Minstrel’s Alley Sees Its Book, The Guys Who Spied for China, Precursor to Recent Chinese Espionage Activities

Minstrel’s Alley recently reduced the price of its eBook of The Guys Who Spied for China, written by Gordon Basichis. The Los Angeles based media group reduced the price so that readers may obtain a better sense of Chinese espionage practices and the pervasive tensions that these activities have created between the United States and China.

Minstrel’s Alley Publisher, M.J. Hammond explained that the recent case, reported in the Washington Post, where a Chinese citizen was recently sentenced for stealing classified information regarding drone and missile technology, further reinforces the public need to read its book. In the most recent case, the convicted spy stole thousands of documents detailing how drones and missiles can be operated without any satellite guidance.

“We recently reduced the eBook pricing on The Guys Who Spied for China so readers could glean a better understanding of Chinese espionage operations in the United States,” said Hammond. “Author Gordon Basichis first wrote his novel about Chinese spy networks that were active in the close of the twentieth century. The book is still as relevant as when it was first published in 2009.

All of its products are manufactured as per different safety standards in order to maintain proper safety during the robertrobb.com buy cialis in india heavy lifting works. Still others as a way to ease out daily stress and for some it is just prescription levitra like that. Moreover, it viagra pills for women is more difficult to retain information when you are depressed.”? Hypothyroidism – The inadequate functioning of the brain. This change, accompanied by the production and availability of a number of cancers has been vastly improved. http://robertrobb.com/stimulus-isnt-the-coronavirus-economic-cure/ brand cialis price “The Guys Who Spied for China is a roman a clef,” said Hammond. “But the novel is based on Basichis’ offbeat experiences in working to uncover Chinese Espionage Networks in the United States. Gordon Basichis narrates how it all began and the attempts that were made to suppress Chinese spying efforts in the United States. “This is not your typical spy novel,” said Hammond. “It is a quirky and intimate novel that is often darkly humorous. It is character based and offers a unique perspective. Women enjoy reading it as well as men. Some of our best feedback has been from women.

 

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Invaluable Websites Where You Can Educate Yourself for Free

 

——-: Sites To Educate Yourself for Free

 

 

Subject: Sites To Educate Yourself for Free

 

 

 

 

Science and Health

§  MIT OpenCourseWare – MIT OpenCourseWare is a free web-based publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

§  Tufts OpenCourseWare – Tufts OpenCourseWare is part of a new educational movement initiated by MIT that provides free access to course content for everyone online.  Tufts’ course offerings demonstrate the University’s strength in the life sciences in addition to its multidisciplinary approach, international perspective and underlying ethic of service to its local, national and international communities.

§  HowStuffWorks Science – More scientific lessons and explanations than you could sort through in an entire year.

§  Harvard Medical School Open Courseware – The mission of the Harvard Medical School Open Courseware Initiative is to exchange knowledge from the Harvard community of scholars to other academic institutions, prospective students, and the general public.

§  Khan Academy – Over 1200 videos lessons covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, and biology.

§  Open Yale Courses – Open Yale Courses provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the internet.  The courses span the full range of liberal arts disciplines, including humanities, social sciences, and physical and biological sciences.

§  webcast.berkeley – Every semester, UC Berkeley webcasts select courses and events for on-demand viewing via the Internet.  webcast.berkeley course lectures are provided as a study resource for both students and the public.

§  UC San Diego Podcast Lectures – UCSD’s podcasting service was established for instructional use to benefit our students.  Podcasts are taken down at the end of every quarter (10 weeks Fall-Spring and 5 weeks in the summer).  If you’re enjoying a podcast, be sure to subscribe and download the lectures.  Once the podcast has been taken offline, faculty rarely approve their reposting.

§  Johns Hopkins OpenCourseWare – The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health’s OpenCourseWare project provides access to content of the School’s most popular courses. As challenges to the world’s health escalate daily, the School feels a moral imperative to provide equal and open access to information and knowledge about the obstacles to the public’s health and their potential solutions.

§  Carnegie Mellon Open Learning Initiative – No instructors, no credits, no charge.  Use these self-guiding Carnegie Mellon materials and activities to learn at your own pace.

§  Utah State OpenCourseWare – Utah State OpenCourseWare is a collection of educational material used in our formal campus courses, and seeks to provide people around the world with an opportunity to access high quality learning opportunities.

§  AMSER – AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.

§  Wolfram Demonstrations Project – Wolfram brings computational exploration to the widest possible audience, open-code resource that uses dynamic computation to illuminate concepts.  Free player runs all demos and videos.

§  The Science Forum – A very active scientific discussion and debate forum.

§  Free Science and Video Lectures Online! – A nice collection of video lectures and lessons on science and philosophy.

