Lewis Perdue's Blog, page 36

Please Tell Me If You Watch Book Trailers

 Book publishers borrowing a page from Hollywood: From the LA Times

"In a sewer beneath Las Vegas, a lethal vixen named Abigail is locked in a mortal struggle an outlaw cowboy with ties to Greek gods.

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"The scene, recently filmed over three days on a sound stage in Glendale, wasn't for a new sci-fi TV series or movie.

"It was for a 30-second commercial spot aired on Google TV to promote "Retribution," the latest chapter in the popular paranormal book series "Dark Hunter" from best-selling author Sherrilyn Kenyon.

"Such commercials, or so-called book trailers, have become increasingly common as publishers look for novel ways to market their best sellers at a time when fewer people are buying physical copies of booksand chains like Borders Group are shutting down. Publishers, which are reducing author advances and slashing print runs, have begun to spend big money to produce full-blown dramatizations that bring book characters to life. That's a far cry from only a few years ago when publishers promoted their books using only commercials containing a few stock photos and voice-over narration."

I've asked a lot of people if they watch book trailers. Most people tell me, "no." They say that the beauty of a book is that the words interact with their thoughts and that creates their own movie in their head as they read.

Please tell me if you watch book trailers.

And if you do, please tell me if you ever bought a book because of the trailer. If you can remember the book, that would be cool!

Leave a comment below. Please.

 

 

Read the rest From the LA Times

The New Cyber Gatekeepers of the Book World – Same Old, Same Old

From tech blog Gigaom comes a techno-view of publishing's future"

Hot on the heels of Amazon signing publishing deals with authors, and thus doing an end-run around their publisher partners, another major e-reader company says it plans to do the same: Kobo is launching its own publishing arm and looking to sign deals with authors directly. All of this is more proof (as if we needed any) that the Internet is potentially lethal to middlemen. Does this mean that traditional publishers will soon be extinct? No. But it does mean that they are going to have to work harder to try to do what Amazon is already doing — namely, making it easier and more profitable for authors to reach their readers.

The solution, they seem to say, lies in connecting writer with reader.

That's a simple idea, with a complex and so-far-unperfected system that remains somewhere over the horizon. There exist many different sites that are trying to do that: Amazon, Good Reads and others. But they all still lack a targeted approach.

I really have no clear idea how to reach the hundreds of thousands of people who have bought each of my previous books. I have a new book coming out next month, but have no idea how to reach fans … other than frantically posting on blogs and Tweeting.

Some of those messages will get to a few readers directly, but the fate of the book will end up in the hands of a new set of gatekeepers: Those who decide (like dead-tree gatekeepers of old) which books will be featured and promoted at the top of their sites and searches.

Thus, the lucky winners of the e-book and cybersales lotteries will find themselves as the same sort of outliers as legacy print bestsellers.

For the average author, the brave new e-world looks like the same old one with new sheetmetal.

Read the entire article at Gigaom

Used Book Stores: The Only Survivors Of The E-Book Wars?

I've got a house full of books. I love books, the feel of them, the smell of them as they age.

They are like old friends, to be held and read again and again.

As a writer, most of my books are not there for pure enjoyment, but as research. I know them. I know where they are (most of the time) and I have a pretty good idea what they contain. Faster, more depth than Googling.

And a presence. They have palpability that will never ooze from my iPad.

And so it was with both trepidation and hope that I read the following From the Business Insider:

"The corner bookstore is supposed to go extinct once Amazon takes over the world. If Borders– and even mighty Barnes & Noble's — couldn't fight off the behemoth, how would the lowly local shop even stand a chance?

Well, most don't, but it may be possible for some, and here's why.

Mark Mason at the Spectator just wrote about a bookstore that recently opened up near him, and is thriving. He makes an intriguing argument that bookstores may still have a future — in secondhand books.

Read more: Used Book Stores Are In A Great Position To Benefit From The E-Book Apocalypse

 

Pulse Weapons: The Economist Catches Up With My Thriller, Slatewiper

According to The Economist,

BULLETS and bombs are so 20th-century. The wars of the 21st will be dominated by ray guns. That, at least, is the vision of a band of military technologists who are building weapons that work by zapping the enemy's electronics, rather than blowing him to bits. The result could be conflict that is less bloody, yet more effective, than what is now seen as conventional battle.

