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From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper.
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Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
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Moralism and ignorance are responsible for the constant stereotyping of prostitutes by their lowest common denominator -- the sick, strung-out addicts, couched on city stoops, who turn tricks for drug money. . . . The most successful prostitutes in history have been invisible. That invisibility was produced by their high intelligence, which gives them the power to perceive, and move freely but undetected in the social frame. The prostitute is a superb analyst, not only in evading the law but in initiating the unique constellation of convention and fantasy that produces a stranger’s orgasm. She lives by her wits as much as her body. She is a psychologist, actor, and dancer, a performance artist of hyper-developed sexual imagination.
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Camille Paglia (Vamps & Tramps: New Essays)
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A recent article in the Financial Analysts Journal confirmed what other studies (and the sad experience of many investors) have shown: that the fastest-growing companies tend to overheat and flame out.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The main lesson of thirty-five years of AI research is that the hard problems are easy and the easy problems are hard. . . . As the new generation of intelligent devices appears, it will be the stock analysts and petrochemical engineers and parole board members who are in danger of being replaced by machines. The gardeners, receptionists, and cooks are secure in their jobs for decades to come.
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Erik Brynjolfsson (The Second Machine Age: Work, Progress, and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies)
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The other buzzword that epitomizes a bias toward substitution is “big data.” Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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The intelligent investor will remember the wise words of financial analyst Mark Schweber: “The one question never to ask a bureaucrat is ‘Why?
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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We don’t want intelligence analysts to assume jihadist groups must be inept or that vicious regimes can’t be creatively vicious.
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Philip E. Tetlock (Superforecasting: The Art and Science of Prediction)
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Like a baseball umpire, an intelligence analyst risks being blamed when something goes wrong but receives little notice when she does her job well.
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Nate Silver (The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail-but Some Don't)
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A small stock trader is like a small hedge fund manager, zen monk, psychologist, intelligence officer, sniper, sportsman, poker player, risk manager, analyst, and economist, all in one.
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Mika (The Small Stock Trader) (The Small Stock Trader)
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The application of creative intelligence to a problem, the finding of a solution at once dogged, elegant, and wild, this had always seemed to him to be the essential business of human beings—the discovery of sense and causality amid the false leads, the noise, the trackless brambles of life. And yet he had always been haunted—had he not?—by the knowledge that there were men, lunatic cryptographers, mad detectives, who squandered their brilliance and sanity in decoding and interpreting the messages in cloud formations, in the letters of the Bible recombined, in the spots on butterflies’ wings. One might, perhaps, conclude from the existence of such men that meaning dwelled solely in the mind of the analyst. That it was the insoluble problems—the false leads and the cold cases—that reflected the true nature of things. That all the apparent significance and pattern had no more intrinsic sense than the chatter of an African gray parrot. One might so conclude; really, he thought, one might.
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Michael Chabon (The Final Solution)
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Intelligence analysts should be self-conscious about their reasoning processes. They should think about how they make judgments and reach conclusions, not just about the judgments and conclusions themselves.
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Richard Heuer
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Comey assured the ADL that the FBI would continue to “require every new FBI special agent and intelligence analyst in training to visit the Holocaust Museum” because “we want them to learn about abuse of power on a breathtaking scale.
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E. Michael Jones (Jewish Privilege)
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In October of 1973, when the Arab sneak attack almost drove us into the Mediterranean, we had all the intelligence in front of us, all the warning signs, and we had simply “dropped the ball.” We never considered the possibility of an all-out, coordinated, conventional assault from several nations, certainly not on our holiest of holidays. Call it stagnation, call it rigidity, call it an unforgivable herd mentality. Imagine a group of people all staring at writing on a wall, everyone congratulating one another on reading the words correctly. But behind that group is a mirror whose image shows the writing’s true message. No one looks at the mirror. No one thinks it’s necessary. Well, after almost allowing the Arabs to finish what Hitler started, we realized that not only was that mirror image necessary, but it must forever be our national policy. From 1973 onward, if nine intelligence analysts came to the same conclusion, it was the duty of the tenth to disagree. No matter how unlikely or far-fetched a possibility might be, one must always dig deeper. If a neighbor’s nuclear power plant might be used to make weapons-grade plutonium, you dig; if a dictator was rumored to be building a cannon so big it could fire anthrax shells across whole countries, you dig; and if there was even the slightest chance that dead bodies were being reanimated as ravenous killing machines, you dig and dig until you stike the absolute truth.
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Max Brooks (World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War)
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The most realistic distinction between the investor and the speculator is found in their attitude toward stock-market movements. The speculator’s primary interest lies in anticipating and profiting from market fluctuations. The investor’s primary interest lies in acquiring and holding suitable securities at suitable prices. Market movements are important to him in a practical sense, because they alternately create low price levels at which he would be wise to buy and high price levels at which he certainly should refrain from buying and probably would be wise to sell. It is far from certain that the typical investor should regularly hold off buying until low market levels appear, because this may involve a long wait, very likely the loss of income, and the possible missing of investment opportunities. On the whole it may be better for the investor to do his stock buying whenever he has money to put in stocks, except when the general market level is much higher than can be justified by well-established standards of value. If he wants to be shrewd he can look for the ever-present bargain opportunities in individual securities. Aside from forecasting the movements of the general market, much effort and ability are directed on Wall Street toward selecting stocks or industrial groups that in matter of price will “do better” than the rest over a fairly short period in the future. Logical as this endeavor may seem, we do not believe it is suited to the needs or temperament of the true investor—particularly since he would be competing with a large number of stock-market traders and first-class financial analysts who are trying to do the same thing. As in all other activities that emphasize price movements first and underlying values second, the work of many intelligent minds constantly engaged in this field tends to be self-neutralizing and self-defeating over the years. The investor with a portfolio of sound stocks should expect their prices to fluctuate and should neither be concerned by sizable declines nor become excited by sizable advances. He should always remember that market quotations are there for his convenience, either to be taken advantage of or to be ignored. He should never buy a stock because it has gone up or sell one because it has gone down. He would not be far wrong if this motto read more simply: “Never buy a stock immediately after a substantial rise or sell one immediately after a substantial drop.” An
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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All descriptions of how near certainty is to be achieved are based primarily on emerging technologies. A Global Information Grid of “persistent surveillance” will gather information and share that information in a networked “collaborative information environment.” Automated systems will fuse that intelligence and make possible “virtual collaboration among geographically dispersed” analysts who will generate intelligence and, ultimately, knowledge. Some even assume that this “robust intelligence” will deliver not only a clear appreciation for the current situation, but also generate “predictive intelligence” that will allow US forces to “anticipate the unexpected." Despite its enthusiastic embrace, the assumption of near-certainty in future war is a dangerous fallacy.
