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“A paranoid is someone who knows a little of what’s going on.” - William Burroughs

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Think Tank Tale

Think tanks have an immeasurable effect on public and private policy; they impact our everyday lives by influencing wars, economy, culture, even our faith. Why immeasurable? Because most people don’t know what think tanks are. Or that they even exist.

So what is a Think Tank? How would you explain it to a 10-year old? Here are some attempts:

“It’s a group of independent people sitting inside an air-conditioned room (the tank), pushing Lego bricks over a world map, in order to appear smart.”

“It’s like a shark tank, but instead of sharks you have guys in pinstripe suits playing Monopoly with real buildings, cities, or countries.”

“It’s like a secret playroom, where kids come up with ideas for new toys that other kids can use against their enemies.”

The Power To Abuse

Think tanks are notoriously difficult to decipher, because while they often have significant impact on public policy - they are also pretty much sealed off from public scrutiny.

What’s more alarming is that think tanks in the United States and Canada enjoy tax-exempt status. This means donors get a tax write-off by sponsoring a think tank to produce “independently researched” data that not only matches their agenda but can also be used to lobby public policy.

Let’s go through that in slow motion. Yes, that’s three (3) birds with one stone, folks: (1) tax write-off; (2) cooked research to fit your (private or corporate) needs; (3) and tailored ammo to for lobbying purposes. All this under the guise of “objective,” “professional” research that is executed “independently” by prestigious highbrow individuals.

This is not to say think tanks are always bad, it’s only to say they have the DNA to be bad.

Just how thin the veil of deceit can be is demonstrated by a recent legal case by the Koch Brothers (the Koch Industries oil magnates and Tea Party backers who fund research to e.g. dispute global warming) against Cato Institute (a Washington based think tank).

In the lawsuit, the brothers attempt to wrestle majority control of Cato Institute from a recently deceased shareholder (the Koch’s already own 50% of Cato). Typically shareholders cannot own nonprofits, but because of legal maneuvering through a Kansas incorporated entity, Cato has managed to avoid IRS claws since 1974.

In the 2011 Global Think Tank Index, Cato is listed as the sixth most influential think tank in the U.S., with a $24m annual budget, ranked third in Economic Policy influence and ranked second in Social Policy influence in United States.

Cato Institute’s president Ed Crane has accused Charles Koch of a “hostile takeover attempt” that would support Kochs’ “partisan agenda.” Meanwhile Charles Koch has released a statement that his intent is to advance “individual liberty, limited government, free markets, and peace.”

Confused? Welcome to the matrix of think tank tales. A matrix that is growing rapidly.

A Mushrooming Influence

According to Government Research Service  there were eight think tanks in U.S. in 1910, 98 in 1960, and 1,106 in 2006. Today, there are more than 6,500 think tanks in the world ,working in diverse fields such as social policy, politics, military, economics, technology, and culture.

Undeniably a lot of these think tanks are doing good work in public and private sectors - pooling talented brains to solve difficult issues that the government typically won’t touch and advocating solutions to pressing global or national concerns. But you don’t need Holmesian deduction to figure out that some of the biggest and most influential shark tanks are designed to support the interests of only a handful of powerful individuals, under the auspices of humanitarian mission statements.

It’s hard find out what the shark eats, however, if you are not allowed to open its belly.

Instead what we can observe is how think tanks spread their tales through mainstream media, and how benevolent their mission statements appear relative to the private interests of their donors.

According to FAIR (Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting), the 25 most-cited think tanks receive about 14,790 citations in U.S. media in 2007.

Lately, progressive and left-leaning think tanks have gained ground, simply because they’re being positioned as more centrist, which gets them more airtime. It’s all about creating a sufficiently positive image in the public eye to optimize funding sources.

The Good, The Bad...

RAND Corporation, for instance, has taken significant steps to become more centrist and detached from its original 1946 mission statement. Although Douglas Aircraft Company founded the think tank to “offer research and analysis to U.S. armed forces” (hmm, isn’t there risk for cognitive bias for  a defense contractor here?), today they also consult on child policy, civil and criminal justice, education, health, national security, energy, environment, population studies, science, social welfare, terrorism, arts policy and transportation, to name a few.  It’s a long stride from its former heydays when then Chief Strategist Herman Kahn wrote “On Thermonuclear War,” a book that argues for a “winnable” nuclear war (fun fact: Peter Sellers’ character in Dr. Strangelove was based on Dr. Kahn).

