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George Orwell's timeless and timely allegorical novel—a scathing satire on a downtrodden society’s blind march towards totalitarianism.“All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”A farm is taken over by its overworked, mistreated animals. With flaming idealism and stirring slogans, they set out to create a paradise of progress, justice, and equality. Thus the stage is set for one of the most telling satiric fables ever penned—a razor-edged fairy tale for grown-ups that records the evolution from revolution against tyranny to a totalitarianism just as terrible.  When Animal Farm was first published, Stalinist Russia was seen as its target. Today it is devastatingly clear that wherever and whenever freedom is attacked, under whatever banner, the cutting clarity and savage comedy of George Orwell’s masterpiece have a meaning and message still ferociously fresh.

A classic work in political philosophy, intellectual and cultural history, and economics, The Road to Serfdom has inspired and infuriated politicians, scholars, and general readers for half a century. Originally published in England in the spring of 1944—when Eleanor Roosevelt supported the efforts of Stalin, and Albert Einstein subscribed lock, stock, and barrel to the socialist program—The Road to Serfdom was seen as heretical for its passionate warning against the dangers of state control over the means of production. For F. A. Hayek, the collectivist idea of empowering government with increasing economic control would inevitably lead not to a utopia but to the horrors of nazi Germany and fascist Italy.First published by the University of Chicago Press on September 18, 1944, The Road to Serfdom garnered immediate attention from the public, politicians, and scholars alike. The first printing of 2,000 copies was exhausted instantly, and within six months more than 30,000 were sold. In April of 1945, Reader's Digest published a condensed version of the book, and soon thereafter the Book-of-the-Month Club distributed this condensation to more than 600,000 readers. A perennial best-seller, the book has sold over a quarter of a million copies in the United States, not including the British edition or the nearly twenty translations into such languages as German, French, Dutch, Swedish, and Japanese, and not to mention the many underground editions produced in Eastern Europe before the fall of the iron curtain.After thirty-two printings in the United States, The Road to Serfdom has established itself alongside the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, John Stuart Mill, and George Orwell for its timeless meditation on the relation between individual liberty and government authority. This fiftieth anniversary edition, with a new introduction by Milton Friedman, commemorates the enduring influence of The Road to Serfdom on the ever-changing political and social climates of the twentieth century, from the rise of socialism after World War II to the Reagan and Thatcher "revolutions" in the 1980s and the transitions in Eastern Europe from communism to capitalism in the 1990s.F. A. Hayek (1899-1992), recipient of the Medal of Freedom in 1991 and co-winner of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics in 1974, was a pioneer in monetary theory and the principal proponent of libertarianism in the twentieth century.On the first American edition of The Road to Serfdom:"One of the most important books of our generation. . . . It restates for our time the issue between liberty and authority with the power and rigor of reasoning with which John Stuart Mill stated the issue for his own generation in his great essay On Liberty. . . . It is an arresting call to all well-intentioned planners and socialists, to all those who are sincere democrats and liberals at heart to stop, look and listen."—Henry Hazlitt, New York Times Book Review, September 1944"In the negative part of Professor Hayek's thesis there is a great deal of truth. It cannot be said too often—at any rate, it is not being said nearly often enough—that collectivism is not inherently democratic, but, on the contrary, gives to a tyrannical minority such powers as the Spanish Inquisitors never dreamt of."—George Orwell, Collected Essays

Written in Greek by the only Roman emperor who was also a philosopher, without any intention of publication, the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius offer a remarkable series of challenging spiritual reflections and exercises developed as the emperor struggled to understand himself and make sense of the universe. While the Meditations were composed to provide personal consolation and encouragement, Marcus Aurelius also created one of the greatest of all works of philosophy: a timeless collection that has been consulted and admired by statesmen, thinkers and readers throughout the centuries.

