Book Description
Playing for Keeps in Stocks and Futures offers traders three winning strategies for trading stocks and futures under any market condition and within any timeframe-from one minute to one month. Tom Bierovic details his newly developed trading strategies-First Prize, R2D2, and Triple Play-and shows you how to integrate them with various technical indicators and analytical techniques to create low-risk, high-reward trading opportunities. Bierovic clearly explains the development of each system, lists the rules, and provides real-world examples from a wide variety of stocks and futures in several timeframes to illustrate how and why each strategy works so well. With these lessons, youll quickly learn how to use Bierovics original strategies to enter, manage, and exit your trades profitably.
This complete guide to stock and futures trading opens with a brief introduction to price swings, impulse waves, corrective waves, and critical points and explains how the extreme and continuous variation in the duration and magnitude of price swings makes it possible for traders to speculate profitably. It also reveals the three components of a complete trading strategy-setups, entries, and exits-and how you should use them when trading with First Prize, R2D2, or Triple Play. Before entering into an in-depth discussion of these three winning trading strategies, Playing for Keeps in Stocks and Futures explains the tools used in them including: breakouts to new highs and lows, directional movement index spread (DMI spread), exponential moving averages (EMAs), Fibonacci retracement zones, Japanese candlestick charts, moving average convergence-divergence (MACD), parabolic stops, trendlines, true range and average true range (ATR).
In explaining his three new trading strategies-First Prize, R2D2, and Triple Play-Bierovic breaks down each strategy into its setup, entry, and exit components and illustrates how to implement each strategy through charts, graphs, and vivid examples from both the stock and futures markets. Most importantly, youll learn the unique qualities of each strategy and understand how the three strategies taken together can profit in any market conditions.(First Prize trades first pullbacks; R2D2 trades subsequent pullbacks; Triple Play trades trend reversals.)Take advantage of the tremendous opportunities offered to you by trading with First Prize, R2D2, and Triple Play. With these three strategies in your trading arsenal, you too will soon be playing for keeps in stocks and futures.
Tom Bierovic, President of the Synergy Trading Group, has been trading stocks and futures successfully since 1971. Tom is also a popular and respected speaker: he has presented highly rated seminars on technical analysis and trading at major conferences throughout the United States and in more than 40 countries on six continents. Futures magazine, Futures World News, and Technical Analysis of Stock & Commodities magazine have all published in-depth interviews with Tom, and he is featured in the book Real People, Real Traders by Ruggiero and Toghraie. For information on products and services offered by the Synergy Trading Group, you can contact Tom by e-mail at tbierovic@aol.com.
Customer Reviews:
Clear and Concrete.......2003-11-19
First off, I'd like to say that for someone who loves technical indicators like the MACD and Parabolic Sar, I really enjoyed this book. Having read many books where technical indicators are simply described on their individual merits, it was wonderful to find a book where the author actually presented some systems in a concrete and clear manner.
I'm sure you'll find this book very clearly written, with the 3 systems clearly illustrated with examples on the entry method along with a few exit methods.
Before explaining his systems, the author presented some quite introductory materials on the technical indicators used - this is good and systematic, and certainly helps the beginner, but if you are an advanced trader with clear ideas of your own trading system, you may not find this book so useful.
Good.......2003-08-16
Not without flaws, but a damn good trading book. The author presents 3 methods, which are probably fairly well known, but to have it clarified and presented with examples certainly would help a trader add another tool to their box. I did notice plenty of varied entries and often vague exits, which may have been a result of curve fitting to the examples. However, it is of a minor concern.
EXECELENT INVESTMENT.......2003-05-02
TOM MADE A VERY HIGH QUAOLITY SMALL AND HONEST BOOK.
HOPE HE MAKES ONE FOR PLAYING FOR KEEPS IN OPTIONS.
