Category: Interesting

The Afghan::Frederick Forsyth read by Robert Powell

As good as reading a short history of the rise and rise of the garden variety jihadist.
A retired SAS agent is mending the roof of his medieval barn when he is summoned to a final counter-terrorist mission. The medieval political system also needs mending. So begins a story about the “new cold war”:

The end of the cold war in 1991 led to the asinine presumption among politicians on both sides of the Atlantic that peace had come at last and come to stay. That was precisely the moment that the new cold war, silent and hidden in the depths of Islam, was experiencing birth pangs.

On one side there are computers; on the other are fanatics, and somewhere in between are a handful of men navigating oceans of terror. Occasionally a Predator drops in like Athena. Occasionally, a god loses his agent. It is never the other way around.

The Confirmation :: Thomas Powers read by George Guidall

It is not obvious that there are soldiers missing in action from the war in Iraq. It is said that the Arabs do not take prisoners, do not leave Americans alive. So the horror of a category of men archived by the subjunctive, neither real nor unreal, neither past nor present, neither recognizable nor localizable is an emotion associated with Vietnam, not Iraq. This is a mistake.

First, imagine the kind of paranoiac, legalistic, calculating Soviet Russia which could nurse a wounded Marine, but could not admit to his presence in the Soviet Union. Not without confirming their (illegal) presence in Laos. Not without confirming his (illegal) entry into the Soviet Union. Not without confirming his (illegal) imprisonment.

Second, imagine that news of this missing soldier arrives in Washington, but the soldier himself does not. Thirty years after Vietnam, a nosy busybody Jewish-Polish CIA hacker hag, with the chutzpah of someone who’s been around the block on heels, makes friends with a CIA boyscout and helps him find out why.

Iraq is not yet Vietnam, but wait.

Good Faith by Jane Smiley read by Richard Poe

At what point can one say that a man is a cheat? When he buys a house from you, when he tells you how to avoid paying income tax, when you help him misrepresent himself, when he helps you find a woman you can marry, when he calls you his best friend? When he complains to you about his wife with the long red hair? When he tells you that everyone trusts you, likes doing business with you, and you could have more, much more? When you close down your business to help him turn an old farm into a classy residential community? When you’re a real estate agent, and it’s 1981?

Perhaps deception should be classified as a sexual crime, as a long form of seduction. Because this is what Good Faith maps out: the leisurely seduction of an average Joe, the leading astray, or leading aside, or leading apart of a country realtor (from the Latin s?ducti?, s?ducti?n-, from s?ductus, past participle of s?d?cere, to lead astray : s?-, apart; see s(w)e- in Indo-European roots + d?cere, to lead; see deuk- in Indo-European roots.)

It was June and summer was right on time.

This is the mood of a good seduction. Not so much an act or an agency as an atmosphere, an environment, a happy economic mix: inflation, undervalued property, optimism. Jane: a combination of older sister, receptionist and tease. Marcus: a persuasive, likeable, ex IRS agent. Joe: a small-town, laid back, bill-paying Christian. A well brought up boy who dusts and smiles at buyers, widows, bankers, and government clerks. Who seduces and is seduced.

The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman::David Colacci

According to Cheney and the gang, some torturers are more equal than others.

This is the story of how one American becomes unequal. How an average guy, born of poor fishing folks of poor Maine stock, becomes a torturer. How a guy who knew boats, and joined the Marines, and learned Arabic, and went to Washington ended up scraping the truth from the bodies of men, like clams.

The guy lives a simple life. He dresses, he goes to work, he has lunch, he goes back to work. Sometimes, he dates. Indeed, there is nothing remarkable about this guy. Except that his job is to interrogate prisoners, and the prisoners are on a little island, outside humanity. Continue reading “The Prisoner of Guantanamo by Dan Fesperman::David Colacci”

New! Dating is a search problem. Solve it with Google Romance.

Death Match is the Beta version of Google Dating Search. Consider it:a small exclusive matchmaking service run by a brilliant lonely Geek charges 25,000 dollars per search. It mixes men, women and algorithms. It finds: perfect couples.

The metallic, mechanical voice of Barrett Whitener engineers the sounds of Miss Google. She’s the demented computer in the kitchen, the thing that produces the results. Eliza. And yes, like all things female, one day Miss Google goes nuts.

That’s when Southern, fay, tangy, overintelligent ex-FBI forensic psychologist Christopher Lasch is hired. To investigate the suicides. Of the men, the women, the perfect matches.

And shows us that jealousy is present in all human products, even search engines.

Charlie Wilson’s War by George Crile read by Christopher Lane

Imagine overhearing the comments of secretaries, girlfriends, GS-11s, GS-18s, CIA heads of station, assistants to CIA heads of station, busty, born-again Texan society matrons, outrageously charming right-wing politicians with more friends than God, superstitious immigrants and sons of immigrants, Muj(ahadeen) terrorists, Afghani torturers, Pakistani tyrants, Egyptian defense ministers turned mule and donkey merchants, so that you can actually see the pieces of history being pushed into place, so that a cult of personalities and a war become cause and effect. Almost. Because things are not so simple….

It is the genius of Crile, ace reporter, that manages these unmanageable personalities and tracks one mad Texan after another, one fanatic after another across the Washington political stage, quoting all the way.

“Now [Avracatos] was forced to recognize that without Charlie he would still be roaming the halls of the CIA without purpose….The man who tried to pretend nothing could hurt him discovered he actually loved Charlie Wilson.”

