Uncle Al Capone

just another good biz man that got destroy by big gov

And I looked, and behold a pale horse: and his name that sat on him was Death, and Hell followed with him. And power was given unto them over the fourth part of the earth, to kill with sword, and with hunger, and with death, and with the beasts of the earth.

"For many years I sincerely believed that an extraterrestrial threat existed. I was wrong and for that I most deeply and humbly apologize"

http://www.amazon.com/History-Jews-Paul-Johnson/dp/0060915331
From Publishers Weekly
Less a seminal contribution than a distillation of a wide range of sources, this history of the Jews focuses on their four-millennia interplay with, and adaption to, other, often hostile, civilizationsa "world history seen from the viewpoint of a learned and intelligent victim." Weaving biblical and archeological data, Johnson (Modern Times and A History of Christianity is particularly deft at placing the patriarchs and early Israelites (the Bronze Age through the destruction of the First Temple) in their historical context. His dense, somewhat arbitrary, capsule extols Judaic rational scholarshipwhich contributed to ethical monotheism and the 18th-century economic system, in turnand denigrates mystic kabbalah"heresy of the most pernicious kind." Although Johnson, who seeks to acknowledge "the magnitude of the debt Christianity owes to Judaism," traces "an inherent conflict" between the religion and the state of Israel through the various ages, the work is incontrovertibly sympathetic to Zionism. BOMC and QPBC featured alternates; author tour.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

4.0 out of 5 stars Niall Ferguson - The killer "apps" or cultural arrogance; you decide.,, March 1, 2011
By
Red on Black
This review is from: Civilization: The West and the Rest (Hardcover)
While I suspect that David Starkey would violently object the two current giants of television history in the UK in terms of providing a worldview are the left leaning Simon Schama and the combative neo conservative Niall Ferguson. Their dust up at last years Hay Literary festival in Wales was a colourful sparring session between two big intellects firing verbal potshots at each other and a joy to behold. Schama concentrated on providing a robust defense of Barack Obama while Ferguson spent much of his allotted time dissing the President's now famous speech delivered in Cairo in 2009. Indeed he has described it as "touchy feely nonsense" and has in recent weeks sent out lurid warnings about Obama's failure to anticipate the demise of Mubarak and to come to terms with what Ferguson sees as the potential rise of the Muslim brotherhood in Egypt and the possible "restoration of the caliphate and the strict application of Sharia". Strong stuff, but Ferguson does like a good row. (see his feud with the nobel prize winning economist Paul Krugman)

These themes above are the heart of this new book "Civilization: The West and the Rest" since Ferguson comes from the controversial standpoint that Western dominance has on the whole been a progressive force and that on the basis of a cost benefit analysis the good outweighs the bad (it is a constant theme in all his books). He recently argued that "the rulers of western Africa prior to the European empires were not running some kind of scout camp. They were engaged in the slave trade. They showed zero sign of developing the country's economic resources....and the counterfactual idea that somehow the indigenous rulers would have been more successful in economic development doesn't have any credibility at all." This is a bold, confrontational, contentious and provocative thesis and his new book reinforces these arguments postulating that there were six killer "apps" which propelled the West to a position of predominance. These were competition, science, property, modern science, consumption and work ethic all with a dedicated chapter in the book.
(Continued)
http://www.amazon.com/review/R1N52H0A6IPY77/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=1846142733&nodeID=283155&store=books

5.0 out of 5 stars Like playing Sid Meier's Civilization, October 29, 2010
By
Boon L. Kwan "Bernard"
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Why the West Rules--for Now: The Patterns of History, and What They Reveal About the Future (Hardcover)
As can be seem by both the summary and and various book reviews, this is big history, encompassing the dawn of the first homonids (or ape-men as the author put it) to present day, with a chapter conjecturing about the future.

I was going to try and compare it to some of books in the same genre that I have read, but this book takes, disproves and/ or builds on their arguments - books such as Kennedy's Rise and Fall of the Great Powers, Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel, Pommeranz's the Great Divergence, Landes' The Wealth and Poverty of Nations - and they are all cited in his book and Morris takes pains to show how they only focus on one small piece of the picture. Indeed the feeling of reading this must have been similar for those who read Marx's Das Kapital for the first time (although the language is much more accessible and the conclusion is open ended) in that it attempts to set out underlying laws of history.

In the words of the author - "History is not one damn thing after another, it is a single grand and relentless process of adaptations to the world that always generate new problems (in the form of disease, famine, climate change, migration and state failure) that call for further adaptations. And each breakthrough came not as a result of tinkering but as a result of desperate times, calling for desperate measures." There may be set backs and hard ceilings, with free will and culture being the wildcards that may hinder social development but eventually the conditions give rise to ideas that allow progress to be made.