Strategies That Work.......2002-04-07
I anxiously awaited the publication of this book since I am always on the lookout for new trading ideas from Tom Bierovic. I first discovered Tom's work at one of the Futures Magazine Trading Seminars where he was a speaker. What caught my eye was the down to earth, solid, and workable trading principles he presented. I was also impressed that he had, for years, been a full time trader for his own account and was willing to share the ideas and systems that he actually used. "Playing for Keeps" is no exception. Tom lays out in detail three trading strategies that can be used in all markets and timeframes. The strategies are presented with numerous examples. I believe that with all of Tom's background in system research and development (he was head of system development for Omega Research and is currently writing a series of articles for Active Trader magazine), the fact that Tom chose these three strategies to present in his book gives me confidence that these strategies will make money if properly applied. (I would have given the book five stars if it had included Easy Language code)
Simple but Good.......2002-04-02
An excellent book. Most books on trading will focus on setups, focusing on entry strategies, whilst skimming over aspects of stop placements, and exits. Worst still, some books will give you setups that are completely untestable with well selected examples. This book is a very thin volume. However despite that, it is one step ahead compared to most books. It actually explains the concepts and mechanics behind three trading plans in precise details. All three ideas are testable. No, they dont always work. Only trading plans with 20/20 hindight do. What it offers is more. It emphasizes the minimal elements that are necessary for anyone in constructing a good trading plan.This is of course obvious. But not obvious enough as otherwise, there wont always be a fixed population of 90% of traders who lose money every year. A good enjoyable read.
Customer Reviews:
Offshore Outsourcing Propaganda.......2006-06-12
After reading this book, I am confused as to its classification. The authors ask you to accept so much of their argument on faith that the book really belongs in the religion section rather than business and economics. This failure is particularly annoying because it is the product of authors who are also teaching staff at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. They obvious attained the educational position due to the relentless progress of diversity rather than any particular knowledge or skills. This does, however, go a long way to explain why the precipitous drop in the intellectual quality of the graduates of their institution has taken place.
Not having any real data does not, however, restrain the author from lecturing, at length, about the many rewards of offshore outsourcing as though they were laws of nature. The boldness reaches a crescendo when the author makes a statement in one chapter and uses that as the basis for an established fact in the next. These "revelations" are punctuated by the complete and total lack of any supporting data. With a wave of the hand, the most egregious and outrageous propositions are made without attempt to support them with data and any questioning of their conclusions briskly brushed away.
Of particularly humorous interest is the author's tactic of creating an example that perfectly illustrates the point he is trying to make and passes that off as a sole-scenario case study that proves his point. The use of actual case studies merely continues the established procedure of taking selected events from selected cases and using them to support broad, sweeping notions of the insanity of offshore outsourcing. Not even the slightest attempt is make to introduce any of the very many risks involved in the process or to explain why some firms, having tried offshore outsourcing to India, returned home or, like Apply Computer most recently, abandoned the idea altogether.
This book is yet another Indian propaganda tome which will doubtless be used to support countless offshore outsourcing proposals and presented to the intended victims as "fact." The truly unfathomable characteristic of this debate is the total absence (or unwillingness of the proponents to produce) facts. Theory, hypothesis and pure conjecture are presented as irrefutable fact and, having learned their perverted lessons from the civil rights movement, have labeled any attempt to apply a metric to their claims "racist" and those who dare to question their conclusions, dolts doomed to economic tar pits.
The terrible shame of all this is that so very many people, both here and overseas, are going to pay (or are paying) such a heavy price because business leaders have abdicated their responsibility to consider their actions and have allowed a handful of powerful, already global, companies to set the pace of development. They have grabbed at offshore outsourcing as their salvation in lieu of making a quality product at a reasonable cost that consumers actually want to buy.
A few of the chapters are worth a read.......2006-04-17
A plethora of books on offshore outsourcing have been released in the last two years, periodically I take a look at them looking for a great handbook for companies looking to get started offshoring. The authors of Offshore Outsourcing - Path to New Efficiencies in IT and Business Processes, start defining the reasoning behind offshoring. Probably anyone picking up this book will have decided that offshoring is necessary. Chapter 2 takes a good look at the costs of offshoring and more specifically the costs beyond labor. Most vendors stick to the labor differential so this is a good breakdown of the other costs involved including recurring costs in management and control and the one time costs of determining what to offshore in the first place.