Electromagnetic weapons, to give these ray guns their proper name, are inspired by the cold-war idea of using the radio-frequency energy released by an atom bomb exploded high in the atmosphere to burn out an enemy's electrical grid, telephone network and possibly even the wiring of his motor vehicles, by inducing a sudden surge of electricity in the cables that run these things.

That idea, fortunately, was never tried in earnest (though some tests were carried out). But, by thinking smaller, military planners have developed weapons that use a similar principle, without the need for a nuclear explosion. Instead, they create their electromagnetic pulses with magnetrons, the microwave generators at the hearts of radar sets (and also of microwave ovens). The result is kit that can take down enemy missiles and aircraft, stop tanks in their tracks and bring speedboats to a halt. It can also scare away soldiers without actually killing them.

THE ECONOMIST CATCHES UP TO SLATEWIPER

The concept and practice started when the EMP from Operation Starfish Prime  accidentally blew out electrical power in Honolulu in 1962. I created a small version of one in the process of building a high school science fair project in 1966.

In 2003, I resurrected the concept for my thriller, Slatewiper, where the protagonists built a directed energy EMP device to prevent aircraft from launching a bioweapons attack on Tokyo.

Read the rest of the Economist article

 

The Help – Wonderful, Evocative, Authentic

The Help rang true for me as an author (Perfect Killer) and as the scion of a Mississippi Delta cotton plantation family, born in Greenwood, raised in Jackson during this book's time period and kicked out of Ole Miss in 1967 for leading a civil rights march.

If Katheryn Stockett had added every possible thing suggested in the numerous Internet discussions, this would have been an unpublishable, 1,000-page tome. Few readers are prepared to sit down with the next "War and Peace."

The Help is, at his core, a "coming of age" story, an introspection by Ms. Stockett of a disturbing time and a clash of cultures. I faced the same agony of cutting at least half of my own "coming of age in Mississippi" story that I wrapped up in Perfect Killer .

I would agree with some that the maids' dialogue (as well as that of the white folk) can fall harshly on people's ears. Both sets of language have been softened very capably — not so much dialogue that it's hard to read, but enough to offer a flavor.

Remember too, that this is a book of impressions and memories, all of which take on rounded, vaguer lines as time passes. Quibbling with minor specifics that do not affect the overall story distracts the reader from absorbing the important impression, the point, the absolute significance of the events and the outcome.

Because I grew up between The Delta and Jackson, I do admire how Ms. Stockett managed to fuse the two very different cultures. The Delta is 2 hours north of Jackson, but The Help did a believable job of moving them so very close in the mind.

Skeeter's mother is absolutely believable and reminded me so much of my Mama who was an unreconstructed Delta Belle, born on one of her father's two plantations and died as one of the last of the Steel Magnolias. Her father — my grandfather John Wester Bradford was called "Daddy" by family and "The Judge" by everyone else (genuflecting hardly optional). His plantations were Mossy Island near Morgan City (still owned by my cousin) and Saints' Rest near Indianola — which I was supposed to inherit part of, but that went away after events at Ole Miss in 1967.

In short, I loved The Help as much as my Mama would have hated it — or been perplexed by it.

There is truth in the book. And authenticity. As I read, my mind put faces from my past on every one of the characters and pulled memories from my mind that I don't even remember ever remembering before. I am grateful this book was written.

Nobel Prize Delusions About Peace, Violence & Revolutions

How wrong can a Nobel Peace Prize winner be? Very wrong.

This wrong: Peaceful revolution 'only solution' .

You could believe that only by ignoring all of history and current events including those in her own country.

More realistically, one could say that peaceful revolution is preferable. But far less likely.

PEACEFUL REVOLUTION = MOSTLY POLITICAL DELUSION

History proves that successful revolutions are violent: even those that are touted as "peaceful." Violent and lasting revolutions have produced the current democratic governments of the United States, France, Mexico and others.

So-called peaceful revolutions have all involved violence and prevailed only because of the eventual moral use of violence and continued threats of violence against the counter-revolutionaries. India, Egypt, Tunisia, Libya (one hopes) and the American Civil Rights Movement all started with violence against non-violent protesters. They succeeded because the violence against the non-violent created outrage among those with a conscience who also had the the will and the power to change things.

