Admit it. Secretly you think optimistic people are just a little annoying—their constant, insufferable smiling; the way they’re always looking on the “bright side” and reciting cheerful aphorisms. When you encounter an optimist, uncharitable words like “sap” and “chump” may pop into your head. And when optimists veer off into wishful thinking, and the ridiculous state called “blind optimism,” you suspect they are downright delusional, even dangerous. Is optimism really a characteristic we want to instill in ourselves and our kids?
Actually, yes. Optimism can protect against depression and anxiety disorders and promote emotional resilience. Optimists are physically healthier than pessimists, and they recover faster from conditions like heart disease. Optimism can help us cope more effectively with stress, and affects the immune system in ways that are largely beneficial. Plus, most people prefer the company of optimists. Compared to pessimists, they have more friends and are more likely to have wide social networks, which confer additional health benefits.
Special NightWatch Comment: Mirror imaging is a serious analytical flaw. If things are not done their way, analysts are prone to consider them inferior or wrong. It manifests a dangerous, potentially lethal cultural bias.
This week US officers were quoted in international press, yet again, as accusing the Taliban of cowardice because they use improvised explosive devices and don't come out and fight like men. An odd taunt.
In the past nine years of fighting, the Taliban — who go to war wearing robes, sandals and turbans and fight mainly with assault rifles, rocket propelled grenades and IEDS — never accuse US soldiers of cowardice for wearing ceramic armor; riding in tanks and armored fighting vehicles; fighting from forts; using the most advanced artillery invented, helicopter gunships and fighter aircraft; relying on advanced communications, satellites, armed drones; and rotating out after a tour in the field.
The officers might drop the name calling and try to understand what motivates pre-modern men so ill equipped to continue to fight the most advanced military forces in the history of the world for nearly a decade.
Phi Beta Iota: It is an honor and a privilege to read NIGHTWATCH. NIGHTWATCH commentaries, along with those by Chuck Spinney, Ralph Peters, and Robert Young Pelton, are among a handful of analytic commentaries that are consistently intelligent and honest. Few others can make this claim. “Strategic Decrepitude” has been joined by “Intellectual Decrepitude” among the ranks of those officers who would rather fight than think. Sun Tzu would call them assured losers….losers who are enablers of the ideological idiots who lie to the public and betray the public trust. In combination, the lack of integrity by both parties robs the Republic of blood, treasure, and spirit.
Today we have news straight out of Mario Puzo. It seems the Taliban made local Afghan private security contractors an offer they could not refuse.
Yesterday the Inspector General's office at the U.S. Agency for International released a report that found that millions of dollars in American taxpayer funds may have been paid to Taliban fighters in southern Afghanistan to provide security for a U.S. development project. The report says subcontractors hired to protect a development project near Jalalabad may have paid more than $5 million to the militants through local authorities.
Phi Beta Iota: INTEGRITY demands respect for reality. The U.S. Government is knowingly funding the Taliban as a “cost of doing business,” the “business” being the churning of the military-industrial complex–use everything up, wear everything out, so it has to be bought again new. This was done in Viet-Nam, and revisionist history is now showing that it was known that there would be a 50,000 US casualty cost beforehand. As long as the American public tolerates a two-party tyranny that excludes sane and sensible alternative candidates, and that allocates the taxpayer revenue behind closed doors and often without complying with the Constitution, the Republic will remain comatose.
University and Media Hosted Debates Continue to Exclude Alternative Candidates Despite Responsibility to Maintain a Free Marketplace of Ideas.
Southwestern Community College Goes One Step Further, Censors Student Journalists.
SACRAMENTO, Calif. – Universities and media outlets across California are excluding alternative candidates from participating in the debates they sponsor. The September 28 debate held at the University of California at Davis and co-sponsored by The Sacramento Bee included Jerry Brown and Meg Whitman, but excluded all the other candidates. Other universities and media outlets have followed suit.
While colleges already suppress dissenting voices in the student population, they are also suppressing them in vital public debates. Once bastions of intellectual freedom, many of our nation’s universities have created a repressive environment, hindering tomorrow’s leaders from absorbing ideas from anyone but the leading Republican and Democratic candidates. And the media has continued the censorship through their coverage of only the top funded candidates.
Phi Beta Iota: The time has come to end the two-party tyranny and make it illegal–it is already unconstitutional–to deny ballot access and public voice to any earnest candidate for public office. The universities, in failing to honor their responsibility for nurturing clarity, diversity, and integrity in the public dialog, should be penalized by loss of funds from any public treasury, inclusive of all research grants….IOHO.
Seven actual or potential conflict situations around the world deteriorated and none improved in September 2010, according to the latest issue of the International Crisis Group's monthly bulletin CrisisWatch, released today.
Guinea saw increased political and ethnic divisions, exacerbated by controversies related to the presidential elections. Two days of violent clashes in the capital between rival supporters of the two presidential candidates, Alpha Conde and Cellou Diallo, left one person dead and dozens injured. Continued delays in the timing of the run-off and Diallo's rejection of the appointment of the election commission's new head led to further tensions between the two camps.
In Sri Lanka moves by President Rajapaksa to consolidate his power through a de facto constitutional coup transformed the political terrain. On 8 September the parliament passed the 18th Amendment to the Constitution, which gives the President nearly unbridled power by scrapping term limits on the presidency, abolishing the Constitutional Court and allowing the President to appoint directly officials to the judiciary, police and electoral bodies.
Wanna know how incestuous amplification works in the politico's OODA loop … or put another way, why the Hall of Mirrors that is Versailles on the Potomac has become so disconnected from reality? … See if you have the stomach to read this disgusting drivel.
Truth in advertising: I did not have the stomach to finish it, but you don't need to finish it to appreciate the sicko psychology of worshipping at the altar of inside-the-beltway
Before he goes to sleep, between 11 and midnight, Dan Pfeiffer, the White House communications director, typically checks in by e-mail with the same reporter: Mike Allen of Politico, who is also the first reporter Pfeiffer corresponds with after he wakes up at 4:20. A hyperactive former Eagle Scout, Allen will have been up for hours, if he ever went to bed. Whether or not he did is one of the many little mysteries that surround him. The abiding certainty about Allen is that sometime between 5:30 and 8:30 a.m., seven days a week, he hits “send” on a mass e-mail newsletter that some of America’s most influential people will read before they say a word to their spouses.
EXTRACT:
“The people in this community, they all want to read the same 10 stories,” he said, table-chopping in the Hay-Adams. “And to find all of those, you have to read 1,000 stories. And we do that for you.”
As a practical matter, here is how Allen’s 10 stories influence the influentials. Cable bookers, reporters and editors read Playbook obsessively, and it’s easy to pinpoint exactly how an item can spark copycat coverage that can drive a story. Items become segment pieces on “Morning Joe,” the MSNBC program, where there are 10 Politico Playbook segments each week, more than half of them featuring Allen. This incites other cable hits, many featuring Politico reporters, who collectively appear on television about 125 times a week. There are subsequent links to Politico stories on The Drudge Report, The Huffington Post and other Web aggregators that newspaper assigning editors and network news producers check regularly. “Washington narratives and impressions are no longer shaped by the grand pronouncements of big news organizations,” said Allen, a former reporter for three of them — The Washington Post, The New York Times and Time magazine. “The smartest people in politics give us the kindling, and we light the fire.”
Phi Beta Iota: We read the whole thing, and here is the bottom line–Washington is incest on steroids. It has little to do with reality, with the needs of the public, with balancing the books, or with actually engaging in public service. It has become its own bog, Of, By, and For Washington. And that does, as Brother Chuck suggests, make one sick with shame.
