A Question of Standing deals with recognizable events that have shaped the history of the first 75 years of the CIA. Unsparing in its accounts of dirty tricks and their consequences, it values the agency's intelligence and analysis work to offer balanced judgements that avoid both celebration and condemnation of the CIA. The mission of the CIA, derived from U-1 in World War I more than from World War II's OSS, has always been intelligence. Seventy-five years ago, in the year of its creation, the National Security Act gave the agency, uniquely in world history up to that point, a democratic mandate to pursue that mission of intelligence. It gave the CIA a special standing in the conduct of US foreign relations. That standing diminished when successive American presidents ordered the CIA to exceed its original mission. When they tasked the agency secretly to overthrow democratic governments, the United States lost its international standing, and its command of a majority in the United Nations General Assembly. Such dubious operations, even the government's embrace of assassination and torture, did not diminish the standing of the CIA in US public opinion. However, domestic interventions did. CIA spying on domestic protesters led to tighter congressional oversight from the 1970s on. The chapters in A Question of Standing offer a balanced narrative and perspective on recognizable episodes in the CIA's history. They include the Bay of Pigs invasion, the War on Terror, 9/11, the weapons of mass destruction deception, the Iran estimate of 2007, the assassination of Osama bin Laden, and Fake News. The Intelligence Reform and Terrorism Prevention Act of 2004 diminished the CIA and is construed as having been the right solution undertaken for the wrong reasons, reasons that grew out of political opportunism. The book also defends the CIA's exposure of foreign meddling in US elections.

Being-in-time to the music from the ground up is a work in phenomenology, where this term is broadly defined, comprehending Plato, Heidegger, Hegel, and Marx. The most direct referent is Hegel, together with the theoretical revolution that he initiated with Phenomenology of Mind. This text’s more general purpose is to set the tone for a 21st communism based upon the idea of dancing with death, assuming full responsibility for one’s mortality, and abandoning the self to love as the meaning of existence. This dance is choreographed through my conversations with the above mentioned writers. In conversing with them I aim to displace (if not usurp) them from the throne of honour which is nothing more than the authority borrowed from me. By this I do not intend to deny completely their ‘other to me’ character. However, they exist or even ‘figure’ for me, both in the sense of of ‘count,’ having importance, as those that I read, and by which I read myself. They have borrowed my authority, namely, my own potential to be an author. So ‘reading them is to re-assume that borrowed authority. The life of the reader, to paraphrase Barthes, begins with the death of the author.

101 Classroom Games: Energize Learning in Any Subject helps students improve their study skills, aids them in reviewing material, prepares them for assessments, and makes the learning experience enjoyable. Each game has stimulating content with variations and progressions as well as teaching points to keep the game fun, interesting, and effective.