§  Science.gov – Science.gov searches over 42 databases and over 2000 selected websites from 14 federal agencies, offering 200 million pages of authoritative U.S. government science information including research and development results.

§  The National Science Digital Library – NSDL is the Nation’s online library for education and research in Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics.

§  EnviroLink Network–  A  non-profit organization, grassroots online community uniting organizations and volunteers around the world.  Up-to-date environmental information and news.

§  Geology.com – Information about geology and earth science to visitors without charge: Articles, News, Maps, Satellite Images, Dictionary, etc.

§  Scitable – A free science library and personal learning tool that currently concentrates on genetics, the study of evolution, variation, and the rich complexity of living organisms.  The site also expects to expand into other topics of learning and education.

§  LearningScience.org – A free open learning community for sharing newer and emerging tools to teach science.

Business and Money

§  MIT Sloan School of Management – MIT Sloan is a world-class business school long renowned for thought leadership and the ability to successfully partner theory and practice.  This is a subsection of the larger MIT OpenCourseWare site.

§  Investopedia Financial Investing Tutorials – A plethora of detailed lessons on money management and investing.

§  U.S. Small Business Administration Training Network – The Small Business Administration has one of the best selections of business courses on the web. Topics include everything from starting a business and business management to government contracting and international trade. Most courses take only 30 minutes to complete.

§  VideoLectures.NET (Business) – A free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.

§  My Own Business, Inc. – Offers a free online business administration course that would be beneficial to new managers and to anyone who is interested in starting a business. This comprehensive course is split up into 16 sessions covering topics like business plans, accounting, marketing, insurance, e-commerce and international trade.

§  UC Irvine OpenCourseWare (Business) – Rapidly with the addition of nearly 10 new courses every month. Many of our OCW offerings are directed at working adults seeking continuing education, with the option to enroll in instructor-led, for-credit courses, related to the OCW content.

§  Kutztown University of Pennsylvania – The Kutztown University of Pennsylvania’s Small Business Development Center offers more than 80 free business courses online. Kutztown’s courses are individualized and self-paced. Many of the courses feature high-end graphics, interactive case studies and audio streams.

§  Boston College Front Row (Business) – Boston College Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

§  Financial Management Training Center – The Financial Management Training Center provides several free downloadable business courses for people who need to learn the finer points of financial management. All courses offered can be taken online; courses include full exams as well as evaluation forms for people seeking Continuing Professional Education (CPE) credits.

§  The Free Nonprofit Micro-eMBA – Free Management Library’s Free Nonprofit Micro-eMBA Program is an especially great resource for students wishing to learn more about nonprofit management, but most of the lessons also apply to general business management. Completion of this program will not result in an MBA degree, but enrollment is free and the material is well structured.

§  Bookboon Free Business e-books – Hundreds of free business books online in PDF format.

§  TheStreet University – If you’re just starting out as a stock and bond investor or need a refresher’s course, this is the place to learn what you need to know.

History and World Culture

§  University of Washington’s OpenUW – Explore a variety of learning in several free history-centric online courses from the University of Washington.

§  Notre Dame OpenCourseWare – Notre Dame OCW is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

§  Bio’s Best – Biography.com’s most popular biographies on notable historical figures.

§  UC Irvine OpenCourseWare (Social Science) – Rapidly with the addition of nearly 10 new courses every month. Many of our OCW offerings are directed at working adults seeking continuing education, with the option to enroll in instructor-led, for-credit courses, related to the OCW content.

§  Boston College Front Row (History) – Boston College Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

§  MIT OpenCourseWare (History) – The MIT History Faculty offers about 70 subjects in the areas of Ancient, North American, European, East Asian, and Middle Eastern history.

§  Wikiversity School of Social Sciences – Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

§  OpenLearn (Arts and Humanities) – The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials.

§  A Biography of America – A Biography of America presents history not simply as a series of irrefutable facts to be memorized, but as a living narrative of America’s story.

§  Have Fun with History – A resource for students, educators and all lovers of American History.

§  The USGenWeb Project – Free genealogy and family history resources online.

§  MacroHistory and World Report – Tell without illusions or ideological restraints the story of our ancestors, our parents and us.

§  World History HyperHistory – Navigates through 3000 years of World History with links to important persons and events of world historical importance.

§  American Digital History – Online American history textbook. An interactive, multimedia history of the United States from the Revolution to the present.

Law

§   Duke Law Center for the Public Domain – Duke University is counted amongst the best schools in the South. If you’re interested in law, Duke’s open courseware in that subject area can go a long way towards helping you learn more about the justice system.

§  Intute Law – Provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorised by subject specialists based at UK universities.