When things get bad, I take out the bourbon. When, as occasionally happens, time drags on and things don't get any better, I put the bourbon away and take out C. S. Lewis. His books are short, readable, and filled with an uncanny amount of wisdom. His genius, and the reason he's always been a comfort to me, lies in his ability to convince me that the world as it appears to be, the world that seems so oppressive, is not the whole story. The lifeline of depression, the fuel from which it draws all of its power, is the mind's misguided belief that it is able to encompass the complete truth about past, present, and future. C. S. Lewis invites the mind into a conversation, using humor, commonplace observations, and logic. He welcomes you into a warm place, like visiting your grandparents at Christmas when you were eight years old. He takes hold of the worldview that led you to him. With gentle, honest, understanding hands he wraps his palms around the neck of that worldview and proceeds to strangle it until it is dead, dead, dead.Lewis is known as a Christian writer. Most people I know want absolutely nothing to do with Christianity, to the extent that, for example, a friend of mine told me that despite my fervent recommendation, he refused to listen to anything by Leonard Cohen because he "heard he sang about religion." Though this particular book is not about Christianity, if you are of the camp that really doesn't want to hear the first word from someone who is religious, you may find this book annoying. Be forewarned.The book is divided into three sections. The first, "Men Without Chests," begins with an example taken from a grade school grammar textbook. In the example, the authors of the textbook imply that there are no sublime things in the world, only feelings of sublimity within us. There is nothing that really deserves respect or castigation, no right responses or ways of thinking about things: there is only opinion.Against this idea Lewis brings to bear the moral and ethical traditions of basically every culture that has ever existed. He lists all the rather startling similarities between, for example, Confucianism, Greek culture, Hinduism, and Jewish and Christian moral tradition. I'm talking about things like finding joy in children, having reverence for old people, respecting your neighbor, being courageous, helping those less fortunate, protecting your family, and not lying about other people for your own gain. In fact, in a long appendix at the end of the book, Lewis takes each of these ideas and gives examples of it in a myriad of different cultures throughout history.Lewis calls this group of ethical ideas "The Tao." And it is at this point that the book gets really startling. First, these ideas are of a dual nature. They are somehow natural to man (exemplified by their reappearance throughout history), yet at the same time they must be taught from one generation to the next. I see this in my three year old son. Through great effort, again and again, I try to teach him to respect other people. Not to, for example, hit other people when he is angry. The behavior I'm trying to teach is, most emphatically, not what comes naturally to him.Yet even in my own personal example I can see the duality Lewis talks about. What arguments can I make to dissuade him from hitting someone out of anger? "If you do it and I see you, I will punish you"? But that's not an argument against doing it, it's an argument against getting caught. "How would you like it if someone did that to you?" But we're not talking about someone doing that to him, we're talking about him doing it to someone else. (He pointed this out, by the way.)In the end, and it has taken me quite a bit of thought to understand this, I have to actually convince him that it's wrong. And this is something different than logical argument. In order to do it, there must be some latent sense of...what? Justice? Proportion? Something that already exists within him that my words can latch on to. Something already within him that the word "wrong" speaks to. So the duality is there, present in the facts that I a) have to teach him this and, b) can only make him really understand it and feel it by appealing to something which he already possesses and carries with him. The main point is this: the idea of what one ought to do cannot be brought before the judge of logic. Lewis made me realize that the word "ought," used so often in our culture, is in fact one of the strangest words ever. What does it really mean?Fortunately (and here comes another startling argument from Lewis) great thinkers like Aristotle and Plato have already thought over this idea. What is "ought"? Whatever it is it's the same thing, it comes from the same place in our thoughts (or our bodies), that our appreciation of good art comes from. The organ used to judge beauty is one and the same as the organ that tells you what you ought to do.When I read this, I almost couldn't believe it. Of course, I've heard this argument before: I remember writing "What the fuck are you talking about?" in the margins of my copy of Plato's dialogues when he brought up much the same argument. At the time, I thought it was completely ridiculous. But reading it now, in the present, it seemed startlingly true.I thought back to some of the times I've had a strong sense of "ought". Years ago, exhausted and tired, my girlfriend and I were driving home from a late night movie. Rounding the curve of a deserted Austin freeway at three in the morning, our car passed a lone truck, sitting still by the side of the road, rammed into one of those gargantuan streetlights they've put up every 100 feet or so. The streetlight had broken at its base and fallen directly on top of the cab of the truck. In the compressed seconds after the image of the truck flashed by, the following thoughts went through my mind: I ought to pull over this car, run over there, and do what I can to help. I don't have a cell phone. I don't have any medical training. There's nothing I can do. I'm really tired. Somebody else with a cell phone will be along in a minute or two. Could I really make any kind of difference? What if there's a lot of blood and I have to take him to the hospital? I don't even know if there's anybody in that truck.While all these thoughts were going on in my head, my stomach was fluttering with worry. But in between...in between my stomach and my head, there was another place: the chest. What we often refer to as the heart. While one part of me was fluttering with emotion, and another part was dithering with logic, this third part spoke its solution with an almost harmonic simplicity. I mean that though my chest (my heart) spoke a single answer, it felt as if this answer were made of a number of unified objects or notes or ideas. Like when someone strikes an e-major on a well-tuned guitar.That, I think, is the "ought" that Lewis is talking about. And he is right: it does come from the chest. It is the chest. Compare this to the experience of viewing something really beautiful, such as a cathedral or sculpture or a vast rock wall, full of shades and contrast, carved out over centuries by falling water. Lewis claims that you will realize, perhaps to your surprise, that the two feelings come from exactly the same organ.The more I read of books written from the 1900s onward, the more I become convinced that we are all in the middle of a fierce debate that started somewhere around that time, and that continues on to this day. This debate is over the future of mankind, the meaning of progress and, in the end, what it means to be human. The remainder of the book concerns this debate. During Lewis's time eugenics was popular. One hopes that the current reader will regard, as Lewis did, the concept with great distaste. But however unpopular eugenics may be at the moment, Lewis points out that it is the concepts and philosophical ideas behind eugenics that are what are truly hideous. Any vision of a perfect utopian society, or of any real progression toward it, must hold somewhere within its core, whether acknowledged or not, the idea that people must be changed. People must be made "better." And the only