Other books that might interest you

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  Summary of Dinesh D’Souza’s...

  Falcon Press

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  Summary of Dinesh D’Souza’s Hillary’s America is a history of the Democratic Party, which author Dinesh D’Souza argues is the source of all evil and iniquity in American history. Hillary Clinton, the 2016 Democratic nominee for president, is a crook who entered politics for personal gain…

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  Visions of Utopia - Philosophy...

  Professor Fred Baumann

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  With the characteristically human abilities to reason and imagine comes, apparently inevitably, the longing for imaginary but plausible places and conditions where everything is exactly as it should be and all our needs and desires are satisfied, including the need not to be jaded by satisfaction.
   
  Professor Fred E. Baumann looks at what some philosophers have had to say on this subject, mostly in the form of stories about utopias. Five are written by great philosophers and the last by a challenging, nearly contemporary American scholar. All have exerted great influence on the history of thought or have expressed influential currents of thought. Professor Baumann's lectures not only examine these texts, but also address the results of attempting to put these utopias into practice.

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  Understandable Economics -...

  Howard Yaruss

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  In this entertaining and informative guide, author Howard Yaruss breaks down our economic system in a straightforward way, avoiding jargon, formulas, graphs, and other technical material so common in books on this subject. Instead, he creates a compelling and comprehensive picture of our economy using accessible analogies, real-world observations, and entertaining anecdotes.Understandable Economics will enable listeners to answer questions such as: Why is inequality soaring and what can we do about it?; Do tax cuts for the wealthy create jobs or just create more inequality?; Where does money come from, why does it have value, and who controls it?; What does the Fed do and how does it affect our lives?; Could alternative currencies like Bitcoin replace the dollar?; Is our national debt a threat?; Why do so many people believe free trade is good if it causes some people to lose jobs?; Why does the economy regularly turn down and how can we get it back on track?; and many more.Understandable Economics provides the context, tools, and foundational knowledge listeners need to thoroughly understand our economy, determine which policies would work best, and champion those policies effectively.

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  Dot and the Kangaroo (version 2)

  Ethel C. Pedley

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  A 5-year-old girl named Dot is lost in the outback after chasing a hare into the wood and losing sight of her home. She is approached by a red kangaroo who gives her some berries to eat. Upon eating the berries, Dot is able to understand the language of all animals, and she tells the kangaroo her plight. The kangaroo, who has lost her own joey, decides to help little Dot despite her own fear of humans. The book is filled with criticism on negative human interference in the wild in 1884. (Summary from Wikipedia)

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  Grave Attending - A Political...

  Karen Bray

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  A thorough critique of the redemptive narratives of neoliberalism in US politics and society. 
   
  “This is a book about what it would mean to be a bit moody in the midst of being theological and political. Its framing assumption is that neoliberal economics relies on narratives in which not being in the right mood means a cursed existence.”  
   
  So begins Grave Attending: A Political Theology for the Unredeemed, which mounts a challenge to neoliberal narratives of redemption. Mapping the contemporary state of political theology, Karen Bray brings it to bear upon secularism, Marxist thought, affect theory, queer temporality, and other critical modes as a way to refuse separating one’s personal mood from the political or philosophical. Introducing the concept of bipolar time, she offers a critique of neoliberal temporality by countering capitalist priorities of efficiency through the experiences of mania and depression. And it is here Bray makes her crucial critical turn, one that values the power of those who are unredeemed in the eyes of liberal democracy?those too slow, too mad, too depressed to be of productive worth?suggesting forms of utopia in the poetics of crip theory and ordinary habit. Through performances of what she calls grave attending?being brought down by the gravity of what is and listening to the ghosts of what might have been?Bray asks readers to choose collective care over individual overcoming. 
   
  Grave Attending brings critical questions of embodiment, history, and power to the fields of political theology, radical theology, secular theology, and the continental philosophy of religion. Scholars interested in addressing the lack of intersectional engagement within these fields will find this work invaluable. As the forces of neoliberalism demand we be productive, efficient, happy, and flexible in order to be deemed worthy subjects, Grave Attending offers another model for living politically, emotionally, and theologically. Instead of submitting to such a market-driven concept of salvation, this book insists that we remain mad, moody, and unredeemed. Drawing on theories of affect, temporality, disability, queerness, work, and race, Bray persuades us that embodying more just forms of sociality comes not in spite of irredeemable moods, but through them. 
   
  “In Grave Attending, Bray forges a bold, and yet surprisingly gentle, theological response to the driving economies of salvation that flow through the bloodstream of US politics and American Christianity. Immersed in multiple scholarly discourses, Bray manages to expose the significance of theology amongst these, as her theological vision insists on countering the pathologizing forces that either numb us or compel us to rise above suffering. She catches readers off-guard by crafting a lyrical work of theology that claims moods and modes of reflection that are often deemed unsuitable and unworthy. Bray’s theology claims the damned and damns the redemptive.” —Shelly Rambo, Boston University

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  Spies for Hire - The Secret...

  Tim Shorrock

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  Running spy networks overseas. Tracking down terrorists in the Middle East. Interrogating enemy prisoners. Analyzing data from spy satellites and intercepted phone calls. All of these are vital intelligence tasks that have traditionally been performed by government officials accountable to Congress and the American people. But that is no longer the case.Starting during the Clinton administration, when intelligence budgets were cut drastically and privatization of government services became national policy, and expanding dramatically in the wake of 9/11, when the CIA and other agencies were frantically looking to hire analysts and linguists, the intelligence community has been relying more and more on corporations to perform sensitive tasks heretofore considered to be exclusively the work of federal employees. This outsourcing of intelligence activities is now a $50 billion-a-year business that consumes up to 70 percent of the U.S. intelligence budget. And it's a business that the government has tried hard to keep under wraps.Drawing on interviews with key players in the intelligence-industrial complex, contractors' annual reports and public filings with the government, and on-the-spot reporting from intelligence industry conferences and investor briefings, Spies for Hire provides the first behind-the-scenes look at this new way of spying. Shorrock shows how corporations such as Booz Allen Hamilton, Lockheed Martin, SAIC, CACI International, and IBM have become full partners with the CIA, the National Security Agency (NSA), and the Pentagon in their most sensitive foreign and domestic operations. He explores how this partnership has led to wasteful spending and how it threatens to erode the privacy protections and congressional oversight that is so important to American democracy.Shorrock exposes the kinds of spy work the private sector is doing, such as interrogating prisoners in Iraq, managing covert operations, and collaborating with the NSA to eavesdrop on Americans' overseas phone calls and e-mails. And he casts light on a "shadow intelligence community" made up of former top intelligence officials who are now employed by companies that do this spy work, such as former CIA directors George Tenet and James Woolsey. Shorrock also traces the rise of Michael McConnell from his days as head of the NSA, to being a top executive at Booz Allen Hamilton, to returning to government as the nation's chief spymaster.From CIA covert actions to NSA eavesdropping, from Abu Ghraib to Guantanamo, from the Pentagon's techno-driven war in Iraq to the coming global battles over information dominance and control of cyberspace, contractors are doing it all. Spies for Hire goes behind today's headlines to highlight how private corporations are aiding the growth of a new and frightening national surveillance state.

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