I keep seeing what could be very subtle “canary in the coal mine” moments that might be evidence that influential people behind the scenes are expecting a crash.
This time it's Eric Schmidt, Google's executive chairman. He just announced that he's planning to sell $1.5 billion worth of shares of stock. He claims it's because he wants to diversify his portfolio.
SAN FRANCISCO — Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt plans to sell up to 2.4 million shares of stock currently worth nearly $1.5 billion.
Schmidt, now Google's executive chairman, intends to stagger the sales of the stock over a one-year period. Google disclosed Schmidt's plans in a Friday regulatory filing. The company said Schmidt, 56, is trying to raise some money and diversify his investment portfolio.
If all 2.4 million shares of stock are sold, that will reduce Schmidt's stake in Google Inc. from 2.8 percent to 2.1 percent.
Schmidt's decision to sell some of his shares comes 10 months after he ended his 10-year stint as Google's CEO and turned the job over to one of the Internet search leader's co-founders, Larry Page.
Although Mitt Romney used the word “conservative” 19 times in a short speech at the February 10, 2012, Conservative Political Action Conference, the audience he used this word to appeal to was not conservative by any traditional definition. It was right wing. Despite the common American practice of using “conservative” and “right wing” interchangeably, right wing is not a synonym for conservative and not even a true variant of conservatism – although the right wing will opportunistically borrow conservative themes as required.
I was taken to task yesterday for limiting the list of software recommended in Best tools and practices for concept mapping. This morning I did some research and came up with a credible list of the ten most-recommended tools for mind mapping and concept mapping (out of fifty listed at least once). I eliminated titles that had not been updated in the past two years or were neither cross-platform nor web-based. The items are listed alphabetically.
Documented in the 488 pages and 1,500 footnotes of Suicide of a Superpower is my thesis that America is Balkanizing, breaking down along the lines of religion, race, ethnicity, culture and ideology, and that Western peoples are facing demographic death by century's end.
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Let error be tolerated, said Thomas Jefferson, “so long as reason is left free to combat it.” What Foxman and ADL are about in demanding that my voice be silenced is, in the Jeffersonian sense, intrinsically un-American.
Phi Beta Iota: Below the line is the complete essay by Buchanan with points that we find compelling. He is articulate, and however much some may dislike delivery, he represents a point of view — and a demographic — whose silence spells death to the Republic as we know it. What is really at issue here is the legitimacy of the two-party bi-opoly and the various levels of government — they have substituted ideology for intelligence, corruption for integrity. Under such a system, the Constitution has been trashed and the Republic dismembered.
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My days as a political analyst at MSNBC have come to an end.
After 10 enjoyable years, I am departing, after an incessant clamor from the left that to permit me continued access to the microphones of MSNBC would be an outrage against decency, and dangerous.
In my opinion, one of the most important books written in recent years on the subject of the global arms trade and its corrupting effects is Andrew Feinstein's, The Shadow World, Inside the Global Arms Trade. This voluminous book is mind numbing in its detail, but it is thoroughly sourced and, I believe, it will become a standard reference over time. Anyone trying to understand the dark and dangerous corner of the global economy and its politics must read this book. (To be sure, I am biased because I was a minor source in this book and I consider Andrew a good friend.)
Naturally, the arms makers are not too happy with the Shadow World and want to keep it hidden in the musty stacks of your local library. I am attaching two recent essays to help you determine if this book should be forgotten. They were published on the Lexington Institute' Early Warning Blog. Lexington is funded in large part by defense contractors and is hardly impartial on all matters regarding defense spending, so the first essay is quite expected; the second, however, comes as a surprise, to Lexington's credit.
The first essay is a predictable critique of Andrew's book by Robert Trice, a retired Senior Vice President of Lockheed Martin. Think of his effort as an attempt to move Andrew's book to a forgotten corner in the back room.
To understand the saliency of Trice's effort, consider his career. Robert Trice is a case study in the quintessential pattern of gorging oneself on cash flow pumped out by the Military – Industrial – Congressional Complex's big green spending machine. Holding a PhD in political science, he began his defense career in the Office of the Secretary of Defense in the Pentagon, where he eventually became Director for Technology and Arms Transfer Policy — or in plain english, a resident shill in the Pentagon for promoting international arms sales — the subject painted in not so flattering terms by Feinstein. Trice then moved to Capital Hill and worked as the defense Legislative Assistant to Senator Dale Bumpers (D-AR) for about three years. I met him in this position because Bumpers was interested in the military reform work my colleagues (Pierre Sprey and John Boyd) and I were doing in the Pentagon. But Trice, as Bumpers' advisor, was clearly a reluctant reformer. (Although Bumpers showed initial and enthusiastic interest in our work, nothing came of it.) In the essay below Trice now slings a little mud, saying the three of us are not just wrong but wrongly motivated, because we are “anti-defense.” Soon thereafter, the presumably pro-defense Trice cashed out of Bumpers office to work in the Defense industry, serving first as a Vice President for Business Development at McDonnel Douglas (in plain english this is a marketing job and in the MICC, marketing, or business development, means greasing the skids in Congress and the Pentagon for your firm's tinker toys — which is a good position for a poly sci type, because he couldn't design airplanes at McAir or Lockheed). Trice then moved to Lockheed Martin where his business development portfolio including shaping L-M's new business strategies and operations for the global market, which of course is the subject of Andrew's book. Obviously a person with his background of bottom feeding so successfully in the MICC's money machine, especially in the international arms trade arena, comes to the reviewing table with … shall we say … a certain amount of bias.