way to do this, in the end, is to strike at the heart, the chest, inside each person. The only way is to attempt to change that organ, that function, that I have been trying to describe.This is the meaning of the title of the book. Lewis argues that the essence of what man is can be found in that organ in the chest, the heart. And in order to achieve utopia, men in power are more than willing to modify, dull, or, if necessary, rip out the heart in order to achieve their goal. And when they do so, they will discover, to their (perhaps) horror, that what they have left is not a man at all.Examples of this kind of coerced modification of the chest can be listed endlessly. To use the media to present something as ugly which people never thought of as ugly before. Or to make people think of certain other people as weak and diseased who are not. Or to deliberately try to make people afraid out of all proportion to what they have to fear. Or to attempt to redefine what people ought to do, based on the recommendations of some experts. Or to paint some people as corrupt and evil, and as the cause of the problems of society.In the end, the ugliness comes from looking at another person and judging them: judging the "ought" they have come to within themselves. That, after all, is what you are doing every time you say you need to make a person (or group of people) better. As it is, this would just be ugliness. But when the massive power and coercion of the state becomes involved, as it always seems to, then the ugliness turns into something much, much worse. The course of history over the last century will provide plenty of examples, all provided courtesy of people whose goal was to make mankind better. Of course, now that we all recognize how horrific all of that was, we are no longer engaged in the business of making people better. We are no longer involved in using the pronouncements of doctors, scientists, famous people, and intellectuals to dictate through force or influence what people ought to do, or how they ought to think. Nor do we disparage those with ideas different from the common culture. Nor does society lean on businesses, artists, and families to believe and behave in certain ways. Now, we recognize that a diverse, vibrant society takes all kinds of viewpoints. As long as none of those viewpoints profess or seem to profess any wrong ideas, all voices are welcome. We invite everyone to join in the national discussion about which of the many new laws being proposed are the best ones to get people to behave more like they ought to, and to move our society into a better future.As if all this weren't enough content for a rather flimsy paperback, there is yet another startling argument that Mr. Lewis makes. He calls our attention to the nature of science. Accepting that science has certainly given us many wonderful things, can we say anything about what, exactly, science is?Science is a way of looking at material objects in which we deliberately dismiss some aspects of those objects. Not only spiritual or emotional aspects, but also even physical aspects that are not of concern to the nature of our inquiry. In science, we deliberately blind ourselves to the whole of something, in order to better understand some part of it. Many would argue, perhaps truthfully, that a clear understanding of the parts leads to a better understanding of the whole. Certainly, a clearer understanding of the parts allows us in many cases to manipulate the whole.Through a really inspired comparison of Bacon's New Organon to Goethe's Faust, Mr. Lewis argues that, in doing this, we are making a kind of deal. The result will be increased ability to get the stuff we want: medicines, airplanes, cheap food, more leisure time, sex without pregnancy. And what are we giving up to get all this stuff that we want? Are we giving up anything?Before I read this book, my answer would have been: "No. What could we possibly be giving up?" Now, I'm not so sure.Mr. Lewis states emphatically that he is not anti-science. He just wants us to be clear about what we are doing when we embrace science whole-heartedly. I think that's fair. If we pretend we are not making a choice when in fact we are, then somewhere down the line a point is going to arise when there are consequences that we didn't realize. I think that time is now. I think the fact that we have made this choice, and we didn't realize we were making a choice at all, has resulted in many of the conflicting views in our current society.What are we giving up? We are giving up our view of the whole object: the object with all of its philosophical, emotional, and spiritual aspects intact. This is, in actuality, the object as it appears to us before we apply the scalpel of science to it. Yes, science can help us find out things, but only by a deliberate destruction, in our minds and often in physical reality, of the whole of the thing.Take the following story as an example. In college, during a cat dissection, my partner and I were working on the large intestine. The room smelled of formaldehyde and our cat was stretched on a stainless steel table, his four paws tied with rope to allow us the easiest access to cut into his chest cavity. Our lab assistant came over. "Oh, let me show you this," he said. We stood back. He gathered the intestines in his hand and plopped them out onto the table beside the cat's body. There was a thin membrane covering them which he proceeded to pull off and stretch out. It stretched like a balloon, him pulling the transparent membrane between his hands. There were blue and red vessels (colored with some kind of dye they'd put into the cat) running through the membrane that reminded me of scraggly branches of trees.He held the membrane up, still stretched between his fingers. I saw his face on the other side of the membrane, staring at the criss-crossing vessels. "Isn't it absolutely beautiful?" he said.It was beautiful. But suddenly I was hit with the strangeness of what we were doing. That membrane was never meant to be stretched out like that: between someone's hands in a lab room. Those veins were never meant to be that color. That cat, whatever he was, whatever personality he had, was gone forever. The cat as he had been presented to the world, a living organism with certain habits and tendencies, in fact a unique thing in all the history of the world, had been destroyed. This was done so that we could learn something that ostensibly was about all cats, and was about ourselves as well: how the organs in mammals function.I am not against dissections. I'm glad I did it and I would do it again. My only point is that a choice was made. Our minds were made to focus on certain aspects of the cat at the expense of others.Mr. Lewis asks whether we don't lose some of our essential humanness in viewing things in this way. Do a dissection once and you might think about the things I thought about. Do it a thousand times and what happens?I chose a cat dissection as my example because I thought it might carry more weight with modern readers, distant as they are from slaughterhouses. But Mr. Lewis is actually talking about every aspect of science. I doubt anyone who reads this has performed a thousand dissections. But I would wager that there are things that everyone (including myself) who has grown up in our science-worshipping culture has thought about only scientifically a thousand times a thousand times. And Mr. Lewis argues, I think rightly, that this must have the same effect.I read this book four times, thought about it for weeks, and tried to boil down what I thought about it into something succinct. Obviously, I was unable to do so. Looking back over the review now, I see that I have, for example, neglected Mr. Lewis's incredibly profound statement that all that we think of as evil is simply the good of a part of The Tao magnified in importance so that it dwarfs all the other aspects of The Tao. That thought alone is worth the price of admission.There are probably five other main points of the book like this: points that I have missed. This book is simply too full of interesting points for any review of mine to do it justice. Five stars.