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H.R. McMaster
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An individual analyst also can brainstorm to produce a wider range of ideas than a group might generate, without regard for other analysts’ egos, opinions, or objections.
However, an individual will not have the benefit of others’ perspectives to help develop the ideas as fully. Moreover, an individual may have difficulty breaking free of his or her cognitive biases without the benefit of a diverse group.
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Central Intelligence Agency (A Tradecraft Primer: Structured Analytic Techniques for Improving Intelligence Analysis - Cognitive and Perceptual Biases, Reasoning Processes)
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We set up an effort, the Geocell, staffed it with smart young folks, teamed them up with imagery analysts from the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency (NGA), and then wired them directly to tactical units in the field. Old SIGINTers will tell you that this was just a version of what they used to call traffic analysis. If it was, it was on a massive dose of steroids. We put the Geocell in the basement among the heating ducts,
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Michael V. Hayden (Playing to the Edge: American Intelligence in the Age of Terror)
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For a psychoanalyst to be any good with Franny at all, he'd have to be a pretty peculiar type. I don't know. He'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place. He'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he wasn't run over by a goddam truck before he ever got his license to practice. He'd have to believe that it's through the grace of God that he has the native intelligence to be able to help his goddam patients at all. I don't know any good analysts who think along those lines. But that's the only kind of psychoanalyst who might be able to do Franny any good at all. If she got somebody terribly Freudian, or terribly eclectic, or just terribly run-of-the-mill - somebody who didn't even have any crazy, mysterious gratitude for his insight and intelligence - she'd come out of analysis in even worse shape.
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J.D. Salinger (Franny and Zooey)
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For years, the suspicion that Mr. Putin has a secret fortune has intrigued scholars, industry analysts, opposition figures, journalists and intelligence agencies but defied their efforts to uncover it. Numbers are thrown around suggesting that Mr. Putin may control $40 billion or even $70 billion, in theory making him the richest head of state in world history. For all the rumors and speculation, though, there has been little if any hard evidence, and Gunvor has adamantly denied any financial ties to Mr. Putin and repeated that denial on Friday. But Mr. Obama’s response to the Ukraine crisis, while derided by critics as slow and weak, has reinvigorated a 15-year global hunt for Mr. Putin’s hidden wealth. Now, as the Obama administration prepares to announce another round of sanctions as early as Monday targeting Russians it considers part of Mr. Putin’s financial circle, it is sending a not-very-subtle message that it thinks it knows where the Russian leader has his money, and that he could ultimately be targeted directly or indirectly. “It’s something that could be done that would send a very clear signal of taking the gloves off and not just dance around it,” said Juan C. Zarate, a White House counterterrorism adviser to President George W. Bush who helped pioneer the government’s modern financial campaign techniques to choke off terrorist money.
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Peter Baker
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Complex operations, in which agencies assume complementary roles and operate in close proximity-often with similar missions but conflicting mandates-accentuate these tensions. The tensions are evident in the processes of analyzing complex environments, planning for complex interventions, and implementing complex operations. Many reports and analyses forecast that these complex operations are precisely those that will demand our attention most in the indefinite future.
As essayist Barton and O'Connell note, our intelligence and understanding of the root cause of conflict, multiplicity of motivations and grievances, and disposition of actors is often inadequate. Moreover, the problems that complex operations are intended and implemented to address are convoluted, and often inscrutable. They exhibit many if not all the characteristics of "wicked problems," as enumerated by Rittel and Webber in 1973: they defy definitive formulations; any proposed solution or intervention causes the problem to mutate, so there is no second chance at a solution; every situation is unique; each wicked problem can be considered a symptom of another problem. As a result, policy objectives are often compound and ambiguous. The requirements of stability, for example, in Afghanistan today, may conflict with the requirements for democratic governance. Efforts to establish an equitable social contract may well exacerbate inter-communal tensions that can lead to violence. The rule of law, as we understand it, may displace indigenous conflict management and stabilization systems. The law of unintended consequences may indeed be the only law of the land. The complexity of the challenges we face in the current global environment would suggest the obvious benefit of joint analysis - bringing to bear on any given problem the analytic tools of military, diplomatic and development analysts. Instead, efforts to analyze jointly are most often an afterthought, initiated long after a problem has escalated to a level of urgency that negates much of the utility of deliberate planning.
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Michael Miklaucic (Commanding Heights: Strategic Lessons from Complex Operations)
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A 2011 study done by Alan Krueger, a Princeton economics professor who served for two years as the chairman of President Obama’s Council of Economic Advisers, and Stacy Dale, an analyst with Mathematica Policy Research, tried to adjust for that sort of thing. Krueger and Dale examined sets of students who had started college in 1976 and in 1989; that way, they could get a sense of incomes both earlier and later in careers. And they determined that the graduates of more selective colleges could expect earnings 7 percent greater than graduates of less selective colleges, even if the graduates in that latter group had SAT scores and high school GPAs identical to those of their peers at more exclusive institutions. But then Krueger and Dale made their adjustment. They looked specifically at graduates of less selective colleges who had applied to more exclusive ones even though they hadn’t gone there. And they discovered that the difference in earnings pretty much disappeared. Someone with a given SAT score who had gone to Penn State but had also applied to the University of Pennsylvania, an Ivy League school with a much lower acceptance rate, generally made the same amount of money later on as someone with an equivalent SAT score who was an alumnus of UPenn. It was a fascinating conclusion, suggesting that at a certain level of intelligence and competence, what drives earnings isn’t the luster of the diploma but the type of person in possession of it. If he or she came from a background and a mindset that made an elite institution seem desirable and within reach, then he or she was more likely to have the tools and temperament for a high income down the road, whether an elite institution ultimately came into play or not. This was powerfully reflected in a related determination that Krueger and Dale made in their 2011 study: “The average SAT score of schools that rejected a student is more than twice as strong a predictor of the student’s subsequent earnings as the average SAT score of the school the student attended.
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Frank Bruni (Where You Go Is Not Who You'll Be: An Antidote to the College Admissions Mania)
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Langley bred a certain type of person with great intention. The human resources department required nearly as sophisticated of analysts as the foreign intelligence department. Apply the massive computing technology of the CIA to hiring, along with the naive appeal of the exciting, though perhaps not so lucrative life of a spy, and any headhunter would be jealous of the results.
