OUR
PLAYLIST
Favorite songs
Favorite books
23 Things they don’t tell you about Capitalism
Ha-Joon Chang
The global economy lies in tatters. While fiscal and monetary stimulus of unprecedented scale has prevented the financial meltdown of 2008 still remains the second-largest economic crisis in history after the Great Depression. This has been ultimately created by the free-market ideology that ruled the world. This is a book that systematically takes apart neoliberal economic assumptions – the ‘things’ here are all nicely summed up in an opening paragraph per chapter where they are stated in the standard, unforgiving terms of neoliberal ideology.
Among the chapters which are a must-read are:
Thing 1, there is no such thing as a free market
Thing 10, the US does not have the highest living standard in the world
Thing 20, equality of opportunity might not be fair
If you want to read a summary of all 23 things go to :
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ian-fletcher/a-review-of-ha-joon-chang_b_840417.html
John Williams
Stoner
Stoner is a 1965 novel by the American writer John Williams. The central character, William Stoner, begins as a farm boy in Missouri whose parents send him to the University of Missouri to major in agriculture. After reading Shakespeare's Sonnet 73 and influenced by his instructor, Archer Sloane, Stoner changes his major to literature and pursues a master of arts.
John Williams's luminous and deeply moving novel is a work of quiet perfection. William Stoner emerges from it not only as an archetypal American, but as an unlikely existential hero, standing, like a figure in a painting by Edward Hopper, in stark relief against an unforgiving world.
@WAR, the rise of Cyber Warfare
Shane Harris
The United States military currently views cyberspace as the “fifth domain” of warfare (alongside land, air, sea, and space), and the Department of Defense, the National Security Agency, and the CIA all field teams of hackers who can, and do, launch computer virus strikes against enemy targets. In fact, as @WAR shows, U.S. hackers were crucial to the US victory in Iraq.
It was Edward Snowden, trained as a computer hacker by the National Security Agency (NSA), who revealed to the world the extent of what Shane Harris calls here the American “surveillance state”. The activities of Chinese hackers targeting American companies had already been laid bare by the cyber-security company Mandiant. But Snowden showed that America was also engaged in offensive cyber warfare, hacking into at least 63 servers or computers at Beijing’s Tsinghua University during a single month in 2013.
A good review of the book can be found at:
Read also “Countdown to Zero Day: Stuxnet and the Launch of the World's First Digital Weapon” from Kom Zetter
Top cybersecurity journalist Kim Zetter tells the story behind the virus that sabotaged Iran’s nuclear efforts and shows how its existence has ushered in a new age of warfare—one in which a digital attack can have the same destructive capability as a megaton bomb.
In January 2010, inspectors with the International Atomic Energy Agency noticed that centrifuges at an Iranian uranium enrichment plant were failing at an unprecedented rate. The cause was a complete mystery—apparently as much to the technicians replacing the centrifuges as to the inspectors observing them.