Chapter 3 looks at the short-sighted strategy of not offshoring. The authors spend quite a bit of time talking about the costs of not offshoring; being left behind. It will not be possible to move from a fixed to a variable cost structure, running the risk of under-using capital resources during a slowdown, and the inability to ramp up quickly enough when the need arises (intermittent needs for professional services or field engineers - those that configure per customer requirements may not always be used if sales are not high enough).
To illustrate the costs to companies not outsourcing, they provided two examples: an R&D Tale and a tale from an insurance company. While examples would normally be a good thing, both examples make the assumption that onshore management and processes cannot be executed (for reasons other than high cost of labor) and offshore processes execute perfectly. This is a bad assumption even if you are dealing with companies certified at CMM level 5.
Chapter 4 reviews the offshore movement. According to the authors, offshore outsourcing began only in 1994 with the offshoring of information technology. I would say that that is debatable. Offshore outsourcing of information technology started as early as the 70's, with some of the larger companies and overall offshore outsourcing has been around for centuries. The authors try to put a timeline to the progression from onshore to offshore outsourcing, the exact years they use are debatable, but you will get the idea.
The beneficial part of this chapter for some readers is that in addition to look at the various aspects of IT outsourcing; e-commerce work, application maintenance outsourcing, etc., they also go in to human resources outsourcing, business process outsourcing, and contact center outsourcing - both inbound and outbound calls. Some of these areas, a reader, may be unaware that it is possible to outsource these activities.
Chapters six and seven define the largest individual companies involved in the market and the most widely used offshore location, India. With the exception of two companies, all mentioned were primarily Indian based. Also only two multi-national firms, EDS and IBM were mentioned, nothing, for example, on Accenture in India and the Czech Republic. Good stats were provided on the countries discussed; India, Russia, China and the Philippines. However, even though this book was published only in 2004, more updated information can be found via articles online.
Chapter 8 finally gets in to the meat of offshoring and defines what they consider to be the four phases of offshoring:
1. Finding a champion to sell the idea of outsourcing.
2. Identifying and prioritizing the processes to be outsourced.
3. Finding an offshore vendor.
4. Executing the contract.
Phase 1 is defined as having someone in top management sell the idea. If they are not on board, it will not get pushed throughout the company. I would add to this that:
1. If top management changes and they are not believers of offshoring, offshoring can change in an instant. Processes can be brought back in house.
2. If top management does not get others on board, offshoring is going no where. For example if top management cannot get the VP of engineering on board with offshoring, either through motivation through bonuses for cost cutting measures or a push to get more product functionality out sooner so the company can get revenue sooner, then offshoring software development will go nowhere as well. The VP of engineering may have had bad experiences before or he/she may not want to deal with the intricacies of distributed development. Top management has to be able to sell their idea internally and see that it gets in place and works. Expecting the vendor to sell the idea internally will not get you too far.
Phase 2 is identifying and prioritizing processes to be outsourced. This is a key issue. One item I believe is missing in their process is to look at what type of a company you are. It seems they are writing the book only for the large corporations, not for small and medium sized businesses which can also benefit from offshore outsourcing. For example on page 93 the authors refer to a typical outsourcing agreement lasting 7 to 10 years, clearly these are the large IT management contracts undertaken by the larger firms. If a firm is smaller, this is not the case, they will be able to change more frequently, or by going with a smaller vendor, be able to influence their vendor much more.
A great suggestion from the author is that an organization should determine its immediate and medium-term tactical goals. Including a chart here would have been helpful.
Under phase 3, finding an offshore vendor, I could find nothing that was specific to offshore outsourcing versus standard outsourcing contracts. In any outsourcing contract, even within the US a company should still be interested in the use of freelancers (contractors), the number of part-time people, how the vendor will protect your assets, how they protect against industrial espionage, intrusion, etc.
The authors provide a good section, albeit only a page and a half, on meeting the challenges of offshoring.
1. Losing control over a process. Look at the software that is being written; define quality measures for any BPO processes.
2. Integrating business processes, direct reporting between vendor management and the company's management.
3. If a company does not have a set of repeatable processes; clear directions, specs, objectives, time frames, quality level and communications process.