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Lynn Blackmar (Rebel)
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The ruling Indian National Congress did not receive adequate attention of our trainers. The talks were rudimentary and an avid reader of the national history that I was, could discern that the analysts were reluctant to talk freely on the ruling party. The communists and communalists were the fiercest ghosts to the intelligence community and their political masters. The ruling party was treated as Caesar’s Wife.
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Maloy Krishna Dhar (Open Secrets: The Explosive Memoirs of an Indian Intelligence Officer)
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There’s a stable, robust relationship between the patterns you’ve seen before and what you encounter today. But if you’re a stockbroker or political forecaster, the events of the past don’t have reliable implications for the present. Kahneman and Klein review evidence that experience helps physicists, accountants, insurance analysts, and chess masters—they all work in fields where cause-and-effect relationships are fairly consistent. But admissions officers, court judges, intelligence analysts, psychiatrists, and stockbrokers didn’t benefit much from experience. In a rapidly changing world, the lessons of experience can easily point us in the wrong direction.
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Adam M. Grant (Originals: How Non-Conformists Move the World)
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the lack of testing meant that intelligence analysts lacked robust feedback loops
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Amy B. Zegart (Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence)
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Many financial analysts will find Emerson and Emery more interesting and appealing stocks than the other two—primarily, perhaps, because of their better “market action,” and secondarily because of their faster recent growth in earnings. Under our principles of conservative investment the first is not a valid reason for selection—that is something for the speculators to play around with. The second has validity, but within limits. Can the past growth and the presumably good prospects of Emery Air Freight justify a price more than 60 times its recent earnings?1 Our answer would be: Maybe for someone who has made an in-depth study of the possibilities of this company and come up with exceptionally firm and optimistic conclusions. But not for the careful investor who wants to be reasonably sure in advance that he is not committing the typical Wall Street error of overenthusiasm for good performance in earnings and in the stock market.* The same cautionary statements seem called for in the case of Emerson Electric, with a special reference to the market’s current valuation of over a billion dollars for the intangible, or earning-power, factor here. We should add that the “electronics industry,” once a fair-haired child of the stock market, has in general fallen on disastrous days. Emerson is an outstanding exception, but it will have to continue to be such an exception for a great many years in the future before the 1970 closing price will have been fully justified by its subsequent performance. By contrast, both ELTRA at 27 and Emhart at 33 have the earmarks of companies with sufficient value behind their price to constitute reasonably protected investments. Here the investor can, if he wishes, consider himself basically a part owner of these businesses, at a cost corresponding to what the
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Such a procedure would divide the work between senior and junior analysts as follows: (1) The senior analyst would set up the formula to apply to all companies generally for determining past-performance value. (2) The junior analysts would work up such factors for the designated companies—pretty much in mechanical fashion. (3) The senior analyst would then determine to what extent a company’s performance—absolute or relative—is likely to differ from its past record, and what change should be made in the value to reflect such anticipated changes. It would be best if the senior analyst’s report showed both the original valuation and the modified one, with his reasons for the change. Is
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Today’s companies have an insatiable appetite for data, mistakenly believing that more data always creates more value. But big data is usually dumb data. Computers can find patterns that elude humans, but they don’t know how to compare patterns from different sources or how to interpret complex behaviors. Actionable insights can only come from a human analyst (or the kind of generalized artificial intelligence that exists only in science fiction).
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Peter Thiel (Zero to One: Notes on Startups, or How to Build the Future)
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The second possibility is of a quite different sort. Perhaps many of the security analysts are handicapped by a flaw in their basic approach to the problem of stock selection. They seek the industries with the best prospects of growth, and the companies in these industries with the best management and other advantages. The implication is that they will buy into such industries and such companies at any price, however high, and they will avoid less promising industries and companies no matter how low the price of their shares. This would be the only correct procedure if the earnings of the good companies were sure to grow at a rapid rate indefinitely in the future, for then in theory their value would be infinite. And if the less promising companies were headed for extinction, with no salvage, the analysts would be right to consider them unattractive at any price. The
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The second possibility is of a quite different sort. Perhaps many of the security analysts are handicapped by a flaw in their basic approach to the problem of stock selection. They seek the industries with the best prospects of growth, and the companies in these industries with the best management and other advantages. The implication is that they will buy into such industries and such companies at any price, however high, and they will avoid less promising industries and companies no matter how low the price of their shares. This would be the only correct procedure if the earnings of the good companies were sure to grow at a rapid rate indefinitely in the future, for then in theory their value would be infinite. And if the less promising companies were headed for extinction, with no salvage, the analysts would be right to consider them unattractive at any price. The truth about our corporate ventures is quite otherwise. Extremely few companies have been able to show a high rate of uninterrupted growth for long periods of time. Remarkably few, also, of the larger companies suffer ultimate extinction. For most, their history is one of vicissitudes, of ups and downs, of change in their relative standing. In some the variations “from rags to riches and back” have been repeated on almost a cyclical basis—the phrase used to be a standard one applied to the steel industry—for others spectacular changes have been identified with deterioration or improvement of management.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Readers of this book, however intelligent and knowing, could scarcely expect to do a better job of portfolio selection than the top analysts of the country. But if it is true that a fairly large segment of the stock market is often discriminated against or entirely neglected in the standard analytical selections, then the intelligent investor may be in a position to profit from the resultant undervaluations.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Five decades after December 7 and eight years before 9/11, Central Intelligence Agency analyst A. R. Northridge summarized these attitudes in a September 22, 1993, Pearl Harbor report: “It seems clear to me that we failed to foresee the Japanese assault largely because we were influenced by a faulty stereotype of what was an adversary nation.
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Craig Nelson (Pearl Harbor: From Infamy to Greatness)
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Discouraging risk-taking. Attempts to measure productivity through performance metrics have other, more subtle effects: they not only promote short-termism, as noted earlier, but also discourage initiative and risk-taking. The intelligence analysts who ultimately located Bin Laden worked on the problem for years. If measured at any point, their productivity would have seemed to be zero. Month after month, their failure rate was 100 percent, until they achieved success. From the perspective of their superiors, allowing the analysts to work on the project for years involved a high degree of risk: the investment in time might not have panned out. Yet really great achievements often depend on such risks. This is typical of situations involving long-term investments of manpower.