He risked an awful lot for us. He was unique. He ran with the CIA instead of hitting us from the outside. How many fucking Congressman in the last 40 years have gone to bat publically to get the CIA more money? …Even in the heyday of Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles when the cold war was one big fucking goat fuck, noone was publically calling for more money for the CIA to use in Guatamela or Cuba or anywhere.

This is not just a text read out loud. This is not a written momento of what was written about guns, mules, Afghanis. It is a tale of what was said, who said it to whom and how, with what kind of accent, and what they were wearing when they said it and who was looking at them when they said it and who wanted to fuck them because they said it …. and how they were fucked. Short, hard, telegrammic statements that moved men and things and boundaries. What Sartre would have called: the gossip, the rumours, the news. Told, and told again because it was originally told, this story which when read is re-heard, again. But differently.

Lisa Scottoline read by Kate Burton:: Mary goes to Missoula

Bennie’s office of girls has moved uptown, and become a good hair office. The Good Italian Catholic girl and the Giant California Blonde combine glib girly gall with smart search skills to reconstruct, redress and prosecute a 60 year old wrong.

Mary (GIC-girl) is obsessed with an old case about an old immigrant and sets off for Wyoming because someone doesn’t want her to.

Judy who climbs mountains for fun (Mary once saw a photo of Judy’s family and thought they worked for Comcast Cable….) encourages her:

“Do you even know where Wyoming is?
“Sure, somewhere on the left.”
“Do you know what an antelope looks like?
“Sure, a dog with horns.”

South Philly accent well done by Kate Burton, who makes Mary sound smart and gullible, smart and nutty, smart and frilly. Lovable combinations. Law and fiction, fiction and law.

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner

Elizabeth Moon The Speed of Dark read by Grover Gardner

Pattern recognition is the theme of this second millenium. Knowledge is pattern recognition. Love is pattern recognition. Beauty is pattern recognition. Those who can recognize patterns get to recognize more patterns. Hi, ho. Class struggle.

Now, lets get flush. A few small and weary ancestors hammered away at a short list of ideas. They are museum quality, priceless, with some entertainment value.

But you don’t want to get behind an idea. Not in heavy traffic. It is all over the road. It is in your face. In the right lane. In the left lane. In the right lane. Then, suddenly, without warning, it stops. In the middle of the road. Miles in front of the light. Sitting pretty on some double line, any double line.

For ideas, substitute patterns. Pro cogito ordo est.

Lou the autistic works for a company that makes weapons systems and other good stuff. He spends thousands of hours in front of a computer screen recognizing mathematically gross patterns within data fields. Patterns take the place of knowing how to think.

Lou sees patterns, Lou makes patterns, Lou is patterns.

28% of Lou’s patterns span Margot: a very pretty normal he talks to when he goes fencing at Tom’s house every Wednesday. 5% span shopping for groceries (Tuesday), 5% span driving to work (8:02 -8:25), 1% span cleaning his car (Saturday), 7% span going to Church (Sunday morning).

This is a monstrous book. A brilliant book. A good book.

It shows us inter alia that normality depends on the undaunted recognition of patterns: social signals, facial expressions, vocal tones, and on the order and organization of appropriate reactions to such patterns….

Maybe.

I just looked up “undaunted” to see whether it means the same as dauntless. The OED reads: undaunted: not daunted. No! You think? We autistics protest. Why don’t normals say what they mean? Why don’t words mean exactly? Why should mathematically coherent, numerically aligned, literal, pattern-recognizing beings kowtow to semantic ninniness. Aarrrrgh.

But we do.

Robin Cook Marker read by George Guidall

Robin Cook Marker read by George Guidall

Most bestselling writers, like Hollywood waiters, are really something else. Shrinks, lawyers, opthamologists. Divorced ex-cops. Sometimes a reporter. A confused priest or two. We excuse such slippery behavior when it gives us access to technical knowledge: why kill? how do cops catch criminals? what can laws do? Which health insurance?

If one listens from cover to cover, one can learn incredible things:
Never get into a car with an armed felon. When a body dies, it is flooded with potassium; so if you want to kill someone, use a potassium derivative to cover your trail. In every bureaucratic health care administration sits a bored actuary who does nothing but dream up new ways to reduce insurance risks, to wit: eliminate individuals who are genetically marked to live long and die sick.

Cook does his “forensic pathologists have more fun” routine. It’s a good routine. But, god help us, its not technical enough. We want more long, unpronounceable medical terms. More ugly medically-specific showmanship and one-upsmanship. More perverse occupational fetishes. The rumors, the gossip, the news: what do forensic pathologists talk about, think, eat? What color lipstick do they wear? Where do they buy their CO2? their shoes? their condoms? How about those space suits? The reason Patricia Cornwall is so good is that she skulls the profession, shows us its brain, and makes it bleed. Robin Cook surveys the hospital as an institution, its political posture and position and positioning, its players, its life-cycle, its economics. At a distance. After all, he’s doing something else.

“What’s reasonable and what isn’t has little to do with decisions about health care in this country…. By a strange twist of fate, managed care companies and malpractice plaintiff attorneys suddenly found themselves in the same bed in their desire to keep any malpractice reform legislation from happening… Managed care companies didn’t want things changed so that they could be sued and the malpractice attorneys didn’t want changes that would cap pain and suffering awards or eliminate contingency fees… “