4. Create accurate, clear and concise specs.
5. Build-and-release management. Define how you will handle configuration management, defect tracking and management, and release control and how this will be replicated offshore.
6. Cross-border communication. How will your company deal with any cultural issues and distance communication?
7. Geopolitical stability. How will your company manage this potential risk?
The list of challenges is good, the readers would be better served if the authors had expanded on how a company deals with these issues in more detail.
Chapter 9 on Offshoring and shifting jobs is an interesting chapter. It is not clear the purpose of this chapter. It almost seems like we should feel bad that the process a company has to go through to get worker in the US on an H1B visa is so difficult. Having hired workers from Russia and the US to work in Ukraine, I do not think that the process to get an H1B visa is any more complicate than what Ukraine makes a company go through to hire a foreign worker. The authors argue that it would be better to bring the foreign workers here, better because they will pay taxes and spend money here. But this seems to go against the very premise of the book which is to help companies explore the benefits of offshore outsourcing.
Chapter 10 is attempting to point the US towards possible trade barriers that could be created on the basis of educational subsidies. They mention that US education has to be paid for and is quite expensive, especially in highly specialized fields such as software engineering. This is somewhat strange. Certainly there are a high number of private universities in the US, but there are also many state schools with excellent reputations for their computer science and engineering programs, where on average a student pays for only 24% of the cost of their education, the rest is paid for by tax payers. In California, a resident can attend the University of California Berkeley or San Louis Obisbo, and have the state (or the tax payers) pay $20,000 per year towards their education, the student would pay approximately $5000 per year.
To a company looking in to how they get started offshoring for the first time, there are three relevant chapters in this book in addition to the case studies. Chapter 2 for its detailing of the total costs involved in offshoring, Chapter 4 for the types of activities which a company can offshore and Chapter 8 for the phases of offshoring and the challenges. The other chapters would be interesting only of the reader has never read anything about offshore outsourcing.
VERY VERY VERY GOOD!!!.......2005-11-15
This was a great book and it had great info. I loved reading it. It broadens the mind completely. How could someone not be happy with the data that this book gives.
Remember the beanie baby fad?.......2004-12-04
Just because something is popular doesn't make it a good idea. My firm outsourced half our processes and we lost our shirts. The Indians simply aren't familiar enough with colloquial English to talk to Americans. They're churning out IT people so quick that they're ignoring quality. And their paralegals have no idea what confidentiality means. Check out the cons of offshoring by doing a thorough web search. And don't fall for this book's shell game.
A manual for bankruptcy.......2004-12-02
None of these books are telling the readers the true costs of outsourcing. Since we outsourced, our systems have been hacked into seven times by anti-outsourcing nuts, customer after customer has complained about the Indian call center workers, and last week my Mercedes was stolen from my garage. There was a note tacked to the front door that said "you outsourced American jobs, now we've outsourced your ride." These people are serious and they're crazy!
Average customer rating:
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Book Description
From anthrax to botulism, from smallpox to Ebola, the threat of biological destruction is rapidly overtaking our collective fear of atomic weaponry. This riveting narrative traces America's own covert biological weapons program from its origins in World War II to its abrupt cancellation in 1969. In light of America's increasing surveillance and condemnation of foreign biological weapons programs, this exposeacute; of America's own dangerous Cold War secret is both fascinating and shocking. The project, at its peak, employed 5,000 people and tested pathogens on 2,000 live human volunteers; conducted open-air tests on American soil; sprayed our cities with bacterial aerosols; and stockpiled millions of bacterial bombs for instant deployment. Yet, surprisingly, almost nothing has been published about this project until now. This is the first book to expose the true story of America's secret program to create biological weapons of mass destruction.
Customer Reviews:
The Biology of Doom.......2005-09-24
This book seems more like a review of records then adding anymore info.
I doubt if any more research has gone in to this book then average high school graduate goes through.
I felt it was a waste of time and money
Pankaj
Well researched, but ends with a unwarranted confidence.......2003-09-24
This is a good book for facts. Unfortunately, it is way out of date. Considering how fast technology is moving, what would lead someone to look back 20 years in the past and use that, as-is, for projecting forward?
Reality is going to bite us, hard.