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Jerry Z. Muller (The Tyranny of Metrics)
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For a psychoanalyst to be any good with Franny at all, he'd have to be a pretty peculiar type. I don't know. He'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he'd been inspired to study psychoanalysis in the first place. He'd have to believe that it was through the grace of God that he wasn't run over by a goddam truck before he ever even got his license to practice. He'd have to believe that it's through the grace of God that he has the native intelligence to be able to help his goddam patients at all. I don't know any good analysts who think along those lines. But that's the only kin.d of psychoanalyst who might be able to do Franny any good at all.
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J.D. Salinger (Franny And Zooey)
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The smart guess matters to leaders now more than ever precisely because they face such a deluge of data—often with no clear map of what it portends for the future. As Richard Fairbank, CEO at Capital One, put it, “Finding a visionary strategy you believe as a leader is a very intuitive thing. There are many things a leader can’t predict using data. How do you know what you will need to have in three years? Yet you’ve got to start development now or you won’t have it when you need it. Our company hires brilliant data analysts; we have one of the biggest Oracle databases in the world. But at the end of the day, I find that all the data does is push us out farther on the frontier where it’s uncertain all over again.
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Daniel Goleman (Primal Leadership, With a New Preface by the Authors: Unleashing the Power of Emotional Intelligence (Unleashing the Power of Emotinal Intelligence))
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The English analyst Adam Phillips underscores this point in his book Monogamy: If it is the forbidden that is exciting—if desire is fundamentally transgressive—then the monogamous are like the very rich. They have to find their poverty. They have to starve themselves enough. In other words they have to work, if only to keep what is always too available sufficiently illicit to be interesting.
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Esther Perel (Mating in Captivity: Unlocking Erotic Intelligence)
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analysis done across the global intelligence community is in a transitional stage from a mental activity performed predominantly by a sole analyst to a collaborative team or group activity.
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Richards J. Heuer Jr. (Structured Analytic Techniques for Intelligence Analysis)
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Perhaps many of the security analysts are handicapped by a flaw in their basic approach to the problem of stock selection. They seek the industries with the best prospects of growth, and the companies in these industries with the best management and other advantages. The implication is that they will buy into such industries and such companies at any price, however high, and they will avoid less promising industries and companies no matter how low the price of their shares. This would be the only correct procedure if the earnings of the good companies were sure to grow at a rapid rate indefinitely in the future, for then in theory their value would be infinite. And if the less promising companies were headed for extinction, with no salvage, the analysts would be right to consider them unattractive at any price.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The ability to quickly analyze data is vital for a system of countering the laundering of the proceeds of crime, and computerized databases and analytical tools are an important element in achieving this goal. Nevertheless, it is important to keep in mind that electronic databases and software can only facilitate the work of analysts, not replace it.
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International Monetary Fund (Financial Intelligence Units: An Overview)
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The phrase “conflict of interest” barely begins to describe Tom Lanphier’s rabidly partisan approach to advising one of the most powerful congressional allies of the American military-industrial complex. Yet he was in good company. Air force intelligence was crammed with highly competitive analysts who believed they were in a zero-sum game not only with the Russians but also with the army and the navy. If they could make the missile-gap theory stick, America would have to respond with a crash ICBM program of its own. The dominance of the Strategic Air Command in the U.S. military hierarchy would be complete—and Convair would profit mightily. It is hardly surprising that the information Lanphier fed to Symington and Symington to every politician and columnist who would listen was authoritative, alarming, and completely, disastrously wrong. Symington’s “on the record” projection of Soviet nuclear strength, given to Senate hearings on the missile gap in late 1959, was that by 1962 they would have three thousand ICBMs. The actual number was four. Symington’s was a wild guess, an extrapolation based on extrapolations by air force generals who believed it was only responsible to take Khrushchev at his word when, for example, he told journalists in Moscow that a single Soviet factory was producing 250 rockets a year, complete with warheads. Symington knew what he was doing. He wanted to be president and believed rightly that missile-gap scaremongering had helped the Democrats pick up nearly fifty seats in Congress in the 1958 midterm elections. But everyone was at it. The 1958 National Intelligence Estimate had forecast one hundred Soviet ICBMs by 1960 and five hundred by 1962. In January 1960 Allen Dulles, who should have known better because he did know better, told Eisenhower that even though the U-2 had shown no evidence of mass missile production, the Russians could still somehow conjure up two hundred of them in eighteen months. On the political left a former congressional aide called Frank Gibney wrote a baseless five-thousand-word cover story for Harper’s magazine accusing the administration of giving the Soviets a six-to-one lead in ICBMs. (Gibney also recommended putting “a system of really massive retaliation” on the moon.) On the right, Vice President Nixon quietly let friends and pundits know that he felt his own boss didn’t quite get the threat. And in the middle, Joe Alsop wrote a devastating series of columns syndicated to hundreds of newspapers in which he calculated that the Soviets would have 150 ICBMs in ten months flat and suggested that by not matching them warhead for warhead the president was playing Russian roulette with the national future. Alsop, who lived well but expensively in a substantial house in Georgetown, was the Larry King of his day—dapper, superbly well connected, and indefatigable in the pursuit of a good story. His series ran in the last week of January 1960. Khrushchev read it in translation and resolved to steal the thunder of the missile-gap lobby, which was threatening to land him with an arms race that would bankrupt Communism. Before the four-power summit, which was now scheduled for Paris in mid-May, he would offer to dismantle his entire ICBM stockpile. No one needed to know how big or small it was; they just needed to know that he was serious about disarmament. He revealed his plan to the Presidium of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at a secret meeting in the Kremlin on
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Giles Whittell (Bridge of Spies: A True Story of the Cold War)
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An unknown software company with fifty plus workers (do I need to call them software engineers or analysts?) would price its issue at a valuation higher than that of Infosys. Even that would be received by the market with both the hands open and chest wide. People
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Chellamuthu Kuppusamy (The Science of Stock Market Investment - Practical Guide to Intelligent Investors)
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In the West, military intelligence (MI) analysts have long followed a simple premise: Assess enemy capabilities, not intentions.
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Daniel P. Bolger (Why We Lost: A General's Inside Account of the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars)
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Similarly, the defense of intellectualization, which employs abstract thinking in an effort to prevent awareness of conflictual emotions, is often the predominant defense of highly intelligent people, whose capacity for abstract thinking has significant adaptive uses. For the analyst to interpret only the defensive aspect (“You intellectualize rather than feel”) is to risk leaving the patient with the sense that there is something wrong with his or her capacity to think. Hartmann’s precise distinctions offered clinicians greater specificity in pinpointing both conflictual and adaptive aspects of psychic functioning.
