The Internet of the 21st century, also called Web 2.0, has become a participatory marvel, letting anyone post anything, anywhere, without having to go through, or be approved by, anyone. According to this book, that is also its biggest drawback, not just for the Internet, but for all of American culture.

The two biggest culprits in the destruction of American culture are the sites Wikipedia and YouTube. Wikipedia is an online encyclopedia that anyone can edit at any time. It doesn’t matter if the person doesn’t know anything about the subject of the entry they are changing. It also doesn’t matter if the edited information is totally wrong, or downright malicious. No approval is required. The legitimate encyclopedias are suffering greatly; people would rather use Wikipedia with its potentially wrong information. YouTube is the video equivalent of Wikipedia. Again, anyone can post anything, with no thought given as to whether or not the video is accurate or fair.

The author explores the near-destruction of the music business by file sharing and downloading; the movie business is not far behind in terms of Internet-caused damage. The site craigslist has done major damage to newspaper ad revenue, a major source of money. Newspaper readership is steadily dropping, as people go to blogs for news, leading to the possibility of journalism becoming totally advertiser-driven, which would mean covering little more than celebrities, diets and self-help. Anything can be cut, pasted and re-mixed, putting great pressure on concepts of copyright and ownership. A major assertion of the author is that there are no “gate-keepers” on the Internet, no one to help the average person discover what information is, or is not, accurate.

There is hope on the horizon. In 2006, one of the creators of Wikipedia started Citizendium, a wiki encyclopedia but with experts who have the authority as the final word in their area of specialty. Legislation has been passed to protect kids from predators on sites like MySpace, but parents have the primary responsibility to know what their kids are doing online.

Lest anyone think otherwise, this is not some back-to-nature, anti-technology rant; the author is a Silicon Valley insider. This book is worth reading and recommended for everyone, from those who live on the Internet, to those who want nothing to do with it.

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A major part of the official story is that Atta and his fellow hijackers slipped into America unnoticed and were able to attend flight school without attracting government attention. A person would think that law enforcement, including the FBI, would be interested in finding out the truth. There are numerous instances throughout this book of witnesses being intimidated into silence by the FBI. Soon after the attacks, the FBI raided the local police department, seized all the files on the "owner" of the flight school where several of the terrorists trained, and put them directly onto a military plane to Washington, accompanied by Florida Governor Jeb Bush.

A person named Mohamed Atta was accused of a bus bombing in Israel in the mid-1980s. Even if they were not the same person, wouldn’t that have put the name "Mohamed Atta" on some terrorist watch list? A Mohamed Atta is also listed as a graduate of the US International Officers School at Maxwell AFB. The researchers who worked on this book offered to clear up the question for the Pentagon, free of charge, but they were not interested. Assertions from the Pentagon that they were not the same person were not convincing. As many as 7 of the hijackers received training at secure military installations. To even be considered for such a program would have required Atta to be on very friendly terms with an Arab ally, like Saudi Arabia.

Much of this book looks at Rudi Dekkers, the "owner" of Huffman Aviation. A Dutchman who is a fugitive back home in the Netherlands, he is generously described, by people familiar with aviation in Florida, as a "scumbag." He would fall several months behind on his rent at Venice Airport, then suddenly be flush with cash. He deserved to be arrested, several times over, on various state and federal charges. Each time, "high government officials" would tell his accusers to back off. Dekkers was also the subject of a federal task force accusing him of smuggling high technology out of the USA.

A reasonable question would be: Who cares what Atta and the others were doing in Florida before the attacks? If this one part of the official 9-11 story can be so thoroughly discredited, are there other parts of the official story that are similarly worthless? This book is very highly recommended. It is investigative journalism the way it is supposed to work; put a witness statement next to a seemingly unrelated verified fact, and see where the trail leads. This is very much worth reading.

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No one knows just how many closed circuit TV cameras are working in Britain at any given moment; estimates range from 2 to 3 million. The average person could find themselves on a CCTV screen up to 300 times a day. No longer do bored security guards have to sit in front of rows of TV screens. New software allows the system to distinguish between normal and abnormal behavior. Such abnormal behavior is automatically flagged and displayed on the one TV screen for the guard to analyze.