SCARY!.......2002-05-08
The book was an awesome overview of the American, Russian and British programs of biological weapons. While the Americans and the British stuck to a treaty signed in the 1970's to stop the production of biological weapons, the Russian's only increased their production. And what a production they had! Almost unrealistic in its scope.
This book is important in its insight into the biological weapons programs of "the big three" and into the possible capabilities of what these programs could do. Information on the early projects at Ft. Dietrick, Maryland were very illuminating and lit a fire for me to read some more on this subject.
Overall, an exceptional book, important to read not only because of what was done, but what could be done with the remnants of what is left. Where did all the former Soviet scientists go? To the Middle East? Read this book - open your eyes!
The elephant laboured mightily and brought forth... a vole.......2001-10-31
The editorial review in the amazon.com entry for Ed Regis's "Biology of Doom" refers to a Herculean effort on the author's part to mine thousands of pages of previously-classified material on biological warfare research in Germany and Japan from the massive archives on the subject maintained in the United States and elsewhere as though merely the exertion were sure of yielding new insights on the subject... wish it were so, but it isn't.
"Biology of Doom" is another book on biological warfare, on a bookshelf already groaning with them. The "teaser" - the premise: that there is something especially sinister about the involvement of the governments of the world to develop diseases to be sued as weapons in order to accomplish national goals beyond the grasp of conventional armed force and threats-and-blandishments diplomacy, remains a true tease... because there still isn't anything worse about biological warfare than what we already know.
And what we already know, that Japan's infamous military germ warfare research Unit 731 and other Axis war criminal doctors were spared hanging for war crimes and murder by an American germ warfare agency greedy for the masses of data compiled by Japanese researchers, is undoubtedly terrible. It's also not news.
As far back as the early 1980s writers such as Sterling Seagrave ("Yellow Rain") have been alluding to this work, and for quite a long time since then an unsophisticated reader could have gotten the impression that the ONLY work done on biological and chemical warfare was being done at Fort Detrick, Porton Down and the Dugway Proving Ground - in other words, by America, Great Britain and their NATO allies - when the sorry fact was that the defensive work done at those installations was dwarfed by the sheer magnitude of the treaty-breaking biological warfare industry run by the Soviets while they slandered us lustily.
Regis does do respectable work in allowing us to visualize the monsters of Unit 731 coldly testing every killer germ and fungus imaginable to them on innocent men, women, and children... unfortunately, while Regis may have succeeded in drawing some previously undrawn dots in on the whole nasty chiaroscuro of military BW, he gives us no new or startling images that other writers had not already revealed to us.
In justice, Dr. Regis does draw more attention in his book to the Whitecoats, the brave conscientious objectors who during World War II volunteered to be exposed to biological warfare agents so that their effects might be closely monitored in the human model, and this is certainly a worthwhile addition to the popular literature on the history of biological warfare. Other parts of his book dealing with the history of Fort Detrick, such as the story of the "8-ball" enclosure, are fascinating but again have been covered by other writers in the popular literature (even in one or two popular-audience science-fiction novels written during the 1970s).
Certainly I share Regis' outrage about the callousness with which innocent blood was shed by the bioweaponeers of several countries, and at how so much indisputable evidence of so many murders comitted by the defeated countries of World War II in the name of better, deadlier weapons of war was kicked under the rug by the victors of that same war in their lust to learn all they could about that same obscene research... what Regis and too many of the other chroniclers of biological warfare research have failed to do is to capture the imagination of the world and vividly demonstrate the vast human tragedy of this research so that the public might be motivated to prevent the wrongs they describe from recurring.
And unfortunately, better research just doesn't make a better book, not by itself, without some effective means of making the reader care about what was uncovered. I wish I could reward all of Dr. Regis's hard work with better than an average rating, but he didn't give us better than an average book. The weakness of amazon.com's rating system is that I can't give half-points, because the book probably is above average, but I cannot honestly award a "4" to this book.