The fall of the Soviet Union may be the best example of a peaceful revolution. Obviously preferable, but more a factor of economic decay that allowed the decline of power.

On the other hand, China's Tiananmen Square, and the slaughter of innocents in Syria, and Iran are among many excellent — and more recent — examples of the abject failure of peaceful protest without power. If you have the guns and the will, you can always slaughter your way into the status quo.

On the other hand, if you have the guns and the will, you can make sure that democracy and human rights prevail.

NON-VIOLENCE, VIOLENCE AND HOW THREATENED VIOLENCE CREATES PEACE

UCLA Professor Bradford Stone, the hero of my book Perfect Killer, made this point when discussing the role of non-violent protest in the United States civil rights movement. Here, he is discussing the prosecution of a cold-case hate crime with Jasmine Thompson, a Black civil rights attorney. The conversation also addresses the issue of why former dictators, despots and war criminals should be brought to justice.

"But why prosecute Talmadge now? The man's old and coming apart at the seams. His awful seizures tear him apart and he's got terminal larynx cancer from cigarettes. Why doesn't somebody just let him die. The cancer's its own punishment."

"Punishment is not always justice," Jasmine said. "Do you think the Nuremberg trials were only about punishment and the culpability of those being tried?"

She paused for an answer I did not have, then shook her head.

"Justice outranks punishment. It brings a cultural repudiation of criminal behavior and that act brings justice—to the individual directly wronged and to society as a whole."

"But why Talmadge and why now?"

"What's happening now began in 1990, a couple of weeks before Christmas when a grand jury in Jackson indicted Byron De La Beckwith for the murder of Medgar Evers."

I was familiar with the case. Evers had been gunned down in front of his home in 1963. An ambitious young district attorney in Hinds County, Bill Waller, brought De La

Beckwith to trial and endured abuse and anonymous death threats to see justice done.

Waller also resisted intense pressure from the racists who controlled the state—the Stennis/Eastland Democrats who had made their careers standing in the schoolhouse door and who thought good race relations was providing new paint to freshen up the Colored Only signs smeared across the Mississippi landscape like ugly cultural graffiti. In this atmosphere, Waller got hung juries in two separate trials. I suppose that, given the all-white juries back then, the verdicts stood as a partial victory, and indicated that not all white people were behind Mississippi's brutal apartheid.

Less than ten years later, Mississippi elected "nigger lover" Waller as governor thanks in large part to the FBI backed up by the guns and steel of the federal government and National Guard troops.

Many think the Reverend Martin Luther King Jr.'s nonviolent protests did the whole job. Partly true enough, Dr. King and his protesters had to be the first wave to show the nation their dedication, their suffering, and to help Americans understand the evil. Build a nationwide outrage intense enough to commit federal guns and bullets to protect the innocent.

Reality is that this is a nasty Darwinian world and you can't love your enemies to death. The world ain't about Kumbaya. And if that's all you have, you and all your good intentions are gonna be eaten alive. The Civil Rights Movement would never have succeeded without the threat of federal violence even the Klan had to respect.

"Bobby DeLaughter got a conviction in the Evers case," Jasmine continued. "And produced more than simple justice for Myrlie Evers and her children. It sent a tremendous signal that Mississippi had changed, and if we got a conviction here, it might happen everywhere. Light bulbs went off all over the South, and pretty soon we had convictions in the Birmingham church bombings and in a whole lot of other Klan killings. All the way up to Indianapolis and Pennsylvania."

"A compelling case, counselor," I said.

"Feed one person's hunger for justice and you can feed a whole people. It's a fish and loaves kind of thing."

Expert Says Perfect Killer Exposes A Secret Military Program With Horrible Consequences

This is the Afterword to my book, Perfect Killer.

Dr. Gabriel thinks Perfect Killer exposes an important, but very secretive, U.S. military program that could have horrible consequences ... in fact, making the average soldier into a perfect killer who becomes the worst weapon of mass destruction.

AFTERWORD TO PERFECT KILLER
By DR. RICHARD A. GABRIEL(Colonel, U.S. Army Ret.)

Author of many books including No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War (More about Dr. Gabriel following this afterword.)

Lewis Perdue's fascinating book, Perfect Killer is the first attempt in the popular literature to bring to the attention of the public a major problem facing modern armies.

