Akkam’s Razor

Eisenhower warned us about this so many years ago.  Politicians of all stripes, but particularly Republicans, love them some war.  The more the better, in fact.

The public’s is losing patience with the Great War on Terror.  The national as a whole is experiencing  a gradual extinction of the fear response (being replaced with looming financial uncertainty).  Conservatives are clearly anticipating the diminishing financial rewards of the Long War, but as a funder of campaign coffers as well as new plunder for profit.  Iran is not panning out to be the great threat they had hoped.  Simply put, they are running out of war-porn.

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  The flip side [of DARPA's independence] is that the agency also risks alienating the Pentagon’s senior leadership and making its programs vulnerable to the type of budget cuts seen in this latest round of reprogramming.
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• What Works - Webmonkey
  What does and doesn’t work in the mobile internet space…
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Nothing is really unbelievable anymore, is it?  And why is a glossy entertainment magazine - in this case, RADAR magazine -  delivering reporting that was formerly the domain of the Fourth Estate?

“There exists a database of Americans, who, often for the slightest and most trivial reason, are considered unfriendly, and who, in a time of panic, might be incarcerated. The database can identify and locate perceived ‘enemies of the state’ almost instantaneously.“

They’ve been working on predictive large-scale behavioral modeling whole-world simulators, with the idea being that  every person, industry, and organization existing in a Matrix-style world that they could then submit to famines, natural disaster, economic disruptions, pandemics, and terrorist attacks.  I suspect this is a part of “Main Core”.

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  Instead, we have allowed the owners of those machines to define their purpose: not reduction of labor, but “higher productivity”—and with it the imperative to consume virtually everything that the machinery can possibly produce.
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Foxnews now confirms that convicted DC Madam Deborah Jeane Palfrey was found dead of a suspected suicide in Florida, as initially reported by their local affiliate. Palfrey was convicted on 4/15/2008 of money laundering, illegal use of the mail, and racketeering in the operation of her “high-quality fantasy service”, operated under the name of “Pamela Martin and Associates”. The investigation of her service resulted in the resignation of Randall Tobias from his position in the US Aid office, Harlan Ullman, the creator of the phrase “Shock-and-Awe”, and an admission of the use of her services by the “very sorry” Louisiana Congressman David Vitter, who is still in office. In the same time period, several additional White House resignations were tendered, apparently unrelated to the DC Madam. In the run-up to her trial, the US DOJ of Justice issued a gag order, stating that her phone records were in fact an asset, forbidding her from discussing (and profiting from) their contents. She intended to call her “johns” to the stand as part of her defense. The case has many interesting unexplored angles.

BC’s Brian Ross had initially said the following (reported at ThinkProgress, with video at Crooks and Liars):

“There are thousands of names, tens of thousands of phone numbers,” Ross said. “And there are people there at the Pentagon, lobbyists, others at the White House, prominent lawyers — a long, long list.” Ross added that the women who worked for the service, potentially as prostitutes, “include university professors, legal secretaries, scientists, military officers.”

ABCNEWS’ Brian Ross had acquired many pages of her cell phone records and had breathlessly pitched them as holding several major names, abruptly reversing course on the night that the 20/20 piece aired.

As usually is the case in Washington, much of it is dull. There are no members of Congress we can find in these phone numbers, no White House officials. Quite frankly, but for the few exceptions, most of the men on this list just aren’t newsworthy.

During that same time period, allegations were made that one of the highest persons in the Bush White House as well as an ABC news personality were allegedly affiliated with the list. Larry Flynt also got involved, at one point stating that he was following 20 Congressional leads, but no other names had come forward.

Other little nuggets of interest:

• Cryptome has the phone numbers in list format (note, also on Scribd as images. See this story on Newsvine regarding the crowdsourcing of the bills).
• Maggie Burns mentions what Ms. Palfrey was doing on 9/11, as deduced by the phone records.
• There is a very clever honeypot at dcphonelist.com which allows users to search for a phone number, highlighting suspect phone numbers. They display statistics for numbers of interest.
• This is not the first suicide related to the Madam.

Popularity: 9% [?]

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I’ve wanted to write something about John Yoo and the torture memos, but it’s depressing and secondly I don’t like to write things that the more well-read political junkies already know, and I’m not sure how to sum up the intricacies of the entirety of Yoo, Bush, and the law in a way that will challenge any of the uninformed, misinformed, or Bush cheerleaders.  Regardless, I’m tackling it anyway.

John Yoo, an Ivy League educated scholar, American Enterprise Institute scholar and fellow, current professor at UC Berkley, and former clerk for two Supreme Court Justices, has been a central figure in many of the central rethinking controversies of President Bush’s administration, including (via ThinkProgress):

Foreign Policy has a nice chart, breaking down the war, by the numbers. Remember, ‘we’ll be greeted as liberators’, the ‘war will pay for itself with Iraqi Oil’, and no matter what any pesky Pentagon reports say, Saddam and Al Qaeda were THIS close.

Updated:  Harper’s provides the following from the ‘no-one could see this coming file’:

The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia into a trap which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information. The Baghdad communiques are belated, insincere, incomplete. Things have been far worse than we have been told … Itis a disgrace to our imperial record, and may soon be inflamed for any ordinary cure. We are today not far from a disaster.

– T.E. Lawrence, Report to the Sunday Times (London), Aug. 2, 1920.

Popularity: 8% [?]