This detailed geo-statistical analysis entitled “The Fog of War: The Geography of the WikiLeaks Afghanistan War Logs 2004-2009″ has been published, not much more than a month after Wikileaks made available to the world six years of Afghanistan records and reports. The study was honestly, scientifically, and nimbly completed and published at no direct cost to the intelligence community. It was made possible by the decentralization, fluidity, and constant sharing and shifting of roles and responsibilities that comprise the Internet. As I read through this lucid analysis, I recalled the recently published Washington Post project, Top Secret America. Both the Post and the researchers in “Fog of War” tried to be careful not to step on government toes, but the very process and existence of these kinds of analyses are cause for great optimism, and provide a strong justification to radically slash government spending on intelligence that the state has proven to be unable to use effectively.

The neocon-allied Unification Church’s DC daily, the Washington Times, has been sold for $1, in an internal Moon family transaction. Recently, Newsweek was also sold for a buck by the money-losing Washington Post. Can the paper itself be far behind? Or Time and US News too? And how about the NY Times?

“Stop Demagoguing the Mosque,” read by Stephanie Murphy.

LRC contributing writer Don Cooper posted this to his Facebook page:

“Too funny: just went through TSA with my ID and ticket receipt. I printed my ticket receipt off the Internet by mistake instead of my boarding pass. When I went through the “security checkpoint” the guy was shooting the s**t with someone and didn’t notice. What a joke of a boondoggle jobs program the TSA is.”

Another TSA “satisfied customer” writes:

“I travel very often, and I cannot count the many times I have gone through security at the airport and come out the other end realizing I had liquids, gels, or some sharp object that could possibly be used as a weapon accidentally sitting in my carry-on.  Yet, I have also lost count of the times when they’ve had to pull my bag to the side to inspect something that could not possibly be harmful in any way.”

The Discovery Channel building hostage news was surreal yesterday, if only because it’s a local event for me and a friend was “locked-down” in a neighboring building. I was a little shocked to find out that this (obviously disturbed) man was killed. What he did was unequivocally wrong, but it was a tragic end to the day nonetheless.

I was reading all of this online, so it wasn’t until this morning that the surreality hit home again. On the local news, they showed snipers prone, a SWAT truck, a robot sitting next to another ominous black vehicle, and a soldier running to the scene. All of this for a single man with a handgun and some homemade bombs.

It’s impossible to convincingly play the role of a Monday-morning quarterback, but one cannot help wonder if this anti-gun state were instead a place where even 10% of the population open-carried? Maybe Lee was deranged enough to have gone on his mission anyway. But would it have taken 4 hours, what seems like the entire Montgomery County arsenal (why does my county have an arsenal?), helicopters into the night, and the lobby still shut down this morning?

There’s a bank run going on at Kabul Bank—as can happen to any fractional-reserve bank without an FDIC, and indeed a run is the only free-market way to correct such crooked institutions. So one of the largest shareholders, US puppet Hamid Karzai’s brother Mahmoud has a solution: “America should do something,” he said. Kabul Bank “has money”—sure it does Mamoud—but cannot “withstand a stampede by panicked depositors,” as Huffpo puts it in banksterspeak. Maybe the Taliban is telling the truth about such crooked regime banks. That would be terrorism indeed.

UPDATE It appears that the US Bankocracy will bail out its criminal kid in Afghanistan. Yet another war crime.

Writes Bill Watkins:

The 2010 Greater Kansas City Bartending Competition was won by my daughter’s boyfriend, Mark Church.  His winning entry was, of all things, “The Refined Austrian Cocktail” which is made with the following ingredients:

Austrian gin, Austrian brandy, house-infused aromatized wine, Kirsch liqueur, and homemade aromatic bitters, garnished with a grilled orange wheel.

UPDATE from Jedd Coburn:

I always thought the Austo-cocktail was colloidal silver and Goldschlager

The WSJ-LRC discussion continues, with contributions from propaganda- analyst Lila Rajiva and Switzerland’s Daily Bell.