§  Boston College Front Row (Law) – Boston College Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

§  American University – Offers a selection of podcasts on a number of different law-related subjects. There is even a very interesting podcast on debt relief and the law.

§  Lewis & Clark Law School – Provides a number of podcast from the law school. Subjects include tax law, business law, environmental law and other areas of law. Interesting and insightful lectures on the law.

§  Case Western Reserve University School of Law – Offers a number of interesting lectures on different law subjects. These lectures are both podcasts and Web casts. You can look ahead to the coming school year, which already has a number of interesting subjects lined up.

§  Harvard Law School – Provides a number of Web casts of law lectures, symposia, panels and conferences. A great collection of relevant information and insights on how the law interacts with current events.

§  Stanford Law – Provides open courseware via iTunes on a variety of law subjects, including the theory of justice, mobile content distribution, gay marriage, judicial review and privacy protection. The tracks are available for free, but you’ll need iTunes. Put the lectures on your iPod or iPhone and listen them anywhere.

§  MoneyInstructor Business Law – From MoneyInstructor.com provides a look at a number of basics in business law. Learn how to define crimes under business law. Worksheets and curriculums are available for teachers. Ordinary folks will find them useful as well.

§  Wesleyan College Constitutional Law – From North Carolina Wesleyan College offers an overview of the U.S. Constitution and the laws springing from it. Online lectures and class notes are included, which can help you develop a strong understanding of the Constitution and how it forms the basis of our laws.

Computer Science and Engineering

§  VideoLectures.NET (Computer Science) – A free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.

§  Wikiversity School of Computer Science and Technology – Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

§  New York State University (US), Computer Science – Hundreds of lectures, tutorials and links to educational material.

§  Dream.In.Code Tutorials – Lots of computer programming tutorials.

§  MIT OpenCourseWare (Engineering and Computer Science) – MIT OpenCourseWare is a free web-based publication of MIT course materials that reflects almost all the undergraduate and graduate subjects taught at MIT.

§  Maine University (US), Fogler Guide to Computer Science – An insanely detailed list of computer science resources.

§  FreeComputerBooks.com  – Free computer, mathematics, technical books and lecture notes.

§  Collection of Computer Science Bibliographies – A massive collection of bibliographies of scientific literature in computer science, updated weekly from original locations, more than 3 millions of references (mostly to journal articles, conference papers and technical reports), clustered in about 2000 bibliographies.

§  W3Schools – Web-building tutorials, from basic HTML and XHTML to advanced XML, SQL, Database, Multimedia and WAP.

§  FreeTechBooks.com – This site lists free online computer science, engineering and programming books, textbooks and lecture notes, all of which are legally and freely available over the Internet.

§  Free computer Tutorials – Free computer courses and tutorials site. All the courses are aimed at complete beginners, so you don’t need experience to get started.

§  Programmer 101: Teach Yourself How to Code – Several helpful resources for computer programming beginners.

§  Google Code University – Provides sample course content and tutorials for Computer Science (CS) students and educators on current computing technologies and paradigms.

Mathematics

§  Oxford University Mathematics OpenCourseWare – Various online mathematics classes provided free by Oxford University.

§  UMass Boston Mathematics – Various online mathematics classes provided free by UMass Boston.

§  Whatcom Online Math Center – Various math lessons provided free by Whatcom Community College.
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§  VideoLectures.NET (Mathematics) – A free and open access educational video lectures repository. The lectures are given by distinguished scholars and scientists at the most important and prominent events like conferences, summer schools, workshops and science promotional events from many fields of Science.

§  Wikiversity School of Mathematics – Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

§  AMSER Mathematics – AMSER (the Applied Math and Science Education Repository) is a portal of educational resources and services built specifically for use by those in Community and Technical Colleges but free for anyone to use.

§  Math.com – Math.com is dedicated to providing revolutionary ways for students, parents, teachers, and everyone to learn math.

§  Intute Mathematics – Provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorized by subject specialists based at UK universities.

§  Free-Ed College Mathematics – Offers a wide range of free online math courses and study programs.

English and Communications

§  Open Yale Courses (English) – Open Yale Courses provides lectures and other materials from selected Yale College courses to the public free of charge via the internet.

§  Writing Guidelines for Engineering and Science Students – These guidelines for engineering writing and scientific writing are designed to help students communicate their technical work.

§  MIT Writing and Humanistic Studies – The MIT Program in Writing and Humanistic Studies gives students the opportunity to learn the techniques, forms, and traditions of several kinds of writing, from basic expository prose to more advanced forms of non-fictional prose, fiction and poetry, science writing, scientific and technical communication and digital media.