The Biology of Doom - aaaaarrrgh!.......2001-01-29
I was fascinated from this book from the moment I picked it up: Ed Regis has the knack of being able to immerse his reader so deeply in the moment that it is a wrench to put it down. I am a practising microbiologist with a morbid fascination with biological weaponry and nasty zoonoses; this book certainly informed me perhaps better than I needed to be about things I had only previously read about at third- or fourth-hand, or heard as apocryphal anecdotes.
The only things I could fault in this book are that a) it is too short; b) it does not cover some of the more interesting recent biowar developments, such as Iraq's and South Africa's ventures into the field (but see a).
Apart from this, it is a fascinating, detailed and scholarly account of one of the darker areas of recent scientific history. It sits happily on my shelf next to his "Virus Ground Zero : Stalking the Killer Viruses With the Center for Disease Control", which I consider a masterwork (but then, I love Ebola...).
Amazon.com
Three reporters from The New York Times survey the recent history of biological weapons and sound an alarm about the coming threat of the "poor man's hydrogen bomb." Germs begins ominously enough, recounting the chilling attack by the followers of the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in 1984 on the Dalles, Oregon--no one died, but nearly 1,000 were infected with a strain of salmonella that the cult had legally obtained, then cultured and distributed.
While the U.S. maintained an active "bugs and gas" program in the '50s and early '60s, bio-weapons were effectively pulled off this country's agenda in 1972 when countries around the world, led by the United States, forswore development of such weapons at the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The issue reemerged in the early '90s thanks to Saddam Hussein and revelations of the clandestine and massive buildup of bio-weapons in remote corners of the Soviet Union. The book's description of the Soviet program is horrific. At its peak the program employed thousands of scientists, developing bioengineered pathogens as well as producing hundreds of tons of plague, anthrax, and smallpox annually. The authors conclude that while a biological attack against the United States is not necessarily inevitable, the danger of bio-weapons is too real to be ignored. Well-researched and documented, this book will not disappoint readers looking for a reliable and sober resource on the topic. --Harry C. Edwards
Book Description
In the wake of the anthrax letters following the attacks on the World Trade Center, Americans have begun to grapple with two difficult truths: that there is no terrorist threat more horrifying -- and less understood -- than germ warfare, and that it would take very little to mount a devastating attack on American soil. In Germs, three veteran reporters draw on top sources inside and outside the U.S. government to lay bare Washington's secret strategies for combating this deadly threat.
Featuring an inside look at how germ warfare has been waged throughout history and what form its future might take (and in whose hands), Germs reads like a gripping detective story told by fascinating key figures: American and Soviet medical specialists who once made germ weapons but now fight their spread, FBI agents who track Islamic radicals, the Iraqis who built Saddam Hussein's secret arsenal, spies who travel the world collecting lethal microbes, and scientists who see ominous developments on the horizon. With clear scientific explanations and harrowing insights, Germs is a masterfully written -- and timely -- work of investigative journalism.
Customer Reviews:
The evil man does!.......2007-07-26
My conclusion after reading this book: How evil man is! It seems that all what mankind is really concerned about is how to destroy itself by the cruelest, most wicked and gruesome ways possible. The atomic bomb was not enough to satisfy man's craving for destruction. Newer means of killing one's adversaries had to be created. Germs, bacteria, and viruses could fulfill man's desire for gruesome killings - for now!
The book starts in 1984 Dalles, Oregon, when an Indian sect, the Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh, poisons the residents with salmonella. No one died, but nearly 1,000 were infected with a strain of salmonella that the sect had legally obtained, then cultured and distributed by spraying it on the food of the unsuspecting residents. The goal of the sect was to incapacitate the residents in order to keep them home and unable to vote in the coming elections! The authors show how easy it is for anyone to acquire and then scatter biological agents.
The authors then describe other instances when biological agents were used, such as the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attacks on a Tokyo subway. They also trace the history of biological warfare, starting from World War II to the present.
The authors also show how politics play a role in this biological warfare. Governments trick each other, making the other believe they have no biological weapons when in fact they do! They sign treaties between each other banning the culture of biological agents, but secretly break those treaties. The authors explain the biological agents that governments have cultured for warfare (such as Anthrax, and Ebola). They also make us aware that many scientists around the globe (especially in the former Soviet Union) who worked on biological warfare can now be easily recruited by other countries such as Iran and North Korea. The threat of biological warfare is still rising, according to the authors.
