcohol, wear clothes, sleep in a bed, or kill a fellow four-footed creature. Those that go upon four legs or wings are friends and the two-legged are, by definition, the enemy. Too soon, however, the pigs, who have styled themselves leaders by virtue of their intelligence, succumb to the temptations of privilege and power. “We pigs are brainworkers. The whole
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management and organisation of the farm depend on us. Day and night, we are watching over your welfare. It is for your sake that we drink that milk and eat those apples.” While this swinish brotherhood sells out the revolution, cynically editing the Seven Commandments to excuse their violence and greed, the common animals are once again left hungry and exhausted, no better off than in the days when humans ran the farm. Satire Animal Farm may be, but it's a stony reader who remains unmoved when the stalwart workhorse, Boxer, having given his all to his comrades, is sold to the glue factory to buy booze for the pigs. Orwell's view of Communism is bleak indeed, but given the history of the Russian people since 1917, his pessimism has an air of prophecy. –Joyce Thompson
Phi Beta Iota: Morality is how civilizations transmit the hard lessons of the past. Both Communism and Fascism–including Faux Democracy Of, By, and For the Corporations and Banks, lack morality. The only antidote to corrupt elites is educated non-violence, as both Thomas Jefferson and James Madison among others understood so well. This web site is an attempt to inspire public intelligence in the public interest.
Thomas Jefferson: A Nation’s best defense is an educated citizenry.
James Madison: Knowledge will forever govern ignorance; and a people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives.
1) Let's distinguish between the book and the heavy-handed (late) censorsorship. The book is an earnest personal effort by an experienced officer who knows what he is talking about. The book as now published does NOT violate even the late heavy-handed censorship. I consider the book to be an excellent overview of where US intelligence and special operations are today, along with General Mike Flynn's powerful critique “Fixing Intel-A Blueprint for Making Intelligence Relevant in Afghanistan,” (free online at Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog).
2) Now on to the officer's loss of clearances and heavy-handed censorship.
2a) First, his loss of clearances was ABUSIVE, unwarranted, and totally reflective of the pathological operational decrepitude of our entire clearance system. I am not speaking of those who administer the system, they do the best we can. I am speaking of Colonels and Flag Officers who abuse the system to punish and silence and bankrupt–this is a form of political assassination akin to CIA's “Fitness for Duty” physicals that seek to declare any person with ethics unwilling to go along with insane or unconstitutional practices to be “crazy” and unemployable.
2b) Secondly, the book was CLEARED for publication, it is only after the fact that someone (if I had to speculate, I would guess General Ron Burgess, Director of DIA) decided that the book might make them look bad and sought desperately and foolishly to find a way to get it off the market. One of the real problems we have in our Top Secret/Sensitive Compartmented Information world is that it turns intelligent adults into morons (Daniel Elsberg said this to Kissinger, I am just borrowing it). They actually end up with the delusion that they can “control” anything by making it secret.
The US is hosed strategically, financially, operationally, politically, and ethically. What we “do” at vast expense to the now bankrupt Treasury that has wasted over 14 trillion on the bank bail-out and over 4 trillion on an out of control Pentagon that can no longer build ships or airplanes or even provide squads with effective personal weapons or immediate area surveillance devices, is not in the public interest. Poverty has skyrocketed under this Administration precisely because it continued the previous Administrations two wars, both wars justified to the public by 935 lies led by Dick Cheney while Colin Powell stood silent.
This book is valuable, it merits five stars on its own, and now that Pentagon and CIA clumsiness have made a free online side by side version of the book available, one side as written, the other as redacted, the public has the added advantage of being able to see with great precision that 90% of the redactions are idiotic and have nothing to do with national security anything–precisely the kind of ineptitude that 90% of our expensive and unwarranted secrecy seeks to cover up across the $75 billion (going on $90 billion) secret intelligence archipelago.
I have not deleted the review and welcome the negative votes as a reminder to myself that we have differing views and that many do not see the world as I see it based on my very broad experience and very broad reading patterns. I am loyal to the Republic, to the Constitution, and to the idea that is America. Much of what we do today is inconsistent with the Constitution and the idea that is America. This book is a checkpoint in our road back to being in a state of grace with our Founding Fathers. IMHO.
At Phi Beta Iota the Public Intelligence Blog, in support of my latest book (free online there but better if bought in hard copy here at Amazon: INTELLIGENCE for EARTH: Clarity, Diversity, Integrity, & Sustainaabilty, I have two massive free lists of lists, the first everything that is wrong with America (according to other authors); the second everything that could be right with America (according to other authors). I am but a bridge to the thinking of others, and I commend to everyone's attention, these lists.
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Positive)
Worth a Look: Book Review Lists (Negative)
Bless you all–too many of you think of the author of this book, and of me, as being part of the enemy force. Not so. We are the good guys who have been left wounded on the battlefield by comrades who should have known better. Neither the chain or command nor careerism are worth dying for, but today our brave troops are dying for precisely that: ideologically and politically justified decisions divorced from reality; and flag officers prostituting themselves to careerism and not doing what I as a young lieutenant knew was my job: protecting my troops from other officers and their bad judgments.