According to imagine building, think tanks involve complicated legal structures to safeguard them from scrutiny. And sometimes these structures are convoluted enough to self-implode.

Take The Advancement of Sound Science Coalition (TASSC), a think tank which was founded in 1993 by APCO Worldwide, a public relations firm, which in turn was founded by Washington D.C.’s largest law firm, Arnold & Porter, a.k.a the “tobacco lawyers,” in order to act as a front for Philip Morris (now Altria) to debunk the link between smoking and cancer.

Incidentally, TASSC also tried to paint global warming as “junk science.”

Luckily a New York Times article exposed TASSC in 1998, prompting them to go underground. Supposedly, however, they are still operating from a home address in Potomac, MD.

Some think tanks, like the Council on Foreign Relations (CCR), get more flack from nosy bloggers and journalists than others, but are still pretty much untouchable because of their size and influence. CFR is considered the “most influential foreign-policy think tank” in the U.S. It’s a favorite target for conspiracy buffs who believe it was set up by David Rockefeller as part of his “world dominion plan.” They point at CFR’s mile-long member list of Fortune 500 CEOs and U.S. presidents for proof, but the finger pointing usually doesn’t get them farther than, well, their finger.

And The Ugly

Then there is the more conservative part of the rainbow, like the Heritage Foundation. You can actually sink your finger inside Heritage just by looking at its history, an extraordinary tale of how a think tank has influenced government policy and wars for the last three decades. Heritage is the 7th most influential conservative think tank in the United States, touting “traditional family values, Christian spirit, free enterprise, individual freedom, strong defense, and small government.”  Words the conservative think tanks like to copy and paste around.

What really distinguishes The Heritage Foundation is its Hollywood-like approach on good and evil, manifest in their blogs and press releases. Americans are the best people in the world, but they are under a threat from terrorists and moral decadence, one Heritage writer claims. Therefore Heritage “must safeguard Americans by influencing the decision makers with timely research.”

Heritage was founded in 1973 by Paul Weyrich, Edwin Feulner, and Joseph Coors, former president of Coors Brewing Company. There are some interesting connections between Coors, Heritage, and U.S. foreign policy.

Joseph Coors provided $250,000 to Heritage to cover their first year’s budget. He also privately donated $85,000 to help the Nicaraguan Contras during the Iran-Contra scandal (selling weapons to Iran to fund the contras wage war on the left-wing Nicaraguan government). Mr. Coors was also a member of Ronald Reagan’s Kitchen Cabinet, a collection of unofficial advisers that Reagan consulted regularly. Coors was instrumental in positioning Heritage as a policy-making machine within the White House. What happened in the 80s with Heritage has become a blueprint for think tank lobbyists today.

Heritage Foundation’s first mandate in January 1981 contained more than 2,000 suggestions to make the federal government more conservative. The Reagan administration adopted 1,200 of them, including the development of a ballistic missile defense system, called the “Star Wars.”

Later, Heritage became a leading proponent of Operation Desert Storm under George H. W. Bush.

Records of Desert Storm show that U.S. planes attacked Iraqi troops that were already withdrawing from Kuwait in compliance with a UN Resolution. Incendiary bombs wiped out not only out-of-combat Iraqi soldiers but fleeing civilians. According to U.S. Attorney General Ramsey Clark: "What took place was the use of technological material to destroy a defenseless country. …125,000 to 300,000 people were killed...”

Ramsey Clark has since been labeled a traitor, especially after he led the National Coalition to stop US Intervention in Middle East. Clark’s main argument was that U.S. went after Iraq for oil interests, after USSR lost its influence in the area. The subsequent statistics would seem to support this theory, as U.S. oil imports from Gulf area rose from 10% to 25% from 1989 to 2000.

This is a lot of influence from a single think tank.

Modern American Heritage

How much the Second Gulf War, the Afghanistan War, and subsequent wars in the Middle East can be attributed to these early policies, and present advocacy, is unclear.

