Aristocratic-Dynastic intelligence vs. bureaucratic intelligence
Image: Lorna Roberts / Shutterstock.com 1) The problem that historians (and many intelligence historians) keep stepping around Most readers can understand that rulers in every...
Author : CandorIsGood
Operation TRUST-2: How the KGB may have fabricated a large-scale conservative rebellion in the USSR
The original operation TRUST was a massive success for early Soviet intelligence: Faking a vast network of anticommunist circles to entrap the real domestic opposition...
Forging the anticommunist illusion everyone desired: Operation TRUST
Introduction: A fake opposition that became the real battlefield Between roughly 1921 and 1927, the Soviet security service (Cheka → GPU/OGPU) ran one of the...
The vast size of the aristocratic supercluster that defined our modern world
Empires have existed for about 10,000 years. Their leadership structures sufered from three main points of failure: You needed to step over other people to...
The Myth of the Leaky State: Why U.S. Government Secrecy Is Deeper, Longer, and Harder Than Most People Think
Introduction: “They couldn’t possibly keep that secret”… or could they? A popular civic folktale says the U.S. government is too big, too porous, and too...
The Confidence Trap: Why the Dunning–Kruger Effect Bites Hardest in Politics, Ideology, and Religion
Introduction: When ignorance becomes certainty The classic Dunning–Kruger result is simple and unsettling: people who know the least about a domain are the most likely...
Calculating how Trump may have been used to fool Russia into a false sense of opportunity
For many months we have seemingly observed a rerun of the same soap opera: The Trump administration professes to be tired of the war in...
Classic conspiracy mythology is a communist invention
We think of classic conspiracy mythology as inherently rightwing; mostly due to the German National Socialists and radical Islam. If you don’t believe in a...
The Five Gimmicks: How Modern Ideologies Sell Simple Keys to Complicated Locks
Prologue: The age of easy answers Every big-tent ideology pretends to be a scientific master concept of salvation. Academics spend their lives on these concepts...
Revenge of the King: How Britain stopped using guns against the American rebels and employed espionage instead
Overture: An Empire Counts Its Coins Empires do not live by muskets alone. They live by arithmetic—by the sober accounting of ships and shillings, allies...