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Stephen A. Mitchell (Freud and Beyond: A History of Modern Psychoanalytic Thought)
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The question raised in this book is whether one could go one step further. If the analyst relies on the patient's unconscious mental activity, if the patient has the faculty to work alone toward the solution of some problem, could this faculty be utilized in a more deliberate fashion? Could the patient scrutinize his self-observations or his associations with his own critical intelligence?
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Anonymous
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The work of a financial analyst falls somewhere in the middle between that of a mathematician and of an orator.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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If we feel ourselves valuable, then we will feel our time to be valuable, and if we feel our time to be valuable, then we will want to use it well. The financial analyst who procrastinated did not value her time. If she had, she would not have allowed herself to spend most of her day so unhappily and unproductively. It was not without consequence for her that throughout her childhood she was “farmed out” during all school vacations to live with paid foster parents although her parents could have taken care of her perfectly well had they wanted to. They did not value her. They did not want to care for her. So she grew up feeling herself to be of little value, not worth caring for; therefore she did not care for herself. She did not feel she was worth disciplining herself. Despite the fact that she was an intelligent and competent woman she required the most elementary instruction in self-discipline because she lacked a realistic assessment of her own worth and the value of her own time. Once she was able to perceive her time as being valuable, it naturally followed that she wanted to organize it and protect it and make maximum use
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M. Scott Peck (The Road Less Traveled: A New Psychology of Love, Traditional Values and Spiritual Growth)
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He was no longer, at least in his mind, the most wanted man in America. He was an analyst, a seer, a prognosticator going over his reams of data, moving their pieces, twisting them, testing them, discounting some, fleshing out others, slowly transforming disjointed intelligence into something that made sense.
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David Baldacci (The Escape (John Puller #3))
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uninhabitable for the first time since it was declared America’s capital in 1790, and the scientific community predicts that it will remain so for a decade. The stock market plunges as investors anticipate draconian customs regimes that will choke global trade. Fear of further attacks paralyzes America and much of the Western world. Hours after the explosion, a little known terrorist group claims responsibility. It is the first time the president, who was not in Washington at the time of the blast, and his surviving cabinet members, including the director of national intelligence, have heard of the group. After searching intelligence databases, analysts report that the group is linked to three hostile governments, all of which have issued statements condemning the
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Benjamin Schwartz (Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism)
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attack and denying involvement. It will take weeks for the remnants of the US intelligence community to assess that one of these three governments is probably lying, but even then the US government won’t have irrefutable evidence of complicity. Unlike a ballistic missile or bomb delivered by enemy land-, air-, or seacraft, the origin of what analysts will call a “container-based improvised nuclear device” is difficult to determine and impossible to prove. Nuclear forensics will ultimately provide strong evidence that the fissile material used in the device originated from the country under suspicion. Signals intelligence will record celebrations and praise of the attack by midlevel officials in that country’s military and intelligence establishment. However, the intelligence reporting taken as a whole will
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Benjamin Schwartz (Right of Boom: The Aftermath of Nuclear Terrorism)
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We have a system of terrorism research in which intelligence analysts know everything but understand nothing, while academics understand everything but know nothing,
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Anonymous
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The CIA had no doubt that the weapons were there, while the Pentagon was unsure whether the capacity to make them even existed. It was as if the intelligence analysts were saying that they were confident that Saddam’s wife was ready to give birth, but remained uncertain if she was pregnant.
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Kurt Eichenwald (500 Days: Secrets and Lies in the Terror Wars)
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His missions for Mossad had been many, an almost formulaic process. The planning invariably opened with incriminating photos, which meant his first impression of every target began the process of demonization. A shadowed figure planting explosives or running from the scene of a shooting. A fingerprint lifted and matched from a tiny piece of shrapnel. If Slaton’s involvement became necessary, it meant a trial of sorts had already been run, albeit without a table for the defense. Intelligence analysts acted as prosecutors, their evidence documented and presented in vivid color—red predominating. Spymaster judges delivered verdicts and passed sentences. Slaton? His part was simplest of all, that of an executioner who didn’t need a black mask because he existed in a black world
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Ward Larsen (Assassin's Silence (David Slaton, #3))
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The need to engage Hamas at all levels remains vital, a position articulated by several analysts and negotiators including John Hume, who shared the Nobel Peace Prize for his work on the Belfast Agreement, and a group of senior intelligence officers at the U.S. Central Command (CENTCOM) in June 2010.
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Sara Roy ([(Hamas and Civil Society in Gaza: Engaging the Islamist Social Sector)] [Author: Sara Roy] published on (December, 2013))
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The contrary is almost certain to be true in the long run. The defensive investor must confine himself to the shares of important companies with a long record of profitable operations and in strong financial condition. (Any security analyst worth his salt could make up such a list.) Aggressive investors may buy other types of common stocks, but they should be on a definitely attractive basis as established by intelligent analysis.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Our benefactor is retired Army Command Sergeant Major, a decorated Korean War veteran, who was given what we call a “plum assignment” at SHAPE just outside of Paris where he worked as an intelligence analyst and was given a Cosmic Top Secret clearance, the highest in the Command. It was there that his profound inner transformation from innocent “good soldier” to disillusioned, concerned citizen took place.
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Paul T. Hellyer (The Money Mafia: A World in Crisis)
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Another common issue is the lack of interdisciplinarity in the transformation. In our experience, the highest impact is the result of multi-lever end-to-end process automation – not small, siloed implementations, focused on one single technology lever. To achieve this, management should advocate for getting the right talents from across the different parts of an organization to work together (e.g., data scientists, developers, business analysts). Interdisciplinarity is also about avoiding limiting the transformation to the implementation of one single technology lever (e.g., RPA), and about implementing IA on end-to-end processes instead of only a few process tasks. By combining talents and technology levers and targeting end-to-end processes, the organization will create synergies, build economies of scale, and remove potential bottlenecks. Organizations failing to achieve this are not able to scale their IA transformation.