Today The Heritage Foundation upholds the 2nd Amendment, abstinence education, and nuclear rearmament. It has an $80 million annual budget, lists Margaret Thatcher as its patron, and is run by Edwin Feulner, a catholic conservative who received the Presidential Citizens Medal from Ronald Reagan in 1989.

Feulner announced the establishment of a new political arm called Heritage Action for America in a Wall Street Journal op-ed on April 12th, 2010.

“This institution—Heritage Action for America—will be able to spend money to push legislation we think the country needs without the obstacles faced by a nonprofit like the Heritage Foundation,” writes Feulner.

In other words, an institution that is even more efficient and less constrained in influencing public policy behind public eyes and under private tutorship.

Bruce Bartlett, a former staff member at Heritage turned-whistleblower,who used to write analysis papers to influence congress on a daily basis, lifts the veil of deceit in his Forbes article.

“With the Supreme Court's Citizens United decision having loosened the restraints on corporate political activity, it's likely that we will see other think tanks adopt the Heritage model as they did in the 1970s. The problem is that the pressure on researchers to conform to partisan political objectives is going to become even more intense, and if they are going to be expected to function as de facto lobbyists they are going to expect to be paid like lobbyists, which will ratchet up pressure to raise money from those with a purely bottom-line perspective. I fear that honesty and truth will get more and more lost in the process.”

Think Tank Of The Think Tanks?

It would seem that the opportunity to abuse the system of governance and democratic process through think tank tales is immense. And accelerating.

How many of the top 50 think tanks in the U.S. (see table below) recognize the need for increased transparency, simply to safeguard their own image? We have only looked at a few of the top think tanks, what are the rest like? Judging by their silence, they are happy inside their translucent skin.

Maybe in an age of think thanks it takes a think tank to really find out what’s going on inside think tanks.

What we need is the mother superior of all think tanks, one that monitors and studies the others to foreclose any oligarchic loopholes.

After all, the government doesn’t care. And the rest of us are too busy.

TABLE: Top Fifty Think Tanks in the United States

(Source: “2011 Global Go To Think Tank Rankings,” by James G. McGann, University of Pennsylvania)

Brookings Institution

Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)

Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS)

RAND Corporation

Cato Institute

Heritage Foundation

Woodrow Wilson International Center for Scholars

Peterson Institute for International Economics, FNA Institute for International Economics

American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research (AEI)

Center for American Progress

National Bureau of Economic Research

Pew Research Center

Hoover Institution

Atlantic Council of the United States

United States Institute for Peace

Open Society Institute New York (OSI)

Human Rights Watch

Center for International Development, Harvard University

Center for Global Development

Urban Institute

Center for a New American Security

German Marshall Fund of the United States

James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy, Rice University

Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University

New America Foundation

Earth Institute, Columbia University

World Resources Institute

Carnegie Council for Ethics in International Affairs

Hudson Institute

Center on Budget and Policy Priorities

International Food Policy Research Institute

Foreign Policy Research Institute

Freedom House

Pew Center on Global Climate Change

Resources for the Future

Stimson Center, FNA Henry Stimson Center

Inter-American Dialogue

Acton Institue

Economic Policy Institute

East West Institute

Competitive Enterprise Institute

Manhattan Institute

Reason Foundation

Center for Transatlantic Relations, School of Advanced International Studies, Johns Hopkins University

East-West Center Honolulu

Center for Budget and Policy Priorities

Center for the National Interest, FNA Nixon Center

Mercatus Center

Aspen Instute

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Religious belief is a totalitarian belief. It is the wish to be a slave. It is the desire that there be an unalterable, unchallengeable, tyrannical authority who can convict you of thought crime while you are asleep, who can subject you - who must, indeed, subject you - to total surveillance around the clock every waking and sleeping minute of your life - I say, of your life - before you're born and, even worse and where the real fun begins, after you're dead. A celestial North Korea. Who wants this to be true? Who but a slave desires such a ghastly fate? I've been to North Korea. It has a dead man as its president, Kim Jong-Il is only head of the party and head of the army. He's not head of the state. That office belongs to his deceased father, Kim Il-Sung. It's a necrocracy, a thanatocracy. It's one short of a trinity I might add. The son is the reincarnation of the father. It is the most revolting and utter and absolute and heartless tyranny the human species has ever evolved. But at least you can fucking die and leave North Korea!