The intensity of modern war especially the close urban combat in which the American Army now finds itself engaged, produces high levels of stress and fear, which cause most soldiers (more than 80 percent!) not to fire their weapons as they seek to avoid the natural human revulsion to killing another human being.

Over time, prolonged fear and the revulsion to killing produce high levels of psychiatric casualties that threaten to cripple combat efficiency. The military's response has been to seek chemical means to solve the problem.

These attempts, and the threats they pose to the soldier's humanity, are the important subjects treated in Perdue's book as he attempts to bring these issues to the attention of the American public.

The idea of trying to control the soldier's fear through chemical means so that he may kill more efficiently is very old indeed, beginning at least two thousand years before Rome when the Kayak and Wiros tribes of Central Russia perfected a powerful amphetamine drug from the Amanita muscaria mushroom, which rendered the soldier highly resistant to pain and exhaustion even as it stimulated him to greater physical endurance.

In the thirteenth century the Crusaders fought a band of Muslim warriors known as the hashshashin, so called because they used hashish prior to battle to reduce fear and control pain. The Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro fought Inca warriors whose resistance to pain and fear was increased by chewing the coca leaf, from which cocaine is derived.

From its earliest days the British Navy has given its sailors rum before and after battle, and the Russian Army in both World Wars provided their soldiers with a number of chemical compounds derived from plants (valeriana) to improve their fighting ability.

During the Vietnam War, American soldiers routinely used marijuana, alcohol, and hard drugs like heroin to help them overcome the fear and stress of battle. But what modern armies have in mind far surpasses anything tried in the past. Biology and chemistry have combined in the modern age to produce the science of biochemistry.

Armed with this new knowledge, the military research establishments of the United States, Russia, and Israel have set for themselves the task of abolishing fear in the soldier to make him a more efficient killing machine.

The next revolution in military power will occur not in weapons technology, but in biochemistry

that will make it possible for soldiers to better endure the conditions of modern war. If the search is successful, and it almost inevitably will be, the fear of killing and death will be banished, and with it will go man's humanity and his soul.

The chemical soldier will become a terrifying reality.

The advent of the chemical soldier will change not only the nature and intensity of warfare, but the psychological nature of man himself.

A chemical compound that prevents the onset of anxiety while leaving the individual mentally alert will produce a new kind of human being, one who would retain the cognitive elements of his emotions but would be unable to feel emotion.

All emotions, not just fear, are based in anxiety. Remove the onset of anxiety, and the interactions between cognitive and physiological aspects of human emotion vanish.

And with them what we know as the soul would be destroyed.

We are left with a genuine sociopathic personality induced by chemical means.

The sociopathic personality is one who clearly knows what he is doing to another person but cannot feel or appreciate the consequences of his action upon another person. Such personalities often cannot prevent themselves from acting even though they know (but cannot feel) what the consequences of their actions might be. They are unable to display loyalty to others, are grossly selfish, are unable to feel guilt or remorse or appreciate the consequences of their actions. The sociopathic personality functions only on the cognitive plane of his emotions and is incapable of human empathy.

The chemical soldier will be a true sociopath.

Abolishing fear and the natural revulsion humans have to killing other humans will change the nature of man and war, and it will be achieved simply by increasing the “human potential” of the combat soldier. Frightened and revulsed soldiers don't kill very well.

Studies have shown that little more than 15 to 20 percent of soldiers will fire their weapons at other soldiers.

But if the chemical means of controlling fear and revulsion to killing succeed in, say, only 75 percent of the cases, then the killing capacity of soldiers under fire will increase by 400 percent! The killing efficiency of crew-served weapons will also increase.

The number of psychiatric cases will be diminished greatly, but at the cost of exponentially increasing the number of dead and wounded on all sides. In a war of chemical soldiers, military units will, once engaged, be unable to disengage.

In earlier battles, both sides absorbed as much death as they could until fear and exhaustion broke one side's spirit, at which point one side ran or surrendered. Fear and revulsion put real limits on the ability of units to attack and defend.

But the chemical soldier will fight without fear and revulsion to limit the killing.

Battles once joined will proceed until one side has been entirely killed or wounded. Without fear and empathy to stop or at least limit the carnage, battles will be fought to the death because there will no longer be any human reason to stop them. The battle of annihilation, once rare, will become the norm.

