Challenged to consider his own sense of maturity while mentoring a group of teenage boys, Fischer shares insights from Jewish tradition, his own thinking, and Zen Buddhist practice that allow cultivation of true maturity.
Sleeping with the Devil: How Washington Sold Our Soul for Saudi Crude by Robert Baer (2003, Crown Books)
Baer, a retired CIA case officer, served in Iraq, Dushanbe, Rabat, Beirut, Khartoum and New Delhi, handling agents that infiltrated Hizballah and al Qaeda, among others, and received the Career Intelligence Medal in 1997.
This book reveals how the US government’s cynical relationship with Saudi Arabia (as well as with Qatar), and America’s dependence on Saudi oil make us increasingly vulnerable to economic disaster and put us at risk for further acts of terrorism.
- Baer documents with chilling clarity how our addiction to cheap oil and Saudi petrodollars caused us to ignore the Al Sa’ud’s culture of bribery, its abysmal human rights record, and its financial support of fundamentalist Islamic groups that are directly linked to acts of terror.
It is the details in the book that make it outstanding. - The connection between members of the house of Saud and specific members of the political and economic elite in the United States, who receive financial subsidy from individual Saudi foundations and quasi-government agencies.
- The fact that were democracy to come to Saudi Arabia, oil to the West would very like be cut off, or go to $150/barrel; and if it does not come, demographic factors in Saudi Arabia indicate that the regime is unlikely to survive for more than another 10 years.
- The fact that the corrupt royal family members have bought off the Wahabi religious zealots in the country by pouring money into foreign madrassas that train jihadists.
You’ve read or heard the general outline before, but not in as much detail, with names named and details given. The fact that 200 terrorists with the proper plan could cause more than half of all Arabian oil exports to be halted for a full two years.
Very highly recommended.
The Cheating Culture: Why More Americans Are Doing Wrong to Get Ahead by David Callahan (2004, Harcourt Books, ISBN 0-15-101018-8, 350 pages
Callahan documents how much cheating is going on throughout society, and thinks this is a reaction against the harsh, unfettered market and unprecedented economic inequality. See The Cheating Culture.
Gag Rule: On the Suppression of Dissent and the Stifling of Democracy by Lewis H. Lapham (2004, Penguin Press, ISBN 1-59420-017-3, 178 pages)
Harper’s Magazine Editor Lapham explains how voices of protest and dissent are locked out of mainstream conversation in the United States, by simultaneous alignments of a concentrated and profit-driven media with an administration that considers civil liberties as second in importance to prosecuting a "war on terror". He’s opinionated, literate, and he is trying to give us a wake up call: sometimes corporatism, or fascism, evolves gradually over a decade or more, as the hard work of politics is abandoned by citizens busy with their private lives and the infrastructure for sustained and diverse policy debate weakens and becomes less crucial to the governing elite. Democracy in the U.S. is weaker than many think, and now is the time to act.