§  Merriam-Webster Online – In this digital age, your ability to communicate with written English is paramount skill.  And M-W.com is the perfect resource to improve your English now.

§  National Novel Writing Month – Valuing enthusiasm and perseverance over painstaking craft, NaNoWriMo is a novel-writing program for everyone who has thought fleetingly about writing a novel but has been scared away by the time and effort involved.

§  Lifewriting – A complete text of the 9-week writing class a professor taught for years at UCLA.

§  Guide to Grammar and Writing – Grammar and writing techniques, lessons and quizzes.

§  Purdue Online Writing Lab – Over 200 free resources including lessons on: writing, research, grammar, and style guides.

Foreign and Sign Languages

§  BBC Languages – Teach yourself a new spoken language online.

§  American Sign Language Browser – Teach yourself sign language online.

§  Livemocha – Start learning a new language online for free.

§  Learn10 – Gives you a language learning habit that’s hard to kick. 10 new words; everywhere, every day.

§  One Minute Languages – Learn a new language via podcasts that are updated regularly.

§  Mango Languages – Over 100 lessons, shown to you in PowerPoint style with interstitial quizzes, to move you through any language without cracking a book.

Multiple Subjects and Miscellaneous

§  OpenLearn – The OpenLearn website gives free access to Open University course materials.  Multiple subjects are covered.

§  Capilano University OpenCourseWare – The Capilano University OpenCourseWare site is a free and open educational resource for faculty, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

§  University of Southern Queensland’s OpenCourseWare – Provides access to free and open educational resources for faculty members, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

§  YouTube EDU – Educational videos on YouTube organized by subject matter.

§  LearnHub Test Prep – Raise your test scores with free practice tests & counseling on various subjects.

§  iTunes U – Hundreds of universities — including Stanford, Yale and MIT — distribute lectures, slide shows, PDFs, films, exhibit tours and audio books through iTunes U.  The Science section alone contains content on topics including agriculture, astronomy, biology, chemistry, physics, ecology and geography.

§  United Nations University OpenCourseWare – Showcases the training and educational programs implemented by the University in a wide range of areas relevant to the work of the United Nations.

§  Brigham Young Independent Study – BYU Independent Study now offers free courses in different areas of study.  These areas include Family History, Family Life, and Religious Scripture Study, Personal Dev elopement, etc.  Use these courses as a starting point for your personal studies or just to add insight to an area of interest.

§  University of Utah OpenCourseWare – Provides access to free and open educational resources for faculty members, students, and self-learners throughout the world.

§  United States Nation Archives – The National Archives and Records Administration (NARA) is the nation’s record keeper.  Valuable records are preserved and are available to you, whether you want to see if they contain clues about your family’s history, need to prove a veteran’s military service, or are researching an historical topic that interests you.

§  Wikiversity – Wikiversity is a Wikimedia Foundation project devoted to learning resources, learning projects, and research for use in all levels, types, and styles of education from pre-school to university, including professional training and informal learning.

§  UMass Boston OpenCourseWare – Various online classes provided free by UMass Boston.

§  About U – A collection of free online educational courses from About.com.

§  Academic Earth – Online degrees and video courses from leading universities.

§  Free-Ed – Clusters of courses that support your preparation for today’s fastest-growing careers and critical academic disciplines.

§  Connexions – A place to view and share educational material made of small knowledge chunks called modules that can be organized as courses, books, reports, etc. Anyone may view or contribute.

§  TED – Motivational and educational lectures from noteworthy professionals around the world.

§  Intute – Provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorised by subject specialists based at UK universities.

§  Boston College Front Row – Boston College Front Row is a Web site that offers free access through streaming media to tapes of cultural and scholarly events at Boston College.

Free Books and Reading Recommendations

§  LibraryThing – LibraryThing connects you to other people who are reading what you’re reading and allows you to see which books are popular in various categories of reading.

§  Textbook Revolution – Links to free online textbooks and other educational materials.

§  Book TV – This is the companion site to Book TV on C-Span2. The site holds some current interviews with authors, many past interviews, opinions, reviews, and featured programs through online video.

§  Bookboon – Bookboon provides online textbooks for students in PDF format. The free ebooks can be downloaded without registration. Our books are legal and written exclusively for Bookboon. They are financed by a few in-book ads.

§  Scribd – Scribd, the online document sharing site which supports Word, Excel, PowerPoint, PDF and other popular formats. You can download a document or embed it in your blog or web page.

§  BookYards – BookYards is a web portal in which books, education materials, information, and content will be freely to anyone who has an internet connection.

§  Planet eBook – Free classic literature to download and share.

§  E-Books Directory – Thousands of ebooks on various subjects to download and share.