Christopher Hitchens

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TIPPING POINT DEMOCRACY Tipping point: when a seemingly insignificant shift in one variable causes a structural, irrevocable transformation in the system. Whether it's the onset of a hurricane, a stock exchange crash, a star implosion, an influenza epidemic, or a nasty temper tantrum, the dynamics of the tipping point remain the same: shit hits the fan before you knew there was a fan.

In politics the tipping point has an especially dramatic implication: a seemingly insignificant change in one legislation can lead to a drastic change in the system of governance.

In 1933 a seemingly innocuous new piece of legislation known as the Enabling Act empowered a relatively unpopular leader with a toothbrush moustache to become a dictator. Within a decade he would be responsible for more than 60 million violent deaths.

Very few noticed or heard about the Enabling Act before it was cited in history books. Fewer predicted its consequences. The reason is simple: predicting a tipping point is like predicting weather.

A special class of individuals is required to sniff out tipping points. Think of them as ultra-smart watchdogs. They have a freakishly sensitive nose for historical patterns. They don't care about being barked at. They are pariahs at the edge of Hyde Park, or on the edge of society.They are not without fear. They have simply realized that hiding from their truth is more destructive than any other alternative.

In rare historical instances, watchdogs are able get their message across to a critical mass of listeners and affect real change. That's when they're suddenly called revolutionaries.

Jump cut to America in 2012, where 21% of children live in poverty while military spending outstrips the rest of the world's, corporations control the electoral system, and Eisenhower’s nightmare about a military industrial takeover is in full gear. It's a land in dire need of watchdogs.

Unfortunately, watchdogs are not politically inclined and therefore they cannot and will not change the system from the inside. It’s not in their DNA. To be a successful politician you have to be a lapdog to the masses. Watchdogs and lapdogs don't mix.

Yet watchdogs know how the political system works. How politics and money entangle. How legislation is cooked. Hence they are a threat to the lapdogs and the corporate system. They are shunned by the media. Flagged by the national security institutions.

On March 29, 2012, I stumbled across four of them in New York, as they entered the United States District Court to bring a lawsuit against Barack Obama and the United States government.

At issue was a piece of legislation known as Section 1021 of the National Defense Authorization Act of 2012, which gives the US military the right to detain American citizens indefinitely without charge or trial. To qualify, all you need is to "substantially support" groups that the President determines to be "associated forces" of anyone "engaged in hostilities" against the U.S. or its "coalition partners." The language is so obtuse that it can be used against anyone, including journalists or dissidents in touch with, well, someone the President doesn't like.

As usual, the media paid no attention, either to the implementation of the law, or to the individuals who were suing the government for it.

The case bore all the hallmarks of a fully loaded tipping point for the future of American democracy.

Six weeks after the testimonies were handed out, an Obama-appointed judge delivered a judgment that surprised both the watchdogs and the lapdogs: Section 1021 of the NDAA violates both the First and Fifth Amendments of the Constitution.

It was a round 1 victory for the plaintiffs. Now it's up to Obama's team to figure out which way they want to tip the point. And it's up to the rest of us to watch out for the watchdogs.They need all the help they can get.

The interviews with the plaintiffs were made during and around the court date:

- Chris Hedges, Pulitzer Prize winning author, journalist and former war correspondent with New York Times - Tangerine Bolen, founder of RevolutionTruth, - Alexa O’Brien, founder of US Day Of Rage - Kai Wargalla, founder of Occupy London.

Other plaintiffs include: Noam Chomsky Daniel Elsberg Birgitta Jónsdóttir

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Finally a realistic solution to poaching. This monkey was fed Bee Alive Royal Jelly (from HoneyColony.com, of course) for three consecutive days, and shown pictures of poachers hovering over dead elephants and rhinos. Another 25 minutes of basic training with a calibre 308 rifle and you're done. Just let them go.

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Check out the loss of the reflecting surface area in three decades. This area sucks in the extra heat, accelerating the meltdown. You don't need to be a scientist to figure out we're in serious trouble. The controversy around this topic is insanely naive. Image courtesy of NASA.

