Showing results by narrator "Ian Putnam" in All Categories

Xi Jinping has made his ambitions for the People's Liberation Army (PLA) perfectly clear, first, that China should become a "great maritime power" and secondly, that the PLA "become a world-class armed force by 2050." China as a Twenty-First-Century Naval Power focuses on China's navy and how it is being transformed to satisfy the "world class" goal.

When sworn protectors of Earth, the Justice Platoon, are all horribly killed, their former arch-enemies come crawling out of the woodwork. Outnumbered, outgunned, and out of options, the US Government has no choice but to activate the Sidekicks Initiative, dragging the Platoon's middle-aged ex-sidekicks out of retirement. Now these three reluctant, out of shape former child-wonders must work together to stop the rising tide of supervillainy, avenge their former mentors' deaths, and bring the world back from the brink of destruction.

Society and democracy are ever threatened by the fall of fact. Rigorous analysis of facts, the hard boundary between truth and opinion, and fidelity to reputable sources of factual information are all in alarming decline. A 2018 report published by the RAND Corporation labeled this problem "truth decay", and Andrew J. Hoffman lays the challenge of fixing it at the door of the academy. But, as he points out, academia is prevented from carrying this out due to its own existential crisis - a crisis of relevance.  

Sturgis Sturdevant is a professional troll. He works for a fake news website; he can’t seem to find a decent therapist or meet a nice girl; and it looks like he’s inadvertently joined a cult. If that wasn’t bad enough, Stu might also be a hypnotically programmed assassin.

This is the story of Jacques Ladouceur he was born in Port-au-Prince, Haiti. He rose from object poverty to the highest level of pro soccer in the world. He traces his fascinating journey from playing soccer on the streets of Haiti as a boy, through his career as a professional soccer player in Athens, Greece, and the USA. He learned the true value of life, family, and making choices.

Satan Goes to the Mind Control Convention looks at the role that conspiracy theories play in American life and the current political climate. The book begins at a convention for therapists who uncover “memories” of past lives, extraterrestrials, and government mind control operations.

Alas...the good old days are gone. But not in our hearts - or our memories. That's the amazing thing about the human brain; it has this neat little “memory palace”, where can store all of our most favorite memories - and the palace has this neat little lock on the door that only WE can open. And inside that palace...oh, what memories!

How do you describe success? How do you describe where you're at with your life right now? These questions were one of the first questions I had asked myself that prompted me to start my journey to self improvement, and change my ways of thinking, and stories in this book may resonate with you. It does not mean you have to be in a really tight spot. The purpose of this book is to lightly touch on ideas and concepts that helped me improve my day to day significantly.

When life hands you lemons, you can either make lemonade or lob them like hand grenades at your problems. Nothing is going as Idina Moorfield planned. It’s what happens when magical powers you don’t know you have manifest when you least expect it. Idina needs to make new plans, even if those plans are loosely based on her CO telling her to figure things out. Time to make lemonade. There’s all sorts of tasks Idina and her unit could be doing. Getting them to help out is another issue. Can she figure out how to get them to help her without asking them to help?

Idina Moorfield is a new kind of magical with a dark and twisty lineage. Any other combat engineer in the 82nd Airborne Division would be proud of how far Idina's come, but the visions and voices in her mind are only getting worse. When it affects her work, Idina gets transferred to a new unit—a unit of misfits with their own problems. But sometimes, what seems like the worst move ever, can turn out to be the beginning of something great. Who says outcasts can’t be heroes?

In his book-length essay Spirituality and the Writer, Larson surveys the literary insights of authors old and new who have shaped religious autobiography and spiritual memoir - from Augustine to Thomas Merton, from Peter Matthiessen to Cheryl Strayed. He holds them to an exacting standard: They must render transcendent experience in the writing itself. 

Drawing on the example of post-WWII Britain and looking ahead at America in the 2020s, Jed Esty suggests that becoming a second-place nation is neither disastrous, as alarmists claim, nor avoidable, as optimists insist. Contemporary declinism often masks white nostalgia and perpetuates a conservative longing for Cold War certainty. But the narcissistic lure of "lost greatness" appeals across the political spectrum.

Algorithms—rules written into software—shape key moments in our lives: from who gets hired or admitted to a top public school, to who should go to jail or receive scarce public benefits. Such decisions are both technical and moral. Today, the logic of high stakes software is rarely open to scrutiny, and central moral questions are often left for the technical experts to answer.

In 2020, engineering firm Velentium faced an unprecedented ask: partner with a small medical device company and a very large vehicle manufacturer to increase emergency ventilator production from hundreds per month to thousands per week—in just twenty-eight days.

In The Practice of Folklore: Essays Toward a Theory of Tradition, author Simon J. Bronner works with theories of cultural practice to explain the social and psychological need for tradition in everyday life. Bronner proposes a distinctive “praxic” perspective that will answer the pressing philosophical as well as psychological question of why people enjoy repeating themselves. The significance of the keyword practice, he asserts, is the embodiment of a tension between repetition and variation in human behavior.

Sin, the newest contribution by Gregory Mellema, provides a short and lively summary of what contemporary philosophers are saying about the relationship between the traditional theological category of sin and contemporary philosophical ethics.

Bourbon whiskey is perhaps Kentucky's most distinctive product. Despite bourbon's prominence in the social and economic life of the Bluegrass state, many myths and legends surround its origins. In Kentucky Bourbon, Henry C. Crowgey claims that distilled spirits and pioneer settlement went hand in hand; Isaac Shelby, the state's first governor, was among Kentucky's pioneer distillers. Crowgey traces the drink's history from its beginnings as a cottage industry to steam-based commercial operations in the period just before the Civil War.