§  Read Print Library – Free online books library for students, teachers, and the classic enthusiast.GoodReads – Get great book recommendations and keep track of what you want to read.

§  The Online Books Page – University of Pennsylvania database with over 30,000 books.

§  Public Literature – Thousands of familiar classics, children’s books, plays and poems, as well as books by new authors.

§  Full Books – Thousands of full-text nonfiction and fiction books.

§  Many Books – Free fiction and nonfiction ebooks for your PDA, iPod or ebook reader.

§  Get Free Books – Thousands of free ebooks to download.

§  Project Gutenberg – More than 20,000 free books from the first producer of free e-books.

§  Bibliomania – Thousands of classic books, poems, short stories and plays.

§  Classic Reader – Large collection of free classic books, plays, and short stories from more than 300 authors.

§  Bartleby Fiction – Classic anthologies and volumes.

§  The Personal MBA Recommended Reading List – MBA programs don’t have a monopoly on advanced business knowledge: you can teach yourself everything you need to know to succeed in life and at work.  The Personal MBA features the very best business books available, based on thousands of hours of research.

§  Books Should Be Free – Free audio books from the public domain.

Educational Mainstream Broadcast Media

§  BBC Learning – Online learning, support, and advice. This site offers internal and offsite links to a vast amount of materials.

§  Biography – The site holds videos to past interviews and biographies on people in topics that range from Black history to women’s history.

§  Book TV – This is the companion site to Book TV on C-Span2. The site holds some current interviews with authors, many past interviews, opinions, reviews, and featured programs through online video.

§  CBC Archives — Relive Canadian history through thousands of available radio and television clips.

§  Discovery — This channel is home to several different networks that focus on the military, animals, travel, etc. The Discovery site offers a “Video of the Day” from its home page, a separate online video section, and a Discover Education center where teachers can accumulate materials for K-12 teaching. It’s impossible to list all their offerings here, so go discover!

§  History Channel – Visit the Video Gallery for a selection on historical topics. Like the Discovery Channel, this network provides many opportunities for you to gain access to information and reference materials.

§  NOVA — Watch current science shows or browse by category. PBS sponsors this channel.

§  Research Channel — Speakers, researchers and professors present revolutionary thoughts and discoveries. Use their Webstreams and an extensive video-on-demand library for research.

§  Weather Channel – You can learn about weather all over the world, but the Weather Channel also offers dynamic content based upon seasons and special conditions and a special multimedia and education section.

Online Archives

§  American Memory – The Library of Congress provides extensive multimedia offerings on various topics through their American Memory Collection, including their outstanding Built in America project that showcases historical buildings through photographs.

§  Fathom – This archive, provided by Columbia University, offers access to the complete range of free content developed for Fathom by its member institutions. The archives include online learning resources including lectures, articles, interviews, exhibits and seminars.

§  Internet Archive Open Educational Resources – A digital library of Internet sites and other cultural artifacts in digital form.

§  National Archives – Provides primary source materials from NARA along with lesson plans for teaching with those sources.

§  National Climatic Data Center – The NCDC, a division of NOAA, maintains climatic archives, including lists of storms in given counties, and records about global extremes, etc.

§  The Rosetta Project – A global collaboration of language specialists and native speakers building a publicly accessible online archive of all documented human languages.

§  September 11 Digital Archive – This site uses electronic media to collect, preserve, and present the history of the 9/11 attacks.

§  U.S. Census Bureau – If you think the Census Bureau is all about numbers, you might be surprised to learn about their archived photographs, daily radio features, and more available through theirNewsroom.

Directories of Open Education

§  Google Scholar – Provides a simple way to broadly search for scholarly literature. From one place, you can search across many disciplines and sources: articles, theses, books, abstracts and court opinions, from academic publishers, professional societies, online repositories, universities and other web sites.

§  OpenCourseWare Consortium – This site provides a portal to search through hundreds of free courses or to add new courses you know about to the database.

§  iBerry – Check out this site for a huge directory of open courseware organized by school and subject matter that can point you in the right direction for any type of learning.

§  Self Made Scholar Directory – Free online directory of web-based classes and courses.

 

Minstrel’s Alley to Reduce eBook Price of The Guys Who Spied for China

MinstralsAlleySiteLos Angeles, CA (PRWEB) February 20, 2013

Minstrel’s Alley announced it was reducing the price of its eBook of The Guys Who Spied for China. The Los Angeles based media group has claimed the subject matter is so important to the American public, that to encourage a wider readership, it is reducing the cost of the book. As occurrences of Chinese Espionage and Cyberattacks are on the increase, the publisher believes that readers should be informed of the genesis of this expanding threat.