Without fear, revulsion, and psychiatric collapse to force soldiers to surrender, units will resist to the last man. This will force the attackers to kill all the defenders, or vice versa, in a sterile exercise in military slaughter. The defenders will he unable to surrender and the attackers unable to offer surrender, for the reasons for surrender—fear of death, overwhelming revulsion at the carnage, or psychiatric collapse—will no longer arise in the chemically altered personalities of the soldiers involved.

The empathy of human for human will have vanished and with it the need to spare even the wounded.

For the chemical soldiers traditional military virtues will have neither function nor meaning.

Qualities such as courage, bravery, endurance, and sacrifice for others have meaning only in human terms. Heroes are those who can endure or control fear beyond the limits usually expected of sane men.

Brave men are those who conquer fear. Sacrifice for on comrades can only have meaning when one fears death and accepts it because it will permit others to live. But if fear is eliminated by chemical means, there will be nothing over which the soldier can triumph. The standards of normal sane men will be eroded, and soldiers will no longer die for anything understandable or meaningful in human terms.

They will simply die, and even their own comrades will be incapable of mourning their deaths.

The moral paradox of the chemical soldier is that for him to function effectively on the modern battlefield he must be psychically reconstituted to become what we have traditionally defined as mentally ill!

He must be chemically made over into a sociopathic personality in the true clinical sense of the term. The battlefields of the future will witness a clash of truly ignorant armies, armies ignorant of their own emotions and even of the reasons for which they fight.

Battle itself will be incomprehensible in normal human terms. Once the chemical genie is out of the bottle, the full range of human mental and physical potentialities becomes subject for further chemical manipulation. The search to improve the military potential of the human being will further press the limits of humanity itself. Such “human potential engineering” is already a partial reality, and the necessary technical knowledge increases every day.

Faceless, if well-meaning military medical researchers press the limits of their discipline with little or no regard for the consequences.

We may be rushing headlong into a long, dark chemical night from which there is no return unless the American public, the press, and opinion makers are made aware of the problem and decide to stop it. Lewis Perdue's Perfect Killer is one way in which large numbers of the American people can be made aware of the problem.

MORE ABOUT DR. RICHARD A. GABRIEL

Richard A. Gabriel was Professor of Politics and History and Director of Advanced Courses in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before retiring to write full-time. Dr Gabriel held faculty positions at the University of New Hampshire, University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and was a tenured full professor at Saint Anselm College before assuming the post at the Army War College.

He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses and has sensed as a consultant for the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. He has held the visiting chair in Ethics and Humanities at the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia, and currently teaches ethics, humanities, and leadership in the MBA program at Daniel Webster College.

Dr. Gabriel is the author of thirty-six books and fifty-eight articles on various subjects in political science, ancient history, military history, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, ethics, philosophy, and the history of theology. A number of his works have been translated into other languages, and others have been used as primary sources for television programs produced by the Public Broadcasting Company. Dr. Gabriel's work has also been featured in a number of made-for-television videos shown on Discovery, the Learning Channel, and the History Channel.

Among his books are a number of definitive works. A History of Military Medicine (2 vols., 1992) is the first comprehensive work an the subject; Crisis in Command, the first major critique of American battle performance in Vietnam (1978); The New Red Legions (2 vols, 1980) and The Mind of the Soviet Fighting Man (1984), the first studies of the Soviet soldier based on interview data; To Serve With Honor (1981), the first treatise on military ethics written by an American in this century and used as a basic work in US. and foreign services senior leadership schools; Soviet Military Psychiatry (1985), the first work on the subject published in the West; and Operation Peace for Galilee: The Israeli- PLO War in Lebanon (1984), the first military analysis of that conflict and generally regarded as the definitive work on the subject.

Professor Gabriel has held positions at the Brookings Institution, the Army Intelligence School, the Center for the Study of Intelligence at the CIA, and at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Department of Combat Psychiatry, in Washington, D.C. Dr. Gabriel is a frequent lecturer to Dr. Gabriel is a frequent lecturer to the academic governmental, and military establishments of Canada, the United States, West Germany, China, and Israel. He has testified before the US. Senate and been interviewed on CBS, NBC, CNN, and ABC national news programs, the Today show, Crossfire, Nightline, and 60 Minutes. Dr Gabriel is a consultant to NBC and 60 Minutes for various news stories and edits for two publishers, Hill and Wang and Greenwood Press, where he edits his own series of political and historical books.

