Looking for a quick read to make that morning commute less dull? Want a relaxing read by the pool? Or something to read at home on those cold winter evenings? How about all that for FREE?Eat my shorts is an award winning collection of short fiction. 150 pages of horror, terror, mystery, suspense, romance and pure comedy await you dear reader. Vampires, Big Game Hunters, Intergalactic smugglers, Escaped murderers, Village Idiots and curious children are wait...

Dean Baker, codirector of the Center for Economic and Policy Research recounts the strategies used by the country’s top economic policymakers to conceal their failure to recognize the housing bubble or take steps to rein it in before it grew to unprecedented levels, resulting in the loss of millions of jobs, homes, and the life savings of tens of millions of people. He quashes dire warnings of looming rampant inflation and spiraling debt with solid historic evidence to the contrary—evidenc...

School reunions can be tough, nobody wants to look like a failure. But when you lose your girlfriend (to an odious, but very good looking kick-boxer) and then your IT job (With the world’s worst Stationary supplier) in quick succession, a school reunion is the last thing you need.Press-ganged by his flatmates, Craig and Melissa, and with the sage-like advice of ‘Dirty’ Barry (A guy whose chat-up line is Go ahead, make my day!), Evan takes the plunge into the world of online ...

Compiled by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the CPI is used to index Social Security payments and many other federal programs, as well as to adjust tax brackets. Today, the accuracy of the CPI is being hotly debated, particularly in light of the Boskin Commission report that concluded in December 1996 that the CPI overstates inflation by 1.1%. If accepted and applied in the formulation of economic policy, the report would have major implications for balancing the federal budget. It would h...

While most people intuitively know that low unemployment is important to job seekers, they may not realize that high levels of employment actually would make an enormous difference in the lives of large segments of the workforce who already have jobs. Particularly in an era of historically high wage and income inequality, many in the workforce depend on full employment labor markets, and the bargaining power it provides, to secure a fair share of the economy's growth. For the bottom third ...

A leading economist's exploration of what our economic arrangements might look like if we applied basic principles without ideological blinders.There is nothing wrong with economics, Dean Baker contends, but economists routinely ignore their own principles when it comes to economic policy. What would policy look like if we took basic principles of mainstream economics seriously and applied them consistently? In the debate over regulation, for example, Baker—one of ...

Images of killer robots are the stuff of science fiction – but also, increasingly, of scientific fact on the battlefield. Should we be worried, or is this a normal development in the technology of war?In this accessible volume ethicist Deane Baker cuts through the confusion over whether lethal autonomous weapons – so-called killer robots – should be banned. Setting aside unhelpful analogies taken from science fiction, Baker looks instead to our understanding of mercenaries (the met...

They say everyone has a book inside them; well Rick Bateman has a whole library bursting to get out!Told in amusing style, through letters, emails and diary entries, Rick quits his lucrative sales job to devote his daylight hours to writing The Great Novel.But as the weeks go by and the rejection letters start flooding in, Rick's ideas become ever more desperate, ridiculous and increasingly plagiaristic.Losing the Plot asks the questions:Does persistence...

The field of military ethics has generally been attentive to emerging trends in modern warfare. Cyber, robotics and AI, for example, have inspired an abundant and flourishing literature. One trend, however, has been largely overlooked: the emergence of special operations as a prominent instrument of statecraft. Drawing extensively on historical cases and first-hand experience, the authors of this book call attention to qualities inherent in special operations – and special operators – that...

This book debates competing approaches to ethical decision-making for members of the armed forces of liberal democratic states.In this volume, four prominent thinkers propose and debate competing approaches to ethical decision-making for military personnel. Deane-Peter Baker presents and expounds the ‘Ethical Triangulation’ model, an ethical decision-making method he has employed through much of his career as an applied military ethicist. Rufus Black advocates for a natural law-bas...

The deadly May 31, 2010 Gaza flotilla incident has been misunderstood. This book explores the incident in more detail than mainstream media coverage has allowed-explaining the background, key players, and the incident itself-enriched by the authors having had unique access to senior Israeli officials in the immediate aftermath of the event. The incident is a microcosm of the struggle between terrorism and democratic societies, and raises a number of legal, ethical, and strategic political ...

Citizen Killings: Liberalism, State Policy and Moral Risk offers a ground breaking systematic approach to formulating ethical public policy on all forms of 'citizen killings', which include killing in self-defence, abortion, infanticide, assisted suicide, euthanasia and killings carried out by private military contractors and so-called 'foreign fighters'.Where most approaches to these issues begin with the assumptions of some or other general approach to ethics, Deane-Pete...