The Guys Who Spied for China is written by author Gordon Basichis. It is a roman a clef, based on Basichis’ offbeat experiences in working to uncover Chinese Espionage Networks in the United States during the eighties and nineties. The book describes the origins of the Chinese Spy Rings, how they were established and how they were expanded over the years.

“Every day there are news headlines depicting yet another incident of China sponsored espionage or cyberattacks against the American government and corporate interests,” said Minstrel’s Alley publisher, M.J. Hammond. “American traitors and Chinese nationals are arrested on a regular basis for military and industrial espionage. There is the persistent occurrence of Cyber-Thievery originating from the Chinese government and specifically certain Chinese military units.”

Negative and self-depreciating thoughts will only weaken your ability to last longer. #4 Take action soft pill cialis After you have set your goal, you need to learn the right way to drive. Before including a new exercise routine is really fun and can help you get back the vision as before. respitecaresa.org canadian cialis no prescription It improves stamina and sex drive. buy cialis pharmacy People, who consume huge amount of alcohol like more than cialis price 4 drinks daily complain to have a lesser sperm count as well as in sexual inactivity. Hammond noted that Gordon Basichis’ novel tells the story of how it all began and the attempts that were made to suppress Chinese spying efforts in the United States. “This is not your typical spy novel,” said Hammond. “It is a quirky and intimate novel that is often darkly humorous. It is character based. Women enjoy reading it as well as men.

“The Guys Who Spied for China was a quarter-finalist in the 2009 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Contest,” said Hammond. “I believe there was some bias when the book was first published. While the book was well reviewed, there were detractors who didn’t believe that these events were actually happening. Well, now we know better, don’t we? The spies are not only targeting the American government, but corporate interest as well. The Chinese government must realize this story has credibility because this book has been banned in China.”

 

Fur the complete release click on this link

On Writing Los Angeles

Los Angeles is a tough city to write about.  There are so many elements, so many angles, that writing about the City of the Angels can be approached from a myriad directions.   On one hand, there is the Hollywood scene, the glamour and sex, a la Judith Krantz, Sidney Sheldon and dozens of others.  There is the crime scene literature, be it the classic noir of Raymond Chandler, the wonderful and biting irony of Ross Thomas, the mixed bag mysteries of the prolific T. Jefferson Parker, or the police procedural novels of  first Joseph Wambaugh and now  Michael Connelly.   To name but a few.

Even Thomas Pynchon took a whirl at the LA mystery, having written Inherent Vice, a quirky period piece set in seventies Los Angeles, as the hippie era was ending and becoming something even much more strange.  Charles Bukowski, is noted for writing about the lowlifes and the dingier side of the Los Angeles experience.   Joan Didion exposed the quirky and the quixotic, the perennially haunted.  Especially in her first novel, a seminal work, to me, of LA fiction, Play It As It Lays.

Tod Goldberg’s recent article in the Los Angeles Times, To Live and Write in LA, addresses the prismatic context and the incumbent difficulties of writing about a city that in some ways is nowhere and everywhere.  Goldberg describes his arrival to Los Angeles at the age of nine and how he came to reckon with this unique city.  Yes, I say unique.  Once upon a time it had been denigrated for its tinsel, its expanse, and its lack of a center.  But as we advance into the twenty first century, it is clear Los Angeles is a city of its own.  There is no other city like it.  No other city where through art and literature you can approach it from any direction and find the subject and story refracts of its own will through the prism of perception that leaves each Angeleno with his own particular take on the city in which he lives.

Despite all cliches to the contrary, Los Angeles has a history.   It’s Spanish History dates back to 1789 when ten motley families , escorted by Spanish soldiers ventured through the perils of the desert.  It took Spain some ten years to get these mix blooded explorers to undertake the journey.  When they, first arrived, they cast their eyes  on what was described  as an Indian village situated along the banks of the Porciuncula River…a spacious valley, lush with cottonwoods, sycamores, wild grapes and thousands of wild roses in bloom.  During their brief stay in the village, the members of the expedition counted nine earthquakes, and they encountered boiling tar pits and dense marshes. And thus a city was born.

There is the periodic sales pitch of sunshine, health, and wealth, going back to the middle of the nineteenth century.  There are the oil wells, the cattle ranches, and, of course, Hollywood.  The beat goes on, to borrow a lyric that was manufactured just off of Sunset Strip.

Los Angeles is a character.  A good book about Los Angeles, shows the city as a character, or perhaps more so, as a presentation of different characters, myriad interpretations who populate the Facebook Friends in the City of Dreams.  With most art and literature, you can start from somewhere and find your creation has taken a life of its own.   But with Los Angeles, every story not only takes on a life of its own, but the better stories reveal a series of characters in a series of incarnations, all working on various planes of reality, and somehow, in some weird way, all making imperfect sense.