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Pascal Bornet (INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human)
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The talent required within the CoE is wide and ranges from business and operations excellence to risk and IT departments. According to McKinsey’s survey, the CoE of top-performing companies includes a large variety of profiles such as delivery managers, data scientists, data engineers, workflow integrators, system architects, developers, and, most critically, translators and business analysts.152 A
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Pascal Bornet (INTELLIGENT AUTOMATION: Learn how to harness Artificial Intelligence to boost business & make our world more human)
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It’s difficult for analysts to get better at predicting when they don’t know if their past predictions were ever any good.30
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Amy B. Zegart (Spies, Lies, and Algorithms: The History and Future of American Intelligence)
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Once the Bermuda regulatory details were under control, Morgan Stanley would need to arrange with at least one of the ratings agencies to receive an investment-grade rating for the new Bermuda company’s bonds. There are two primary ratings agencies, Moody’s Investor Services and Standard and Poor’s, and numerous secondary agencies. I always found Moody’s analysts to be more intelligent and creative than analysts at any other agency. However, when you really needed a rating, there was only one choice: Standard and Poor’s, known as S&P. It might surprise you that private entities can pay for their credit ratings. Most people assume that credit rating agencies are principled and accurate, and that S&P in particular is above reproach because it is at least partially accountable to the federal government. Certainly S&P and Moody’s Investors Services are two of the premiere ratings agencies in the United States, and the Securities and Exchange Commission regulates each as a Nationally Recognized Statistical Ratings Organization. However, it’s also true that although ratings agencies once provided information about particular debt issues without charging the issuer of the debt, today—and for the past two decades—such agencies have been collecting credit rating fees from issuers, simply for telling investors what credit rating they assign that issuer’s debt. A rating isn’t cheap, either. Fees typically range from $30,000 on up, more for large and complicated deals such as PLUS Notes. Because S&P also had to preserve its reputation, for some deals you simply could not buy a rating. For a while these Bermuda bonds appeared to be one of those deals, and it looked as if Morgan Stanley might not be able to obtain an investment-grade rating at any price.
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Frank Partnoy (FIASCO: Blood in the Water on Wall Street)
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Instead of listening to Hoffman and his lapdog analysts, traders should have heeded the honest warning in Commerce One’s annual report for 1999: “We have never been profitable. We expect to incur net losses for the foreseeable future and we may never be profitable.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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HouJeng provides expert betting picks and tips for horse races around Hong Kong using artificial intelligence. We Are A Collective Of Data Analysts And Machine Learning Enthusiasts. We Enjoy The Complexities Of Data Forecasting And Data Analysis. Boost your horse racing betting with our horse racing betting tips for today.
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HouJeng
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Noyce recalled that the group had some slight qualms about running their own business, but these doubts were easily overcome by “the realization, for the first time, that you had a chance at making more money than you ever dreamed of.” The dream, as it happened, came true. Even by high-tech standards, that $500 turned out to be a spectacular investment. In 1968 the founders sold their share of Fairchild Semiconductor back to the parent company; Noyce’s proceeds—the return on his initial $500 investment—came to $250,000. Noyce and his friend Gordon Moore had by then found another financial backer and started a new firm, Intel Corporation (the name is a play on both Intelligence and Integrated Electronics). Intel started out making chips for computer memories, a business that took off like a rocket. Intel’s shares were traded publicly for the first time in 1971—on the same day, coincidentally, that Playboy Enterprises went public. On that first day, stock in the two firms was about equally priced; a year later, Intel’s shares were worth more than twice as much as Playboy’s. “Wall Street has spoken,” an investment analyst observed. “It’s memories over mammaries.” Today, Intel is a multibillion-dollar company, and anybody who held on to the founding group’s stake in the company is a billionaire several times over.
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T.R. Reid (The Chip: How Two Americans Invented the Microchip and Launched a Revolution)
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After all,” he may say, “the rules you have outlined are pretty simple and easygoing. A highly trained analyst ought to be able to use all his skill and techniques to improve substantially on something as obvious as the Dow Jones list. If not, what good are all his statistics, calculations, and pontifical judgments?
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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In the end, the entire 6th Army was dissolved, replaced eventually by units from the 9th Army from Wonsan. The process dragged on for many months. To this day, the exact reasons remain a mystery. Intelligence analysts tend to dismiss the story of the attempted coup. Over the years many reports of attempted putsches, rebellions, and assassination attempts have emerged from North Korea—as yet, none of them confirmed. The most plausible explanation about the 6th Army is that it was disbanded because Kim Jong-il wanted more control over its financial activities.
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Barbara Demick (Nothing to Envy: Ordinary Lives in North Korea)
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It is better for Russia or Ukraine because they know who their enemies are and who they are fighting .
Us we don’t know who our enemies are , but they keep on fighting us from within.
They are using our people. They are using our resources.
They are using our intelligence’s. They are using our media.
They are using our platform. They are using our parliament.
They are using our constitution. They are using our buildings.
They are using our court. They had infiltrated us. We had been compromised.
They are within us. They are now one of our own. our NGO’s, our foundations, our political parties, our Media houses , our journalists , our institutions, our politicians, and our analysts.
That is why we have internal wars that never ends but results into factions and sabotaging.
These Internal battles are started by these agents of destruction. These hired guns or spies within us.
There are there to break the system, cause confusion, dysfunction, destabilization, chaos ,spread propaganda and to promote divisive politics. They are there to poison the minds of our people. Our enemies are next to us. We see them and great them everyday. While they are plotting against us .
Judas Iscariot is not the only one to sell his friend and he won’t be the last.
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D.J. Kyos
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The perpetrator of such a misdemeanor must have a motive. Is UMMO the private joke of a group of Spanish engineers? Is it a psychological warfare exercise, as some French analysts suspect? Or is the truth more complex, rooted in a social reality where the ideas and symbols of UMMO have acquired a life of their own, their special mythology, and a set of beliefs that feed on themselves?
We can at least be certain of one thing: the UMMO documents do not come from advanced beings trying to demonstrate their existence to us. But try to explain it to their disciples! Very few UFO believers, and even fewer of their New Age counterparts, have any formal training in science. They are easily awed by any document that contains a few equations and a numerical system of base 12. Yet if they had some awareness of modern technology, they would realize how easy it should be for an advanced race to prove its genuine skill to a society like the human race.