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The age-old dilemma: want to learn about healthy nutrition, energy, transformative food, healing wisdom, but there is just too much out there, and most of it is advertising. This little venture is about to change it all. Bee a part of HoneyColony through the Indiegogo campaign here! 

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$87,000 worth of relationship and life counseling - for free!

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THE LAST FIRST 2013 expedition across the Northwest Passage, THE LAST FIRST, during which a bunch of fearless men will row 2000 miles through icebergs and polar bears in the most perilous conditions.

There are very few adventure "firsts" left today. The highest mountains have been climbed, the oceans have been crossed and poles have been reached. But high up in the Arctic remains one of the last feats of human endurance yet to be achieved. In July 2013, Kevin Valley, Paul Gleeson, Frank Wolf, Denis Barnet & Ray Zahab will attempt something that has never been done before - crossing the North West Passage in a single season by human power alone. They will row the North West Passage starting in Tuktoyaktuk, NWT and finishing approximately 3000 kilometers later in Pond Inlet, Nunavut.The quest for the North West Passage alluded mariners for centuries - since Elizabethan times. It was to be the gateway to the orient and the first to conqueror it would be its gatekeeper. The Spanish controlled the South and the British wanted the North. The iconic names of Canadian Geography are the names of the British explorers, the "Sea Dogs" as they were called, willing to risk everything in pursuit of the passage - from Frobisher to Baffin, from Davis to Hudson, from Parry to Franklin, they'd all try to find the passage and they all would fail. It would take the cool, calculating Norwegian, Raold Amundsen, to finally traverse the passage between 1903-06 in his tiny sloop the Gjoa. The North West Passage is arguably the most challenging waterway on earth. No one has traversed the passage in a season under human power.  Production/Interviews/camera/edit: Jan Wellmann (www.janwellmann.com) Archive imagery courtesy of many wonderful explorers and brilliant filmmakers For more info on the trip, see WWW.THELASTFIRST.COM

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The Necessary Hanging Of Jimmy The Life Coach

... Or How To Distinguish Between True Passion And "Fashion Passion."

Jimmy the Life Coach tells us to define our life goals and break them down to milestones. He tells us to realize our passion with a measuring cup. Visualize it Yoda -style. To jump fearlessly into the void and "be all we can be." As a result many of us jump into a black pit that is less than 10-feet deep. The inevitable crash is sufficiently painful to make us temporarily forget how much we paid for Jimmy's audiotapes. But if we want to jump again, we need to figure out what went wrong the first time.

True passion is as rare as truffles in the forest. Few of us stumble on truffles accidentally - without the guidance of specially trained truffle pigs. But in the $10 billion self-help industry where passion has become fashion, real truffle pigs are nearly extinct. Now that Jimmy rules we are often pressured to identify our passion in a pressure cooker. We have to nail it, define it, visualize it, jump at it – or perish as losers.

Even if Jimmy's intentions are innocent, his external goal oriented -system is not. His mistake is to treat symptoms. He tries to cure our disaffection with life by administering faux passion. But Jimmy is not a trained truffle pig; he is just a pig with a catchword. His tongue-in-cheek homework assignments can be downright destructive: "write down your passion and repeat it to yourself 100 times before going to bed." By the time our homework assignment is due, we are ready to cheat our own destiny.  We start comparison-shopping passion ideals from glossy magazines, our social circle, even our third little cousin who works (the copying machine) at a movie studio.

We will look at anybody but ourselves, and finally identify with one passion that meets the expectations… of others. In other words, we scam ourselves.

Our need for acceptance compromises our judgment about who we really are. Jimmy’s focus on external goals exacerbates this compromise. Some would argue that Jimmy should be hung upside down from a lamppost, and his system replaced - but with what?

During a search for adventurers to profile our smartphone venture ADAIA, I came across three Irish chaps who had a rare glimpse in their eyes. Their drive was so singular that it had to be the real thing. It was was addictive. I wanted to figure out their secret sauce.

Denis, 31, the youngest in the bunch, explained to me the magic that drives him. He calls it The Silent Moment. It's when people suddenly quiet down because survival demands an extraordinary performance. You’re suddenly cast outside your comfort zone, and your life depends on what you do next. The Silent Moment brims with purpose inside, while the outside implodes in chaos.