Indeed the motor of progress is not some economic logic, but what he calls the Morris Theorem - (expanding an idea from the great SF writer Robert Heinlein) to explain the course of history - Change is caused by lazy, greedy frightened people (who rarely know what they are doing) looking for easier more profitable and safer ways to do things. And it is geography that is the key determining factor where something develops first - Maps, not Chaps.
(Continued)
http://www.amazon.com/review/R3IH8KOS5TGYYC/ref=cm_cr_dp_title?ie=UTF8&ASIN=0374290024&nodeID=283155&store=books

A Delightful and Educational Way to Spend an Afternoon November 7, 2009
By C. E. Snow
http://www.amazon.com/Revolutions-Fun-P ... +Profit%21
No longer will I be forced to sit through a business meeting wondering how I could make the pain end. I now know how to rectify my situation and make a mad grab for power. The best part is I didn't even have to spend money on a set of awkwardly fitting clothes to set myself apart from the masses or spend hours languishing away in a some poorly lit prison cell plotting my rise to prominence. Instead I simply read this book and you should too.

Winning at War: Seven Keys to Military Victory throughout History
Christian P. Potholm (Author)
http://www.amazon.com/Winning-War-Military-Victory-throughout/dp/1442201304
......................
In an interesting look at the separate factors that determine success at war, Potholm has defined what he calls a

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A true espionage page-turner
The spy who loved us by Thomas A Bass

Reviewed by Alexander Casella

On the morning of April 30, 1975, as hundreds of North Vietnamese tanks were heading for the center of Saigon, Phan Xuan An, the last remaining Time reporter in Vietnam, sent out a last report before the line went dead: "All American correspondents evacuated."

In the days prior to the fall of Saigon, now Ho Chi Minh City, An had used his many American contacts to airlift his wife and four children out of the city and have them resettled in the US. He had also pulled strings to ensure the evacuation of South Vietnam's former spymaster Tran Kim Tuyen who, many years before, had been one of his patrons. Why he himself had not left before the communist onslaught caused some perplexity among his Vietnamese friends but most attribute it to the confusion that prevailed at the time in Saigon.

So An stayed behind and initially did not find the going easy. As a Vietnamese journalist working for an American news media, he was bound to be looked on with suspicion by the new authorities and was repeatedly called in by the police for questioning. Then suddenly the harassment stopped and he was seen pedaling his bicycle through Saigon with full shopping bags replete with goods that could only be purchased at some of the special shops that the communists had set up for their cadres.

The rumor now spread among his friends that An was a so-called "April 30 revolutionary", one of the many who had rallied for the revolution on the day of victory. They were not wrong in assuming that he was a communist. All they had gotten wrong was the date. He had joined the revolution in 1945 and, seven years later had been infiltrated into Saigon as one of the first agents of the newly created Communist Military Intelligence Service.

For the next 23 years An operated as perhaps the single most successful communist intelligence agent in South Vietnam. And while he had made all the necessary preparation to leave Saigon in April 1975, including first evacuating his family, he stayed behind only because at the last minute the order had come from Hanoi: do not leave.

With the ending of the war, An no longer needed his cover and yet the truth that he had not been just a journalist took years to surface. The first inkling came in December 1976 when he was spotted in Hanoi in a full North Vietnamese army uniform with the four stars of a senior colonel on his lapels. As, little by little, his true role during the war became known, a wave of disquiet swept across the community of American correspondents who had covered the Vietnam War. Most knew An.

Many, including the likes of Robert Shaplen and David Halberstram, had relied on him not only as one of their primary news sources but even more so as an analyst of Vietnamese affairs. All held him in high esteem for his professionalism and his impartial insights into Vietnamese politics. And now the man they had grown to respect as an impartial South Vietnamese journalist and, they all felt, harbored a genuine liking for all things Americans, proved to have been one of their deadliest enemies.

Some refused to believe the evidence. Others felt betrayed. Others set out to decipher the enigma of a man who, for 23 long years, at great danger to himself, had not so much played a double role but had been, for all practical purposes, two persons in one.
(Continued)
http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Southeast_Asia/KH01Ae01.html

Thursday, August 9, 2012
Alfred Henry Lewis, Wolfville (1897)
Alfred Henry Lewis (1855-1914), published a trio of books, Wolfville (1897), Wolfville Days (1902), and Wolfville Nights (1902). Each is a collection of sketches set in a fictional frontier settlement in the Arizona desert. Ominously called Wolfville, it was no doubt meant to emulate the very real town of Tombstone.

Cast of characters. The narrator of the sketches is a longtime resident of Wolfville, a man from Tennessee known as the Old Cattleman. The old man spends his time in the saloon or on the hotel verandah

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The Once and Future War

[Updated on: Mon, 10 September 2012 07:29] by Moderator

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Thursday, October 18, 2012
Edgar Beecher Bronson, The Red-Blooded (1910)

http://buddiesinthesaddle.blogspot.com/2012/10/edgar-beecher-bronson-red-blooded-1910.html

Bronson

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