The retailers of this world are building up a more comprehensive portrait of an individual’s purchases and buying habits, with that person’s willing consent. It is done through recording credit card transactions and the use of store discount cards (Is a discount of a few percent on your purchase really worth giving all of your personal information to some retailer’s database?). What the retailers don’t know about a person, the credit reporting agencies do know. Their information comes from a seemingly infinite array of sources, and accuracy of the information is not guaranteed.

Echelon is a global electronic interception system that aims to capture every phone call, email, fax and telex communication between America, Europe and the Middle East. It is run by the National Security Agency, with help from its British, Canadian, Australian and New Zealand counterparts. A major listening station is at a place called Menwith Hill in Yorkshire. Without the absolutely highest security clearance, don’t even bother trying to get in. Members of the European and British do not have such clearance. France is building its own smaller version of Echelon, using current satellite technology.

This is a fascinating, and pretty spooky, book. There is a list of groups in the back of the book working on various aspects of the privacy issue. About all a person can do is to keep any more civil liberties from disappearing in the name of security (those liberties that are gone are not coming back anytime soon). This book is recommended for everyone; those who know their way around this issue, and those who know nothing about this issue.

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This perception of the inner city as a dark, depressing and amoral place is not a new phenomenon; think Charles Dickens and Victorian England. More recently, there was a "liberal" period in the early 1950s; books like Michael Harrington’s "The Other America" helped bring about Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society programs. Aside from that, the end of World War II brought about the beginning of white flight to the suburbs. The difference in income between whites and blacks grew wider and wider.

After the 1960s riots, and especially since the Reagan Administration, conservatives have gone on the offensive, painting the city as some sort of evil, horrible place full of people who don’t think or act like "we" do. Welfare programs cause poverty and dependency. Inner city residents lack a sense of ethics or morality. While federal subsidies to cities were being slashed, that money was used to build more prisons. Minor crimes like vagrancy or graffiti were suddenly being treated much more seriously. Remember how "welfare queens" were supposed to be the cause of America’s problems? Remember the teenage "super-predators" who were supposed to flow into the suburbs like a tidal wave, leading to a huge increase in gated communities and the purchase of home security systems?

Advertising and the movies are just as guilty of giving the perception that the inner cities should be simply walled off and forgotten. Evidently, things like the moving of jobs to the suburbs, police racism, the ending of "welfare as we know it," and the lack of mass transit to get to those suburban jobs have nothing to do with the present state of America’s cities.

This book does a fine job at showing the latest attempt to find a scapegoat, to blame the poor and downtrodden, for America’s problems. More importantly, this book is quite readable; the author keeps it from sounding like a dry, academic tome. It is very much worth reading.

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The American Civil Liberties Union was a new liberal organization in New York, looking for publicity. The Butler Act was a Tennessee state law which mandated the teaching of creationism alongside evolution (which had been taught in Tennessee for the previous 15 years). The ACLU put ads in local newspapers, looking for a teacher to be arrested to test the law. John Thomas Scopes, a teacher and athletic coach in Dayton, Tennessee (a former steel town that had fallen on hard times) was persuaded to be that person. The trial quickly became the talk of America.

Spectators descended on Dayton by the hundreds (the city fathers hoped for thousands). The trial was marked by a lot of procedural wrangling by both sides, with the jury absent, on such questions as whether or not each day’s session should open with a prayer. The jury only heard about 3 hours of actual testimony. There were moments of great eloquence during the trial, but there was little of the hoped-for Bryan vs. Darrow.

The authors don’t end with Scopes being found guilty of teaching evolution, which both sides had planned on, but looks at more recent things like intelligent design. Those who believe in ID are portrayed as flexible and willing to listen to skeptics, while those who believe in evolution are shown as dogmatic and totally unwilling to listen to anyone who doesn’t believe as they do.

If the authors had ended this book at the end of the trial, I would give it two thumbs up; I can understand showing the current state of the evolution debate. Whatever your feelings on the matter, this is still recommended.