After reading the masses of documents purportedly coming from the planet UMMO, I asked myself: if I had the opportunity to communicate with intelligent beings of an earlier time, such as the high priests of Egypt, how would I establish a meaningful dialogue? I certainly would not insult them by sending a letter beginning with ”We are aware of the transcendence of what we are about to tell you”—especially if I had an imperfect command of hieroglyphics! Instead, I would concentrate on a few points of valuable, verifiable information. Since the Egyptians already knew how to make electrical batteries and were aware of the magnetic properties of certain minerals, I would send them a simple set of instructions to make a coil and a compass. I could explain resistance and Ohm’s Law, a simple equation that was easily within the grasp of their mathematicians. Or I would tell them about making glass and lenses from sand. If they wanted proof, I would not bother to reveal to them set theory or the fact that E is equal to mc2. Instead, I would send them a table predicting future eclipses, or a diagram to build an alternator, or Leonardo da Vinci’s design for variable-speed cogwheels. That should get the attention of the top scientists in their culture and open up a dialogue. Unfortunately, the extraterrestrials of UMMO and other planets never seem to communicate at this level. Are they afraid of collapsing our society by appearing too advanced with respect to us? This hypothesis does not hold, since they have chosen a very obvious way of showing themselves in our skies.
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Jacques F. Vallée (Revelations)
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Given the recent remarkable advances in artificial intelligence, scouting will probably involve “algorithmic warfare,” with competing AI systems plowing through vast amounts of data to identify patterns of enemy behavior that might elude human analysts. Identifying enemy operational tendencies may also aid commanders in employing their forces more effectively, similar to the way the introduction of operations research aided the allies in identifying effective convoy operations during the Battle of the Atlantic in World War II.30 AI could potentially assist efforts to develop malware, which could be used to erase or corrupt enemy scouting information, including the enemy’s AI algorithms themselves. If these efforts are successful, enemy commanders may lose confidence in their scouts, producing a “mission kill,” in which much of the enemy’s scouting force continues to operate but where its product is suspect.
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Andrew F. Krepinevich (The Origins of Victory: How Disruptive Military Innovation Determines the Fates of Great Powers)
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We lack space here to discuss in detail the pros and cons of market forecasting. A great deal of brain power goes into this field, and undoubtedly some people can make money by being good stock-market analysts. But it is absurd to think that the general public can ever make money out of market forecasts. For who will buy when the general public, at a given signal, rushes to sell out at a profit? If you, the reader, expect to get rich over the years by following some system or leadership in market forecasting, you must be expecting to try to do what countless others are aiming at, and to be able to do it better than your numerous competitors in the market. There is no basis either in logic or in experience for assuming that any typical or average investor can anticipate market movements more successfully than the general public, of which he is himself a part. There is one aspect of the “timing” philosophy which seems to have escaped everyone’s notice. Timing is of great psychological importance to the speculator because he wants to make his profit in a hurry. The idea of waiting a year before his stock moves up is repugnant to him. But a waiting period, as such, is of no consequence to the investor. What advantage is there to him in having his money uninvested until he receives some (presumably) trustworthy signal that the time has come to buy? He enjoys an advantage only if by waiting he succeeds in buying later at a sufficiently lower price to offset his loss of dividend income. What this means is that timing is of no real value to the investor unless it coincides with pricing—that is, unless it enables him to repurchase his shares at substantially under his previous selling price.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The only people one really should detest are the interpretation professionals, the specialists in violence by insinuation, the intention-mongers and responsibility merchants. The critics, for whom every divergence betrays the author 's sensibilities. The analysts, for whom every show of reserve is a mark of obscure resistance and bad faith towards oneself. The champions of artificial intelligence who take you for temperamentally maladjusted (which is true) and look pitingly on you if you don't play their game.
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Jean Baudrillard (Fragments)
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Because the general prospects of the enterprise carry major weight in the establishment of market prices, it is natural for the security analyst to devote a great deal of attention to the economic position of the industry and of the individual company in its industry. Studies of this kind can go into unlimited detail. They are sometimes productive of valuable insights into important factors that will be operative in the future and are insufficiently appreciated by the current market. Where a conclusion of that kind can be drawn with a fair degree of confidence, it affords a sound basis for investment decisions. Our own observation, however, leads us to minimize somewhat the practical value of most of the industry studies that are made available to investors. The material developed is ordinarily of a kind with which the public is already fairly familiar and that has already exerted considerable influence on market quotations. Rarely does one find a brokerage-house study that points out, with a convincing array of facts, that a popular industry is heading for a fall or that an unpopular one is due to prosper. Wall Street’s view of the longer future is notoriously fallible, and this necessarily applies to that important part of its investigations which is directed toward the forecasting of the course of profits in various industries. We must recognize, however, that the rapid and pervasive growth of technology in recent years is not without major effect on the attitude and the labors of the security analyst. More so than in the past, the progress or retrogression of the typical company in the coming decade may depend on its relation to new products and new processes, which the analyst may have a chance to study and evaluate in advance. Thus there is doubtless a promising area for effective work by the analyst, based on field trips, interviews with research men, and on intensive technological investigation on his own. There are hazards connected with investment conclusions derived chiefly from such glimpses into the future, and not supported by presently demonstrable value. Yet there are perhaps equal hazards in sticking closely to the limits of value set by sober calculations resting on actual results. The investor cannot have it both ways. He can be imaginative and play for the big profits that are the reward for vision proved sound by the event; but then he must run a substantial risk of major or minor miscalculation. Or he can be conservative, and refuse to pay more than a minor premium for possibilities as yet unproved; but in that case he must be prepared for the later contemplation of golden opportunities foregone.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Hindsight biases influence the evaluation of intelligence reporting in three ways: • Analysts normally overestimate the accuracy of their past judgments. • Intelligence consumers normally underestimate how much they learned from intelligence reports. • Overseers of intelligence production who conduct post-mortem analyses of an intelligence failure normally judge that events were more readily foreseeable than was in fact the case.
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Richards J. Heuer Jr. (Psychology of Intelligence Analysis)
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During my career I’ve worked with intelligence agencies and experts of every kind, from a young lieutenant, battalion-level intelligence officer to all sixteen branches of the U.S. intelligence community. With rare exceptions, intelligence analysts do all they can to give you the information and facts you need to understand the enemy and the situation and come up with the best decision.
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Colin Powell (It Worked for Me: In Life and Leadership)
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made worse during the 1930s by Stalin’s increasing tendency to act as his own intelligence analyst. Stalin, indeed, actively discouraged intelligence analysis by others, which he condemned as “dangerous guesswork.
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Christopher Andrew (The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB)
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He speaks always in reference to a real world, thoroughly experienced and understood. His words keep an almost physical hold on 'what I have touched with my hands and what have touched me...' Surely this is the power that we have periodically sensed in what is called (vulgarly) 'the vulgar tongue. It is a language under the discipline of experience, not of ideas or rules. Shaw's words, always interposed between experience and intelligence, have the exactitude of conviction, whereas the words of an analyst or theorist can have only the exactitude of definition.