Furthermore, they argue, germ warfare is suited to unconventional attacks by terrorists. Germs can kill as many people as atomic bombs, are more discreet to manufacture, transport, and use on targets. They also give time for the terrorist to escape (i.e. leave the country).
The question that will linger on your mind at the completion of the book is whether doomsday will be a result of a massive nuclear war, of microscopic biological agents, or of as now an undiscovered and more horrific weapon!
A lot of it rings true in my experience.......2007-05-31
There are a lot of people who want to discredit the entire book for one reason or another, and they're just plain wrong. In the early 90's, I was an Army infantry officer; I had gone through the army's NBC school (Nuclear, Biological, Chemical), served as my unit's NBC officer, and did a lot of additional reading on these topics, including reading this book. Almost everything I read in this book rings true. The average American would be smart to read this book (although most Americans are too lazy, too self-absorbed in Reality TV, and too stupid to be able to comprehend the highly-technical information in the book) and to be aware that biochemical weapons are very enticing to terrorists.
Sick.......2006-03-08
"While the U.S. maintained an active "bugs and gas" program in the '50s and early '60s, bio-weapons were effectively pulled off this country's agenda in 1972 when countries around the world, led by the United States, forswore development of such weapons at the Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention. The issue reemerged in the early '90s thanks to Saddam Hussein and revelations of the clandestine and massive buildup of bio-weapons in remote corners of the Soviet Union." - Harry Edwards
When Bush 2.0 resisted renewal of a defunct ABM treaty with the USSR, a defunct country, liberal complainers slammed his disrespect for the sacredness of words on paper. Germs, the good book by Times guys & Judith Miller, discloses the aftermath of another sadred treaty with the USSR, the one signed by Nixon & Brezhnev that outlawed development of WBD, weapons of biological destruction.
Nixon and the United States honored that treaty. Brezhnev and the USSR broke it, even after the USSR broke up. Ken Alibek, recent defector from Russia's recent Biopreparat bio-terror program, demonstrated that bad stuff happened back in the USSR and the ex-USSR for at least twenty years after the Reds promised to play well with others & to be nice. Judith Miller, recent star of the Plame Name Blame Game, was certain that residual bugs from Russian germ factories were being stored by Saddam Hussein. Maybe. Maybe it's now in Syria, or maybe Miller got bad intel, Chalabi's revenge.
The good news is that the bio-weapons and poison gas that Saddam apparently didn't have in 2003 were weapons that weren't available for use against liberating and/or invading Americans. The bad news is that, when Americans could not find the weapons that were not used against them, the liberation of Iraq looked to the world like unprovoked aggression and invasion. C'est le guerre.
Ms. Miller and I go way back, back before Iraq. I read this book during our interminable rush to war; then I read Miller's front-page refutations of the anti-war posture of the anti-war Jayson-Blair Times. The Times prominently printed Miller's refutations of its own bias, a bias that now looks prescient while Miller, Bush, Chalabi, and Chalabi's war look bad. C'est le vie.
Still, because germs are with us always, Germs is worth your money and time. Miller's story about the Bhagwan's bio-terror attack on Oregon -- probably the first bio attack on America; forget about bogus apocryphal reports of smallpox-infested blankets delivered to Indians -- is necessary & sufficient reason for reading this book.
Not Worried About Nukes Anymore .......2006-02-19
Judith Miller et al. have successfully illustrated that the fear of nuclear weapons or terrorist-planned "dirty bomb" attacks are the least of our worries. Rather, the danger lies in microbes and human biology.
At the height of the Cold War, Soviet and American scientists generated enough biological and viral agents to kill the inhabitants of the Earth many times over. The problem emerging now is where have all these bio and viral weapons gone, and perhaps more important, where have the scientists gone?