Among Dr Gabriel's most recent works are The Great Battles of Antiquity (1994), A Short History of War (1992), From Sumer to Rome: The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies (1991), The Culture of War (1990), The Painful Field: The Psychiatric Dimension of Modern War (1988), The Great Captains of Antiquity (2000), Gods of Our Fathers: The Memory of Egypt in Judaism and Christianity (2001), and Great Armies of Antiquity (2002). Dr Gabriel is also the author of three novels, Warrior Pharaoh (2000), Sebastian's Cross (2001), and The Lion of the Sun (2003). His most recent books are The Military History of Ancient Israel (2003), Subotai the Valiant: Genghis Khan's Greatest General (2004), and Ancient Empires at War (3 vols., 2004).

 

Expert Says Perfect Killer Exposes A Secret Military Program With Horrible Consequences

This is the Afterword to my book, Perfect Killer.

Dr. Gabriel thinks Perfect Killer exposes an important, but very secretive, U.S. military program that could have horrible consequences … in fact, making the average soldier into a perfect killer who becomes the worst weapon of mass destruction. Government documents on this program can be accessed here.

AFTERWORD TO PERFECT KILLER

By DR. RICHARD A. GABRIEL(Colonel, U.S. Army Ret.)



Author of many books including No More Heroes: Madness and Psychiatry in War (More about Dr. Gabriel following this afterword.)

Lewis Perdue's fascinating book, Perfect Killer is the first attempt in the popular literature to bring to the attention of the public a major problem facing modern armies.

The intensity of modern war especially the close urban combat in which the American Army now finds itself engaged, produces high levels of stress and fear, which cause most soldiers (more than 80 percent!) not to fire their weapons as they seek to avoid the natural human revulsion to killing another human being.

Over time, prolonged fear and the revulsion to killing produce high levels of psychiatric casualties that threaten to cripple combat efficiency. The military's response has been to seek chemical means to solve the problem.

These attempts, and the threats they pose to the soldier's humanity, are the important subjects treated in Perdue's book as he attempts to bring these issues to the attention of the American public.

The idea of trying to control the soldier's fear through chemical means so that he may kill more efficiently is very old indeed, beginning at least two thousand years before Rome when the Kayak and Wiros tribes of Central Russia perfected a powerful amphetamine drug from the Amanita muscaria mushroom, which rendered the soldier highly resistant to pain and exhaustion even as it stimulated him to greater physical endurance.

In the thirteenth century the Crusaders fought a band of Muslim warriors known as the hashshashin, so called because they used hashish prior to battle to reduce fear and control pain. The Spanish conquistador Francisco Pizzaro fought Inca warriors whose resistance to pain and fear was increased by chewing the coca leaf, from which cocaine is derived.

From its earliest days the British Navy has given its sailors rum before and after battle, and the Russian Army in both World Wars provided their soldiers with a number of chemical compounds derived from plants (valeriana) to improve their fighting ability.

During the Vietnam War, American soldiers routinely used marijuana, alcohol, and hard drugs like heroin to help them overcome the fear and stress of battle. But what modern armies have in mind far surpasses anything tried in the past. Biology and chemistry have combined in the modern age to produce the science of biochemistry.

Armed with this new knowledge, the military research establishments of the United States, Russia, and Israel have set for themselves the task of abolishing fear in the soldier to make him a more efficient killing machine.

The next revolution in military power will occur not in weapons technology, but in biochemistry

that will make it possible for soldiers to better endure the conditions of modern war. If the search is successful, and it almost inevitably will be, the fear of killing and death will be banished, and with it will go man's humanity and his soul.

The chemical soldier will become a terrifying reality.

The advent of the chemical soldier will change not only the nature and intensity of warfare, but the psychological nature of man himself.

A chemical compound that prevents the onset of anxiety while leaving the individual mentally alert will produce a new kind of human being, one who would retain the cognitive elements of his emotions but would be unable to feel emotion.

All emotions, not just fear, are based in anxiety. Remove the onset of anxiety, and the interactions between cognitive and physiological aspects of human emotion vanish.

And with them what we know as the soul would be destroyed.

We are left with a genuine sociopathic personality induced by chemical means.

