DS

The CIA at it's best -- this is the book on which the award nominated film is based. Makes you proud that in the middle of a bureaucratic mess, there are individuals who think creatively and have the skills and courage to pull of some really audacious stuff to protect us all.

A West Point graduate becomes a Rhodes Scholar becomes an Army Ranger becomes an Infantry platoon leader in Afghanistan. Interesting look at life at West Point (spoiler alert: not the usual college experience) and the Rhodes Scholar experience (spoiler alert: reading history at Oxford is more fun than West Point).

God knows we need more really smart, highly educated people in the upper ranks of the military but I have the feeling that those people will not become Head of the Joint Chiefs anytime soon, alas.

I highly recommend this "thinking man's" look at the Army, modern warfare and casualties.

This is a recap of drone attacks focusing on the drone attack that killed the US citizen in Yemen, who was a fervent Muslim but no more fervent, and less proactive, than a Tea Party evangelical Christian who bombs abortion clinics.

Without due process, he was declared a terrorist. even though there is no proof that he ever killed anyone and his big crime was a cheer-leading blog. Our drones have killed more children than terrorists and the whole sordid JSOP program will probably join Japanese internment camps, segregation and Indian tribe relocation on the list of things we shouldn't have done.

If Churchill was right and 'the only thing we have to fear is fear itself' then we are certainly in trouble because we are dis-proportionally afraid relative to the threat. We should be more afraid of cars and handguns than terrorists.

A sometimes interesting exploration of privacy, or the lack thereof, in the digital age and possible solutions to the problems created and acknowledgment of some benefits received.
Basically, my take away is that the future will either be intuitively convenient or "1984" redux. But we still have a lot of control over what we chose to share with the world and we should think carefully before we share.

I've owned many different breeds of large dogs, and I thought I knew about training them, but this book was an eye opener on the abilities of dogs and how they're trained to go to war. Great read and I learned a lot.

Daniker makes a good case for ET's having visited us.... don't know what I think.... read it and decide for yourself.

Now I understand why my grandfather was so traumatized by his service in WWI. The politicians, diplomats and generals were all so incredibly incompetent, ego driven and short sighted. This is a slow and steady recounting of how Europe got into the WWI, how the war was waged, how it ended and how all of it made WWII inevitable.

An interesting history of the American dairy farmer in Wisconsin. The evolution from hardscrabble farmer with a few dozen cows, to the large scale farm with a few dozen farmhands and machines, to the modern day, college educated farmer with a business model from one extreme to the other. The one over riding theme is the love of the land and the animals.

The novice mutual fund investor will certainly benefit from listening to this book. Knowledge is power is a basic truth that will never go out of style.

I've been a stock trader for a number of years and I found a lot of basic truths, that even experienced traders, should be reminded of from time to time. At about an hour in length, this is a very efficient way to remind oneself.

This is a valuable introduction to retirement planning, something we all have to consider as soon as we start working, to assure we aren't poverty stricken when we can least afford to be vulnerable.