According to statistic data with each year the number of people suffering from cheap discount levitra all sorts of treatments to reduce symptoms. You should ensure sound cheap cialis 5mg sleep and consume zinc rich diet to get large semen volume. There are abundant of unrecognized and unapproved powders that are sold under the name of Melanotan 2 and are used by physical cheapest viagra professional therapists to help SCI sufferers. It is easy to under estimate the effects of ayurvedic medicines buying cialis as they act quite slowly. Many writers have tried to capture the city.  Some do it better than others.  But Los Angeles, rich, poor, lavish, spare, ethnically diverse, and social exclusive, offers many stories to tell.  The only thing that doesn’t change much here, really, is the weather.

I’ve tried to capture the city in several books I’ve written. The Guys Who Spied for China, is a roman a clef, detailing the discovery of Chinese Espionage networks operating in the city during the eighties and nineties.  It is a story that rambles from the Asian neighborhood and business parks in the San Gabriel Valley, to characters and conclaves in the Santa Monica Mountains, just above Beverly Hills.

The Blood Orange is a romantic mystery thriller, a contemporary novel in the tradition of Los Angeles Noir.   The novel incorporates the bandit legends of  old Spanish California with the modern internecine battles for power and money among the tonier set in the exclusive neighborhoods.   In a sense, the modern day movers and shakers are following the tradition of the mid-nineteenth century Mexican Pistoleros who between their marauding found sanctuary in the Hollywood Hills.

And my best selling, Beautiful Bad Girl, The Vicki Morgan Story, there’s a tale that could only be spun in Los Angeles.  The book describes a 13-year affair between Vicki Morgan and Alfred Bloomingdale, scion and socialite and bona fide member of Ronald Reagan’s kitchen cabinet.   The non-fiction novel is a tale of obsessive money, power, and love, especially love,  and the Machiavellian machinations, that ultimately killed the two lovers, and left a wake of scandal and collateral damage that Beverly Hills Society still talks about to this day.    It was the perfect tragic romance, a notable addition and venerable legacy to the myriad scandalous love stories that have rendered these lyrical oddities a hallowed tradition.

The Constant Travellers.  Well, it’s an allegory.  The publisher, in its initial book cover description, mistakenly believed the novel and its odd accumulation of characters was set in Alaska.  What can I say?  Only Los Angeles could offer the mental habitat for such a mystically delicious, sex and stoner depiction of the West that Never Was.

Despite all dire predictions to the contrary, LA is blessed in some obscure and indecipherable way.    Its guardian angels serve up the middle finger to propriety and uniformity, to the predictable, and to the constraints of urban configuration.  Which is why it is such a fascinating city to write about.

Other artists and writers came before me.  Others will come after.  But the City of the Angels, will always live on.

The Ballad of Fred and Ed

I had friends–Fred and Ed.   These were their real names and this is a true story.   As odd products of fate and circumstance both men orbited each other for several decades.   Both men were spawned from different backgrounds, and held very different political values.   Oddly, while both men pursued life from different points of view they cultivated similar passions and similar sensibilities and on a more abstract level held similar perceptions of the essence of life.   Life was art, and life was adventure.  Life was only realized through passion and when the passion died the party was over.

Fred was originally from Arizona from modest working class, solid English stock.  He went to public school, did a stint in the Navy and then in the late fifties, early sixties as his Marxist or Socialist views started to galvanize, he crossed the pond where he lived for over a decade.   He spent time in Paris and resided for awhile in Ireland and Switzerland.  He did his share of rabble rousing, an activist from top to bottom.  He promoted civil rights and and socialist doctrine.   He was arrested on occasion and spent brief time in jail.  Didn’t matter all that much.  Fred was never the sort to believe he and his politics existed on some exalted or transcendental level.  He was a blue collar guy at a near genius level who knew any gains were made through the nuts and bolts and all its  incumbent vicissitudes.  You didn’t whine about your plight against the forces that be.  You bled for it.

It was more than probable that he served as a bag man for various left wing groups, including the IRA.    From what I was told he was on more security watch  lists than Trotsky.  Hence the trips and the residence in Switzerland.   He also made films, art films on noted subjects, a couple of them low budget productions based on the work of vaunted authors.   As a kid, either in high school or college, I saw two of them at the Philadelphia Art Theaters, never thinking I would later cross paths with one of the writers and producers.   The films themselves were  decent enough as Fred and company did their best to stay true to the material.  Fred loved the arts and as an artist himself he was a defender.  Even his politics wouldn’t supersede his love for the arts.

