Review (Guest): Confidence Men – Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President

Ron Suskind From Product Description: The new president surrounded himself with a team of seasoned players—like Rahm Emanuel, Larry Summers, and Tim Geithner—who had served a different president in a different time. As the nation’s crises deepened, Obama’s deputies often ignored the president’s decisions—“to protect him from himself”—while they fought to seize control of a …

DefDog: Defense Contractors Start the Big Lie Again–Jobs PLUS Winslow Wheeler Defense Budget Facts RECAP

More lies…big ones. Defense contractors launch campaign to end military spending cuts Los Angeles Times, September 14, 2011 Seeking to whip up public support for what’s expected to be a hard-fought budget battle in Congress, a group of defense contractors launched a lobbying campaign urging an end to cuts in military spending. The campaign, named …

Chuck Spinney: How Incestuous Amplification Leads to Treason

9-11: Incestuous Amplification Highjacks the American OODA Loop Mark Danner has written a brilliant exegesis (also attached below) of how the collective leadership of the United States dragged an entire nation off its moral rails in its reaction to 9-11. It is long but well worth the reading investment. While Danner does not use the …

Marcus Aurelius: The Covert Commander in Chief

The Covert Commander In Chief By David Ignatius Washington Post, September 11, 2011 Pg. 15 It’s an interesting anomaly of Barack Obama’s presidency that this liberal Democrat, known before the 2008 election for his antiwar views, has been so comfortable running America’s secret wars. Phi Beta Iota:  Full story below the line together with a …

Berto Jongman: Forecasting Large-Scale Human Behavior — and Four Flaws in the Concept

Culturomics 2.0: Forecasting large-scale human behavior using global news media tone in time and space Kalev Leetaru First Monday, Volume 16, Number 9 – 5 September 2011 Abstract News is increasingly being produced and consumed online, supplanting print and broadcast to represent nearly half of the news monitored across the world today by Western intelligence agencies. …

John Robb: ROI for 9/11 Attacks 10 Million to One….

September 11: Counting the Costs to America Al Jazeera, 1 September 2011 $5 trillion, and counting Osama bin Laden spoke often of a strategy of “economic warfare” against the United States, a low-level war aimed at bankrupting the world’s economic superpower.  A decade after the 9/11 attacks, it’s hard to argue that bin Laden’s strategy …

Worth A Look: Understanding 9/11 and 9/11 RECAP

Precedent works: Project for a New American Century Post-Event Illuminations: 2006  Endgame: The Blueprint for Victory in the War on Terror 2007 Wesley Clark interview (March 2007): “We plan to take out 7 countries in 5 years” From Niels Groeneveld at Facebook: VIDEO:  9/11 Attack or Godsend (German and British Ministers) Decision to Invade Afghanistan …