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The authors have years of experience in corporate America, and it shows. This is a really interesting book about arrogance at the top, and the middle ranks who believe in the company, or just want to make it to retirement. Was Enron ever like this? Well worth reading.

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Libertarians believe that liberty is about fundamental rights, while statists feel that liberty is about quality of life. Libertarians feel that self-ownership is vital to human dignity; government should adopt a laissez-faire attitude as much as possible. Statists believe in a powerful central government that delivers quality of life to the people. This book explores a number of present-day political issues from a libertarian perspective.

The right to privacy is an important check on the power of the state. It should be the right of every citizen to have, or not to have, a faith. But that does not mean that all mentions of religion should be removed from public life. Libertarians need to do a better job of convincing the public that an open-border policy and a vibrant immigrant population is a sign that the economy is growing and that a rising tide lifts everyone. Among the state’s few, legitimate purposes is to ensure safety for its citizens. Risk-free existence is not possible, but steps can be taken to stop groups that will destroy the citizens of a free state if they get the chance. A proof that the Patriot Act is a bad law is that the best argument by its defenders is that it is not used as often as people think. The state should get out of the marriage business; offer civil unions to any qualifying couple and leave the granting of marriage to churches. Prohibitions of drugs like marijuana are a bad idea for several reasons: prohibiting the behavior of reasonable adults erodes self-ownership, passing laws that won’t be enforced leads to a disregard for all laws, and laws that "send a message" misuse the state’s powers and are redundant.

Perhaps it is time for a different way of looking at politics in America; the present system doesn’t work very well. The author says that it is not easy to be a libertarian, but for those who are interested, this book is an excellent place to start. It is recommended for everyone, including that who simply want to know what libertarianism is all about.

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The carrying of a national ID card, implanted with an RFID chip that could record a person’s movements, and which may have to be produced on request of any representative of the state, is not some vague possibility; in May 2008, it will become a reality. The average shopper is more than willing to give up their personal information to retailer’s databases, some of which are more comprehensive than those held by governments, all in exchange for a discount of a few percent. Have you ever heard of ECHELON? It has certainly heard of you. It is a worldwide electronic monitoring system that aims to check all phone calls, faxes, telexes and emails between Europe, America and the Middle East, supposedly for possible terrorist activity.

If there is such a thing as The Database that contains all information on the average American, it is probably the one held by Atlanta-based ChoicePoint Corporation. They get their information from many different sources, and sell it to many different types of clients. If the information on a person’s report is faulty, and there is a good chance that something on the report is wrong, oh well. ChoicePoint does not consider itself subject to the Fair Credit Reporting Act (FCRA), which gives Americans a chance to fix faulty information. America is not the only country that has sophisticated spy satellites in orbit, able to take very detailed pictures of practically anything. A new industry has emerged around home-based surveillance, like nanny-cam’s that work over the Internet, and systems to monitor and record everything your kids do online.

What can be done? The most that can be done by the average person is to keep any more privacy from disappearing; that which is already gone is gone, it is not coming back. The book contains a list, with web addresses, of American and British groups working on the privacy front.

This book is better than excellent. It is more than a little spooky, it is easy to read, and is highly recommended, even for those who know their way around the worlds of privacy and surveillance.

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In this book, Alicia and Meg are at a new employer. Meg has become part of a coven, and both she and Alicia still feel that same ancient, evil hunger, like something, or someone, is coming for them. Perhaps Wesley is still alive, or it could be Frederick, a recently living person, now a vampire, now living in the same town. He patrols Route 9, the main thoroughfare through town, needing a constant supply of, preferably female, blood. His victims don’t turn into vampires, but they have no memory of their encounter with him.

Because of their past dealings with Wesley, the coven doesn’t hesitate to take steps to prepare for whatever is coming. They prepare a number of spells and protections. Alicia is at the center of all this, and has become a sort of junior member of the coven, so she is taught some wiccan methods of protection.

This is a rather “quiet” novel, but a really good novel. The author certainly knows her way around Wicca; this is almost more of a Wiccan novel than a vampire novel. For the squeamish, this is not a very bloody novel. It is very much worth reading.

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