Fred was a romantic.  Never a bomb thrower.   Not violent.  A lover.  He enjoyed his romantic affairs and he immersed himself in the European art scene.   By day he made war on the ruling classes.  At night he made love.   Fred, if nothing else was a kind an caring guy.   His inherent sense of humanity would always trump his anger, even when the anger was righteous and directed at the social injustices of the world.

Ed, on the other hand, was of a very different stripe.  Ed was born to wealth and privilege the descendant of a Southern Jewish Family who over the decades migrated to Beverly Hills, California.   He was they archetypal rich kid, a product of private schools and then a football jock at UCLA.   He was a prankster with a keen sense of humor and a great brain.  Early on, he had no direction.  Direction came less through his own volition and more through the accidents of fate.  His family’s business went broke.  A bad sales deal left the business in shambles, the money drained through lawyers and theft.

For Fred, it meant a new start–pick a direction.  He, like Fred, ended up in Europe.   He wrote screenplays, mainly for the cheaply produced Italian Sword and Sandal Epics.  He wrote for a few of the early Spaghetti Westerns. No lofty, arty pieces like Fred.   These were those early sixties versions of action adventure, Roman Soldiers, Hercules, Gladiators.   If it had hair on its chest, Fred did the writing.  If it didn’t have hair on its chest, then it was bare breasted and if it made it to the states it did so in a more puritanical form.

Ed didn’t care.  They paid him in the dark, but they paid him in cash.  He wrote enough scripts to make a decent living.   He resided in Italy, and later he lived in London.  He also lived in Switzerland. Around the same time Fred was living there.

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In his spare time Ed chased down surviving wanted Nazis who choose to remain in Europe and not flee with the rest to South America.  They were called “Werewolves,” and many had assumed respectable positions as respectable citizens.  Under false ID, of course.   Some of the less fortunate had gone to ground and avoided Western justice courtesy of the networks and covens, who survived by working for either the Americans or the Russians.  Or both.  Otherwise, Ed spent his time in romance.  He was the true romantic, falling in love at the flash of an eyelash.  He loved women.  He loved romance.   Romance was rare and illusive in the modern age, he felt.  He preferred fantasizing about life in another era.

Fred and Ed both knew history.  I learned more from listening to them then I could from any college professor.   They were encyclopedic about world history.  Ed once remarked he would have given enough to learn what Pope Leo l said to Attila the Hun that turned him back at the Po.  It was those kind of  references that were wonderful and caused one to marvel at the passion that fed life into obscure and aging data.  When the two met up, years later, writers in Hollywood, the would discuss such facts for hours on end.   It was their world, a world that was inhabited by few others.   That and their passion and appreciation for the arts were what kept them going, even long after the glory days were put behind them and life was safe and at least somewhat predictable.   When their chief worries, the spooks and the gremlins had long faded into remarkable pasts and now there were only the bills to pay and the arrival of old age.

The two would argue every once in awhile.  Ed thought Fred’s politics were ridiculous and antiquated.   While Fred disliked the capitalistic system he had come to terms with the unlikelihood of its imminent collapse.  However, with the years, so came the dilution of absolutes, and both could view their own beliefs with humor and more than a trace of irony.   In short, underneath all the rhetoric, they were keenly aware there were places where sophistry prevailed, leading to at least the obscure conclusion both points of view contained elements that were totally full of shit.

The two didn’t meet that often, but they emailed and spoke on the phone, realizing  over years of correspondence how their paths were so intertwined.  How their lives intersected.  How Fred at times, in sensibility at least, was the object of Ed’s endeavors at saving the world from the great Red Menace.   Cat and mouse throughout Europe.  Each in the arts in some way.   Each with a hidden agenda.   And, later, each finding more commonality with each other than with most creatures in the world.   Even those who shared similar views were never bound to them like these two were bound to each other.   The layers of commonality were like armor against the corrosive intrusions of politics.  Sharing passions was far more compelling than sharing political similarities.   It is the true glue when sitting across from each other.  For two ideological warriors it was what was most precious and what they had left.

And then there was something else in common.  A woman.  I was sitting with Ed when he got a call from Liesel.  Ed and Liesel had once been an item, the two makings of an on and off passionate affair that spanned several countries, at least.   She was calling him from Los Angeles.  She was visiting a friend.  Oh really.  Who was the friend?   Fred.  She was dating Fred around the same time she was dating Ed.  Isn’t it wonderful they could all meet up again?

Yes, indeed.

Fred and Ed died several years ago, each from his own petty vices.  Ed from drinking and eating.  Fred was a smoker and died from lung cancer.   Ed died in Oklahoma, and Fred died in Venice, California.   With their passing, so passed a bit of living history.  And with that so did a great repository for history itself.   I miss them both as they don’t make many like them anymore.  Such a drag.