<p>War Is a Racketis a speech and a 1935 short book, by Smedley D. Butler, a retired United States Marine Corps Major General and two-time Medal of Honor recipient. Based on his career military experience, Butler discusses how business interests commercially benefit, such as war profiteering from warfare. He had been appointed commanding officer of the Gendarmerie during the United States occupation of Haiti, which lasted from 1915 to 1934.</p><p>After Butler retired from the US Marine Corps in October 1931, he made a nationwide tour in the early 1930s giving his speech "War is a Racket". The speech was so well received that he wrote a longer version as a short book published in 1935. His work was condensed inReader's Digestas a book supplement, which helped popularize his message. In an introduction to theReader's Digestversion, Lowell Thomas praised Butler's "moral as well as physical courage". Thomas had written Smedley Butler's oral autobiography.</p>

Machiavelli needs to be looked at as he really was. Hence: Can Machiavelli, who makes the following observations, be Machiavellian as we understand the disparaging term? 1. So it is that to know the nature of a people, one need be a Prince; to know the nature of a Prince, one need to be of the people. 2. If a Prince is not given to vices that make him hated, it is unsusal for his subjects to show their affection for him. 3. Opportunity made Moses, Cyrus, Romulus, Theseus, and others; their virtue domi-nated the opportunity, making their homelands noble and happy. Armed prophets win; the disarmed lose. 4. Without faith and religion, man achieves power but not glory. 5. Prominent citizens want to command and oppress; the populace only wants to be free of oppression. 6. A Prince needs a friendly populace; otherwise in diversity there is no hope. 7. A Prince, who rules as a man of valor, avoids disasters, 8. Nations based on mercenary forces will never be solid or secure. 9. Mercenaries are dangerous because of their cowardice 10. There are two ways to fight: one with laws, the other with force. The first is rightly man’s way; the second, the way of beasts.