Phi Beta Iota: Rarely, if ever, do we find a book reviewed by someone we know, and in this instance, two someone's we know. It is for that reason we are ranking the book as 6 Star and Beyond.
38 of 43 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars The Most Frightening Book of the Decade – Genius!, January 24, 2008
Steve Alten clearly states that many of the factual threads running throughout “The Shell Game” were based upon the extensive research found in my book, “Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil”. I actually didn't know about Shell Game until after it had been written, when Steve offered to send me a review copy. I am so glad he did.
My book is 600 pages of non-fiction with a thousand footnotes. It is in the Harvard Business School Library.
Steve's book is a gripping, fire-breathing, page-turning novel that the great Robert Ludlum would envy. Both books convey exactly the same message: that the world is running out of oil fast; that human civilization hangs in the balance; and that the US government used this crisis as a rationale for perpetrating the attacks of 9-11 and (very likely) attacks yet to come.
Why? The American people would never allow their sons and daughters to be used and sacrificed as bloody oil conquistadors unless we could call ourselves victims.– We are victims, but not that kind.
Steve's absolute genius is in his ability to make the unpalatable irresistible. It lies also in his ability to separate research “ice cream” from research “bs”. “Children”, hucksters and some with more sinister motives have hijacked the so-called 9-11 “truth movement.” That clear thinking is what makes “The Shell Game” slice through consciousness and reach the soul like a hot scalpel through butter. Steve takes us into a terrifying future as though he were reading a military GPS locator.
I had the privilege of reviewing this book before it was published. Below is what I provided for use in publicizing the book, followed by my more detailed summary review provided here for the first time.
I have goose-bumps as I contemplate this book that I have just finished in galley form. The author is unique, a mix of Philip Caputo (Rumor of War), Robert Young Pelton (Come Back Alive), and Ralph Peters (Wars of Blood and Faith), with one huge difference–this man, this author, this son of Afghanistan who is red, white, and blue American–has given us the definitive book on all that is wrong with the American “way of war,” at the same time that he so clearly, so explicitly, so very simply, outlines the alternative path of how we can, we must, “wage peace” in Afghanistan. I am reminded by this author of Bonheoffer, of Gandhi, of Nelson Mandela. This is a book in which the souls of two nations come together, both dark and light, and we see in very personal terms, with deep cultural intelligence, that Afghanistan is unconquerable by force, but desperately seeking to connect and respond to kindness. It shames me that our government is so inept–and our population so abjectly disconnected from reality–that we have repeated Viet-Nam. Bagram Air Base is the Binh Hoa Air Base of my time; we once again seek to win hearts and minds while looking and acting like Darth Vader; and our military prisons are again filled with individuals framed by their enemies, imprisoned by gullible naïve uninformed Americans who mean well, but who are simply not trained, equipped, nor organized to wage peace.
Robert David STEELE Vivas
Co-founder USMC Intelligence Center, #1 Amazon Reviewer for Non-Fiction, Author on Intelligence
Highlights for me personally as a former Marine (1976-1996) who lived in Viet-Nam as a pre-teen from 1963-1967:
EDIT of 6 Sep 2010 to add comments on books once received.
I bought this book, a real bargain, at the suggestion of Dr. Walter Dorn, the “dean” of the peace intelligence scholars, who cites the book with great favor in his own forthcoming book, KEEPING WATCH: Monitoring and Technology in UN Peace Operations, which I am going through now in galley form.
Now that I am holding it in my hands, here are some comments.
1) Published in 1966, it is a phenomenal, an utterly superb, historical review of League of Nations, Latin American Union, and UN peace observation missions from 1920 to 1965. The book concludes with a major section on “Strengthening Peace Observations.”
2) Right away I decide to donate this book to the George Mason University library without marking it up, nor am I reading it, having seen enough to understand why Professor Dorn recommends it so highly as a historical reference work.
3) The book clearly needs a sequel, from 1966 to date, over 40 years of new conflicts and new peace missions, and I make mention of this hoping that someone reading this review will be inspired to take on the project with many collaborators.
This book is really a “comprehensive” (in the literal meaning of the word), clearly written, richly supported by concrete cases (mostly, federal agencies) guide about government bureaucracy mainly in the United States. From introduction to the end, Wilson clearly and convincingly demonstrates the reasons what the government agencies do and why they do that in the way they do.
The book is organized into six parts: Organizations, Operators, Managers, Executives, Context, and Change. In the first part, Wilson's thesis is simply that organization matters. Organization must be in accordance with the objectives of the agency. In the second part, the author examines the operators' behavior (say, street-level bureaucrats) and how their culture is shaped by the imperatives of the situation they encounter in a daily basis. The third part deals with the issues peculiar to managers of public agencies. In this part, attention is focused upon the constraints that put the mangers in a stalemate (see chapter 7, this chapter is completely insightful!!). The fourth part is devoted to the Executives. This part clearly illustrates why the executives of government agencies compete with other departments and which strategies are used in the process of competition and/or cooperation (especially see the 10th chapter about Turf, insightful!!). In the fifth part, Wilson focuses on the context in which public agencies do their business (Congress, Presidents and Courts). In the last part, Wilson summarizes the problems and examines alternative solutions (the market alternatives to the bureaucracy) and concludes with reasonable and “little” propositions.