This episode of “Ask the Strategic Genius” is about logistics and the 2nd Amendment: two things you typically will not find connected in public discourse. Time to cure that!
“Amateurs talk about tactics, professionals study logistics” – Napoleon Bonaparte*
I hate the olympics because of the corruption in the surrounding fol-de-rol, the pointless displays of silly excess, and the nationalism.
If you want to cut to the chase and just read this article over at Jacobin, I encourage you to do so.
Richard Feynman famously said that marketing was an inherently immoral job, because it consisted of selling something as being better than the marketer knows it to be. I tried that argument on our VP of Marketing, back in the day, and she said that “MarCom” – Marketing Communications – was OK. Well, that still leaves the rest of marketing on the hook.
As we discussed in my piece on butter packaging, marketing claims often do amount to lies – excuse me – “deliberate excursions from the truth.”
As we charge forward to the quadrennial “Changing Of The Oligarchy” ritual, one topic that remains off the talking points is: ‘defense’ spending. Some candidates favor spending vastly more, others slightly less, but none of them appear to be serious about adjusting the money-valve from the ‘full on, locked’ position.
I didn’t want to turn my first posting on this topic into a book report on the Blumrosen’s “Slave Nation” because I find that when one does a book report, it’s easy to turn off the critical engine in one’s brain and just accept material without a close reading. “Look, I’m not going to read all of Jefferson’s correspondance…!” it’s too much.
At MISTI in 2013 I was on the closing panel with Alex Hutton (at the time CSO of Zions Bank) and Chris Nickerson (a “red teamer”) – the topic was the distressing state of internet security. Hint: it’s distressing. Somewhere in the course of the panel I decided to do a “show of hands poll” and asked everyone in the room:
How many of you use the google 2 factor authentication on your gmail account?
“The worst political state is the popular state.” So Cinna explains to Augustus. But just as good a maxim is “The worst political state is the monarchy.”
The media in the US are uncertain as to whether the US oligarchy is going to back Erdogan, or not. So their language is carefully pared-back, like their language regarding torture, or the imperial wars that the US has waged since 1990. They accept terms like “collateral damage”* and “enhanced interrogation” or “ethnic cleansing” instead of actionable terms like “area bombing” “torture” and “genocide” – the US is signatory to various treaties that criminalize “area bombing” so let’s just call it “unfortunate mis-identification” and the problem’s solved. [Read more…]