Denis has joined up with Paul, 36, and Kevin, 47, for an inhuman adventure: to cross the Northwest Passage for the first time with a row boat. The Passage is possibly the world's severest maritime challenge historically.  It’s 1,200 miles from the North Pole, composed of over 900 miles of arctic channels above Alaska, populated by a treacherous archipelago of icebergs. A few fortified chips have crossed the Passage over the last few centuries, and many have perished trying, while no one has even dreamt about crossing it using deltoids and biceps alone. The expedition is called The Last First.

Kevin is an architect who has been named one of Canada's leading adventurers. His latest feat was to break the world record for the fastest unsupported trek to the South Pole.

Paul is a financial advisor who one day got the idea of crossing Australia with a bike, without any previous biking experience. And right after that, to row across the Atlantic, without any sea experience.

Despite their differences in age and profession, Denis, Paul, and Kevin are brothers. They are experts in the Silent Moment.

Until I met these Irishmen I often wondered about hazardous expeditions that had no "real purpose." How crazy do you have to be to hang from a K2 cliff when you could be reading a book in a Jacuzzi. I was an ignoramus.

The more I listened to these guys the clearer it became that Jimmy was doomed. The recipe for the secret sauce of passion is strikingly simple. It goes like this:

Exceed yourself in a No Comfort Zone (NCZ). And then do it again. And again.

We have forgotten the recipe because of modern reverence for conformity and convenience. We like to take the easy path. We deserve the easy path, because we built the easy path, the logic goes. But our neurochemical evolution screams for the NCZ experience.

Think of the brain as a magic hula-hoop ring. You nudge one edge forward, and the entire ring grows in proportion. The diameter of that ring measures the real value of your life. If we don't keep nudging the barriers, the ring shrinks. Inactivity makes it shrink. Repetition makes it shrink. Comfort and dedication to a single area of expertise makes it shrink. Predictability makes it shrink.

We don't need to cross the Atlantic for the recipe to work. A hazardous journey is simply a tool to force us out of the rut. We can break the NCZ barriers on our keyboard, in our relationships, in our work, on our backyards. The recipe doesn't mind if it's trivial  - because it will automatically lead to another less trivial one. It doesn't care about your career, status, or finances. It has no preference for age, gender, or race. We just have to keep breaking familiar patterns. In a way, we need to constantly assassinate our former selves.

Where Jimmy went wrong was to define passion as something you do on the outside. But real passion is when you push yourself towards the unknown - on the inside.

In the words of a great mindnaut:

We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring 

will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time.

                                                                                                T.S. Eliot

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Jack Cafferty asks on CNN why the hell Obama won't pull out of Afghanistan until 2014. One wild guess: How about the 236 trillion cubic feet of natural gas reserves and over 200 billion barrels of oil in the Caspian region, that the Trans-Afghanistan Pipeline (TAPI) will facilitate. This might constitute a bigger national security interest than protecting Afghans from themselves. TAPI is finished in 2014, which happens to be Obama's pullout schedule.

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Copy of Da Vinci's 'Battle of Anghiari' that's been lost for 500 years - and possibly discovered under a fresco in Florence this year. Supposedly Da Vinci went ballistic and abandoned the project after a new paint mixture he concocted started dripping. He kicked the crap out of his assistants, shouted "merda", and blazed out of the palazzo.

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Imagine you got wind of organized crime in a government institution (maybe you are friends with a bureaucrat who likes his whiskey). Next imagine you gathered enough courage to go to the newspapers (maybe you also expect a bit of fame for exposing the dirt). Then imagine someone pulling a hood over your head (you just stepped out with your dog on a beautiful, sunny day). And finally imagine being thrown into jail - without due process of law - for the rest of your life (with a cellmate who has a peanut-shaped head and guarantees you protection, on one condition).

Chris Hedges on what will happen if the Supreme Court endorses the Espionage Act on whistleblowers...

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Sarkozy puts a French twist on diabolique. Be friends with a dictator. Use an illegal donation from the dictator to become president. Then bomb the dictator and his country to stone age, to get humanitarian points for the next election campaign.