In 2006-2007 a group of investors bet against the US mortgage market. In their research, they discover how flawed and corrupt the market is.

2015 American biographical comedy-drama film directed by Adam McKay

A mother personally challenges the local authorities to solve her daughter's murder when they fail to catch the culprit.

A criminal pleads insanity and is admitted to a mental institution, where he rebels against the oppressive nurse and rallies up the scared patients.

1975 drama film based on the novel by Ken Kesey

World War II American Army Medic Desmond T. Doss, who served during the Battle of Okinawa, refuses to kill people and becomes the first man in American history to receive the Medal of Honor without firing a shot.

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24 hours in the lives of three young men in the French suburbs the day after a violent riot.

A sexually frustrated suburban father has a mid-life crisis after becoming infatuated with his daughter's best friend.

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An examination of the machinations behind the scenes at a real estate office.

1992 American drama directed by James Foley

An outcast New York City cop is charged with bringing down Harlem drug lord Frank Lucas, whose real life inspired this partly biographical film.

A quiet observation of the triumphs and defeats of daily life, along with the poetry evident in its smallest details.

Based on the true story of Forrest Tucker and his audacious escape from San Quentin at the age of 70 to an unprecedented string of heists that confounded authorities and enchanted the public.

A sole survivor tells of the twisty events leading up to a horrific gun battle on a boat, which began when five criminals met at a seemingly random police lineup.

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Set in the near-future, technology controls nearly all aspects of life. But when the world of Grey, a self-labeled technophobe, is turned upside down, his only hope for revenge is an experimental computer chip implant.

When a posse captures three men suspected of killing a local farmer, they become strongly divided over whether or not to lynch the men.

Col. Katherine Powell, a military officer in command of an operation to capture terrorists in Kenya, sees her mission escalate when a girl enters the kill zone triggering an international dispute over the implications of modern warfa

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A frontiersman on a fur trading expedition in the 1820s fights for survival after being mauled by a bear and left for dead by members of his own hunting team.

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A family in 1630s New England is torn apart by the forces of witchcraft, black magic, and possession.

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A bounty hunting scam joins two men in an uneasy alliance against a third in a race to find a fortune in gold buried in a remote cemetery.

Three girls are kidnapped by a man with a diagnosed 23 distinct personalities. They must try to escape before the apparent emergence of a frightful new 24th.

April 6th, 1917. As a regiment assembles to wage war deep in enemy territory, two soldiers are assigned to race against time and deliver a message that will stop 1,600 men from walking straight into a deadly trap.

The story of Ray Kroc, a salesman who turned two brothers' innovative fast food eatery, McDonald's, into the biggest restaurant business in the world, with a combination of ambition, persistence, and ruthlessness.

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