The sociopathic personality is one who clearly knows what he is doing to another person but cannot feel or appreciate the consequences of his action upon another person. Such personalities often cannot prevent themselves from acting even though they know (but cannot feel) what the consequences of their actions might be. They are unable to display loyalty to others, are grossly selfish, are unable to feel guilt or remorse or appreciate the consequences of their actions. The sociopathic personality functions only on the cognitive plane of his emotions and is incapable of human empathy.

The chemical soldier will be a true sociopath.

Abolishing fear and the natural revulsion humans have to killing other humans will change the nature of man and war, and it will be achieved simply by increasing the "human potential" of the combat soldier. Frightened and revulsed soldiers don't kill very well.

Studies have shown that little more than 15 to 20 percent of soldiers will fire their weapons at other soldiers.

But if the chemical means of controlling fear and revulsion to killing succeed in, say, only 75 percent of the cases, then the killing capacity of soldiers under fire will increase by 400 percent! The killing efficiency of crew-served weapons will also increase.

The number of psychiatric cases will be diminished greatly, but at the cost of exponentially increasing the number of dead and wounded on all sides. In a war of chemical soldiers, military units will, once engaged, be unable to disengage.

In earlier battles, both sides absorbed as much death as they could until fear and exhaustion broke one side's spirit, at which point one side ran or surrendered. Fear and revulsion put real limits on the ability of units to attack and defend.

But the chemical soldier will fight without fear and revulsion to limit the killing.

Battles once joined will proceed until one side has been entirely killed or wounded. Without fear and empathy to stop or at least limit the carnage, battles will be fought to the death because there will no longer be any human reason to stop them. The battle of annihilation, once rare, will become the norm.

Without fear, revulsion, and psychiatric collapse to force soldiers to surrender, units will resist to the last man. This will force the attackers to kill all the defenders, or vice versa, in a sterile exercise in military slaughter. The defenders will he unable to surrender and the attackers unable to offer surrender, for the reasons for surrender—fear of death, overwhelming revulsion at the carnage, or psychiatric collapse—will no longer arise in the chemically altered personalities of the soldiers involved.

The empathy of human for human will have vanished and with it the need to spare even the wounded.

For the chemical soldiers traditional military virtues will have neither function nor meaning.

Qualities such as courage, bravery, endurance, and sacrifice for others have meaning only in human terms. Heroes are those who can endure or control fear beyond the limits usually expected of sane men.

Brave men are those who conquer fear. Sacrifice for on comrades can only have meaning when one fears death and accepts it because it will permit others to live. But if fear is eliminated by chemical means, there will be nothing over which the soldier can triumph. The standards of normal sane men will be eroded, and soldiers will no longer die for anything understandable or meaningful in human terms.

They will simply die, and even their own comrades will be incapable of mourning their deaths.

The moral paradox of the chemical soldier is that for him to function effectively on the modern battlefield he must be psychically reconstituted to become what we have traditionally defined as mentally ill!

He must be chemically made over into a sociopathic personality in the true clinical sense of the term. The battlefields of the future will witness a clash of truly ignorant armies, armies ignorant of their own emotions and even of the reasons for which they fight.

Battle itself will be incomprehensible in normal human terms. Once the chemical genie is out of the bottle, the full range of human mental and physical potentialities becomes subject for further chemical manipulation. The search to improve the military potential of the human being will further press the limits of humanity itself. Such "human potential engineering" is already a partial reality, and the necessary technical knowledge increases every day.

Faceless, if well-meaning military medical researchers press the limits of their discipline with little or no regard for the consequences.

We may be rushing headlong into a long, dark chemical night from which there is no return unless the American public, the press, and opinion makers are made aware of the problem and decide to stop it. Lewis Perdue's Perfect Killer is one way in which large numbers of the American people can be made aware of the problem.

MORE ABOUT DR. RICHARD A. GABRIEL

Richard A. Gabriel was Professor of Politics and History and Director of Advanced Courses in the Department of National Security and Strategy at the U.S. Army War College in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, before retiring to write full-time. Dr Gabriel held faculty positions at the University of New Hampshire, University of Massachusetts at Lowell, and was a tenured full professor at Saint Anselm College before assuming the post at the Army War College.

He has taught graduate and undergraduate courses and has sensed as a consultant for the House and Senate Armed Services Committees. He has held the visiting chair in Ethics and Humanities at the Marine Corps University at Quantico, Virginia, and currently teaches ethics, humanities, and leadership in the MBA program at Daniel Webster College.