The second essay is Andrew Feinstein's polite repost to Trice's bucket of grease. Andrew's background could not be more different than that of Trice. Whereas Trice gorged himself and became a wealthy ‘pillar of the establishment' by slopping in America's defense trough, Andrew put his ass on the line trying to rein in the excesses of that trough's South African equivalent. In the late 1980s, Andrew, a young white South African, joined Nelson Mandella's African National Congress (ANC), because he opposed Apartheid. In 1994, after the fall of Apartheid, he was elected in South Africa's first democratic election to be an ANC member of parliament. But Andrew took his parliamentary oversight responsibilities seriously, and while in parliament, he set up a kind of one man Truman Committee to investigate allegations of ANC corruption in some international weapons deals. And he hit pay dirt, but rather than shutting up when he was pressured by party elders to close down his investigation into a £5bn arms deal that was tainted by allegations of high-level corruption, he resigned in protest from Parliament. His political memoir, After the Party: A Personal and Political Journey Inside the ANC, was published in 2007 and became a bestseller in South Africa.
With the backgrounds of these two protagonists in mind, I urge you to read Trice's critique of Andrew's latest book first (Attachment 1 below) and then Andrew's repost (Attachment 2 below) and judge for yourself who is closer to being a straight shooter — and read The Shadow World.
Introduction to the concepts behind The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, a new book by Clay Johnson. The Information Diet makes the case that it's time we started being as selective with the information we consume as we are the food that we eat, then describes what a healthy diet and healthy habits look like.
Amazon Page
EXTRACT from one Review:
Johnson* makes a strong case that content farms are the media industry's equivalent of factory farms: producing cheap, low quality information to maximize profit. And if we don't educate ourselves as consumers, then we're basically doing the brain equivalent of eating at McDonalds every day… destroying our mental health and driving serious journalists, the organic family farmers of the media industry, out of business.
If the premise sounds a little depressing, it is. But a strong dose of humor and charming anecdotes make the medicine go down. And just like factory farms are depressing, the response — farmers markets, grass-fed beef, and HGH-free milk — can be empowering and delicious.
Special Operations forces have long enjoyed an elite position in the United States military, and achieved something like folk-hero status when Navy Seals killed Osama bin Laden in Pakistan last May. The admiration is well-deserved, but an article in Monday’s Times drew attention to the power they’ve accrued of late, and raised questions about just how much independence they should have.
Carol Giacomo, who covers foreign affairs for the editorial board, says that the Obama administration has increasingly made Special Operations Forces its military tool of choice to handle threats overseas. It plans to rely on them even more widely as it draws down conventional troops from Afghanistan.
Eventually, Special Ops Forces will make up the bulk of any residual force left in Afghanistan, hunting down militants and helping train Afghan security forces. Administration and military officials are also talking about using them in regions where they have not operated in large numbers for the past decade, including Asia (the Philippines, specifically), Africa and Latin America.
The article on the front page of Monday’s Times reported that the top Special Operations officer, Adm. William H. McRaven, is now seeking authority to move his forces faster and outside of normal Pentagon deployment channels. The proposal has not been fully explained publicly but The Times reported that it would give him more autonomy to position his forces and their equipment where intelligence and global events indicate they are most needed.
Among congressional, staff—who have not yet been briefed on the proposal—there are questions about how such new authority might affect operations. “What problem are they trying to solve?” one aide asked. A Pentagon official, who spoke on background, insisted that Admiral McRaven “is not trying to fix something that’s broken. The proposal is anticipating what the future will be for these guys and getting ahead of it.”
The Pentagon official stressed that Admiral McRaven “is not looking for complete autonomy unanswerable to anybody” and that Special Operations Forces would still be ordered on specific missions by the regional four-star commander. But one concern is that the new plan would cut out the State Department. In the past, some ambassadors in crisis zones have opposed increased deployments of Special Operations teams, and they have demanded assurances that diplomatic chiefs of missions will be fully involved in their plans and missions.
The “global war on terror” has been used to justify a lot of things. But not everything changed on Sept. 11, 2001. Civilian control of the military is one thing that did not change. I can’t imagine a circumstance under which it should.