Miller et al. argue the simplicity of scientific techniques necessary for creating bio and viral weapons makes them a prime device for terror. Miller and others site a number of examples to illustrate the ease with which a bio attack is possible. For example, the Aum Shinrikyo sarin attacks on a Tokyo subway and a domestic attack of salmonella poisoning in Oregon were both committed with homemade agents. However, these attacks pale in comparison to what could happen. With the virulence of agents magnified to a nearly unfathomable level, if even a small amount of toxins escaped from their "safe" containers stored around the world, the death toll would be horrendous. Miller et al. have brought to light the horrible possibilities of bio or chemical weapons proliferation, and I, for one, am in agreement.
Great Read But Where Are the WMD She Claims in the Book?.......2005-10-21
I read this book in 2002 way before the Iraq invasion seemed probable. After reading it (and believing that I was reading thorough reporting) I supported going after the WMD in Iraq. However, now that we've seen how Judy can manipulate facts and her proven track record with no WMD found in Iraq I strongly suggest you read this book with a skepticism to truthfulness.
Some of the non-Iraq WMD reporting was very interesting and I learned a bit from that, but how do I separate fact from fiction? As a result of being 100% wrong in her reporting and Judy's recent comments, "the analysts, the experts and the journalists who covered them -- we were all wrong," which is not true (read John MacArthur, Ian Williams and Joby Warrick), I think this book loses its credibility. You may want to read it just to attempt to discern fact v. fiction.
Customer Reviews:
"A Treatise on Biological Warfare".......2007-09-10
"Germs: Biological Weapons & America's Secret War," J. Miller, Engelberg & Broad. Simon & Schuster 2001, NY. ISBN: 0-684-87158-0, HC 382 pgs., which includes Index 12 pgs., Notes 44 pgs., Biblio. 4 pgs., 6.5" x 9.5"
All three authors are accomplished, active journalist correspondents (NY Times & Times) who write using well-researched data of the scope & depth of biological research warfare carried out, mostly secretively, by world powers including the Soviets, USA, Iran and Iraq.
"Germs" opens with a desription of how an Oregon cult of Rajneeshees in 1984 deliberately placed cultured Salmonella bacteria in food to poison hundreds (751) of people in an Oregon power grab to take over a county government. They were caught & convicted.
Subsequent chapters are fairly technical, but compelling, on the details of the R & D by the US & its CIA of chemical & biological germ warfare efforts on colossal scales including methods for delivery, dispersal & protection of military using (both cultured normal and genetically altered) bacteria, viruses, & rickettsia: this included tularemia (plague), TB, smallpox, botulism, Valley fever, encephalitis (VEE) organisms and food-poisonings, snake venoms, ricin, etc. The contributing expertise of genetist Joshua Lederberg and the dismal role played by President William Jefferson Clinton during the Monica Lewinsky affair is discussed in detail. All in all, "Germs" is an unsettling read, and the book ends just prior to the 2nd. attack on the Twin-Towers.
"Germs" highlights the unpreparedness of the United States to deal adequately with any major catastrophe, documented by failures in several mock disasters including the May 17, 2000 Denver, "Operation TopOff." The book also details the 1999 misdiagnosis and ineptness of the CDC in finding the cause of the mysterious human and bird cases of encephalitis in Queens, NY - first citing St. Louis Encephalitis (SLE) - but later discovering it to be a West Nile virus and learning it could be spread sans mosquito vector. If you must know where millions, nay billions, of US tax dollars are spent, read "Germs". This is non-fiction at its finest and at its scariest.
Average customer rating:
- Kid's guide to details about germs in their own terms!
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Germs: Biological Weapons and America's Secret War (Gross But True)
Luann Colombo
Manufacturer: Little Simon
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Hardcover
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ASIN: 068981495X |
Customer Reviews:
Kid's guide to details about germs in their own terms!.......2000-04-14
This is the perfect book for the budding scientist in your home. It mentions words like farts, zits, scabs and sweaty, stinky feet and then provides scientific explanations and illustrations for how each happen. Illustrations and the germ growing kit are all kid appropriate and appealing! Guaranteed to be gross and not something to read before meal time!
Average customer rating:
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Biowar Stories. (Biology).: An article from: American Scientist
Manufacturer: Sigma Xi, The Scientific Research Society
ProductGroup: Book
Binding: Digital
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ASIN: B0008EBZ02
Release Date: 2005-07-29 |
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