Dr. Gabriel is the author of thirty-six books and fifty-eight articles on various subjects in political science, ancient history, military history, anthropology, psychology, psychiatry, sociology, ethics, philosophy, and the history of theology. A number of his works have been translated into other languages, and others have been used as primary sources for television programs produced by the Public Broadcasting Company. Dr. Gabriel's work has also been featured in a number of made-for-television videos shown on Discovery, the Learning Channel, and the History Channel.

Among his books are a number of definitive works. A History of Military Medicine (2 vols., 1992) is the first comprehensive work an the subject; Crisis in Command, the first major critique of American battle performance in Vietnam (1978); The New Red Legions (2 vols, 1980) and The Mind of the Soviet Fighting Man (1984), the first studies of the Soviet soldier based on interview data; To Serve With Honor (1981), the first treatise on military ethics written by an American in this century and used as a basic work in US. and foreign services senior leadership schools; Soviet Military Psychiatry (1985), the first work on the subject published in the West; and Operation Peace for Galilee: The Israeli- PLO War in Lebanon (1984), the first military analysis of that conflict and generally regarded as the definitive work on the subject.

Professor Gabriel has held positions at the Brookings Institution, the Army Intelligence School, the Center for the Study of Intelligence at the CIA, and at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, Department of Combat Psychiatry, in Washington, D.C. Dr. Gabriel is a frequent lecturer to Dr. Gabriel is a frequent lecturer to the academic governmental, and military establishments of Canada, the United States, West Germany, China, and Israel. He has testified before the US. Senate and been interviewed on CBS, NBC, CNN, and ABC national news programs, the Today show, Crossfire, Nightline, and 60 Minutes. Dr Gabriel is a consultant to NBC and 60 Minutes for various news stories and edits for two publishers, Hill and Wang and Greenwood Press, where he edits his own series of political and historical books.

Among Dr Gabriel's most recent works are The Great Battles of Antiquity (1994), A Short History of War (1992), From Sumer to Rome: The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies (1991), The Culture of War (1990), The Painful Field: The Psychiatric Dimension of Modern War (1988), The Great Captains of Antiquity (2000), Gods of Our Fathers: The Memory of Egypt in Judaism and Christianity (2001), and Great Armies of Antiquity (2002). Dr Gabriel is also the author of three novels, Warrior Pharaoh (2000), Sebastian's Cross (2001), and The Lion of the Sun (2003). His most recent books are The Military History of Ancient Israel (2003), Subotai the Valiant: Genghis Khan's Greatest General (2004), and Ancient Empires at War (3 vols., 2004).

 

Michael Hart – The Father of E-Books, R.I.P.

A belated send-off for Michael Hart who created and sent the world's first e-book, way back in the mainframe computing days of 1971 and went on to found Project Gutenberg.

He died September 6 at the relatively young age of 64. A full obituary is here in the Economist.

“Governments do not rule the world Goldman Sachs does” - Trader Echoes Zaibatsu Thriller

Trader Alessio Rastani's wildly popular BBC interview on YouTube shocks the world and echoes the central points in two of my financial thrillers, Zaibatsu which was the sequel of The Delphi Betrayal.
(The really good parts of this video begin about 38 seconds in.)

Rastani's statements allude to the central points I tried to make in my two thrillers:

-- Corporations control most of the world's cash, making it impossible for nation states and their central banks to have any real effect on the global economic environment.

-- Sharp traders make money regardless of whether the markets are going up or down.

"I dream of another recession," Rastani says in the video. "I dream of another moment like this."

In other words, recessions and market crashes are a great opportunity to make money.

"Governments do not rule the world Goldman Sachs does."

I had a different name for the global conspirators, but Rastani's is close enough.

One thing he alludes to is the central part of my plots that make for good thrillers: If you know whether the market will go up or down, that's when you bet everything -- and that's one helluva'n incentive to manipulate things.

And ...if you were a massive conspiracy of global players who decided among themselves that the world would be better off with them in control and with wealth better apportioned from rich nations to poor ones, then you could create one or more global crashes in order to equalize living conditions.

But how do you manipulate the global economic environment to do that?

That's the heart of these thrillers ... and the methods were created with help from some of the world's best global traders.