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Wendell Berry (What Are People For?)
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Analysts must have a "duty of curiosity," and the analytic process must encourage and reward a deep and meaningful understanding of the phenomena
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Jeffrey R. Cooper (The CIA's Program for Improving Intelligence Analysis - "Curing Analytic Pathologies")
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In the past few centuries what was once the European and then the American periphery became the core of the world economy,” writes Financial Times analyst Martin Wolf. “Now, the economies of the periphery are re-emerging as the core. This is transforming the entire world … this is far and away the biggest single fact about our world.
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Nicolas Berggruen (Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East)
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Make no mistake: LIBERALS control the Deep State. Writing for National Review a few years back, Fred Fleitz, a retired CIA analyst, wrote how LIBERALS had taken control of our intelligence agencies. According to Fleitz, who is vice president of the Center for Security Policy, a Washington think tank, the Clinton years were like a Petri dish for the politicization of the CIA. “The liberal tilt within the CIA, especially in the Directorate of Intelligence (the analysis office), grew worse during the Clinton years as personnel were hired and promoted to support Clinton-Gore policy objectives,” 2 he wrote. Those policy objectives didn’t seem to include keeping the United States safe from Osama bin Laden.
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Jeanine Pirro (Liars, Leakers, and Liberals: The Case Against the Anti-Trump Conspiracy)
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In the previous chapter, reference was made to two factors which promoted a person’s recovery from neurotic disorders: first, the adoption of some scheme or system of thought which appeared to make sense of the patient’s distress; secondly, the achievement of a fruitful relationship with another person. The need to make sense of one’s experience is, of course, not confined to neurotic distress, but is an essential part of man’s adaptation as a species. The development of intelligence, of consciousness, of partial emancipation from the governance of instinctive patterns, has made man into a reflective animal who feels the need to interpret, and to bring order to, both the world of external reality and the inner world of his imagination. Much of the emphasis placed on the transference situation in psycho-analysis is due to its being an element common to different psycho-analytic schools. The factor of making sense of the patient’s experience is underemphasized partly because different analysts may view the same experience in very different ways. In the end, one has to make sense of one’s own life, however influential guidance from mentors may have been. The pattern made is not necessarily ‘true’ in any provable fashion, although it is possible to say that some views are closer to what is objectively known of the world than are others. But the need is there; and if it appears more obviously in the psychology of introverts, convergers, and patterners than it does in the psychology of extraverts, divergers, and dramatists, this does not mean that it is not present in the latter group as well as in the former. Even the most introverted persons need some human relationships; even the most extraverted persons need some pattern and order in their lives.
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Anthony Storr (Solitude a Return to the Self)
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Zeira’s confidence was rooted in the protocols of meetings at the highest levels of the Egyptian government. The protocols were provided by Dr. Ashraf Marwan, Nasser’s son-in-law. Marwan had approached Israeli intelligence after the Six-Day War and offered his services. He provided Israel with a large number of internal Egyptian documents. Two documents in particular stood out to Israeli intelligence analysts. The first was a transcript from a meeting held in Moscow on January 22, 1970, between Nasser and the Russian general staff. Nasser explained that to regain the Sinai, two preconditions must be met. First, he needed Scud missiles to attack Israel’s cities. Second, his air force needed long-range fighter bombers capable of striking deep into enemy territory and destroying their fortified command centers. The second document was a letter written by Sadat to the Soviet premier on August 30, 1972, reiterating Nasser’s position that without bombers and missiles, Egypt could not retake the Sinai. When these requests were denied, Israeli intelligence concluded that the possibility of an Egyptian attack was close to zero. Intelligence also concluded that Syria would not go to war without Egypt. Zeira maintained that war was not to be expected because the Arabs did not have enough air power to allow them to strike deep into Israel and challenge the Israel Air Force and did not possess long-range ground-to-ground missiles to deter—by threat of retaliation—deep Israeli air strikes.
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Eric Gartman (Return to Zion: The History of Modern Israel)
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CIA analysts aren’t perfect and they often pay the price. John McLaughlin, a courtly intellectual who served twice as acting director, is also an accomplished magician; on a visit to Moscow he dazzled his Russian intelligence counterparts with feats of sleight of hand, turning a 10,000 ruble note into 100,000. But when McLaughlin and his fellow analysts botch an intelligence estimate—as with Iraq’s WMDs—their mistakes do not magically vanish. “Analysts write things down, venturing assessment and prediction on issues that are contentious, sometimes unknowable,” he said. “They are hanging out there in words that never go away. Very few others in government do that. No one understands any of this.” CIA operatives are a different breed; brash and outgoing, they practice deception and seduction, enticing strangers to betray their countries.
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Chris Whipple (The Spymasters: How the CIA Directors Shape History and the Future)
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Without solid information, a military is open to feints and surprises and is likely to miss opportunities. Intelligence aids in the production, use, and conservation of power.37 In short, the right intelligence can lead to better and more rational policy-making. In a world full of many possible threats, contingencies, and opportunities, sound intelligence can help policy-makers prioritize objectives and tasks. Once focused, policy-makers rely on accurate information and analysis to guide their decisions, as no policy-maker can ever hope to know offhand all that he or she must about a potential adversary or a geopolitical event. Good intelligence can also sometimes act as a brake on unchecked ideology. Although policy-makers largely retain decision-making power, well-reasoned analysis can minimize the degree to which decisions rely on hunches, biases, and predispositions. By accurately and fairly framing issues, intelligence can ensure that reason has a place in government. This is a role long prized by some famous analysts.38 But intelligence collection can be threatening to the state targeted by the operation. States must bear additional costs to keep their operations secret. If
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Ben Buchanan (The Cybersecurity Dilemma: Hacking, Trust and Fear Between Nations)
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It casts some little doubt in my mind as to the complete dependability of the popular belief among analysts that prominent and promising companies will now always sell at high price-earnings ratios—that this is a fundamental fact of life for investors and they may as well accept and like it. I have no desire at all to be dogmatic on this point. All I can say is that it is not settled in my mind, and each of you must seek to settle it for yourself.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Ideally, perhaps, the security analyst should pick out the three or four companies whose future he thinks he knows the best, and concentrate his own and his clients’ interest on what he forecasts for them. Unfortunately, it appears to be almost impossible to distinguish in advance between those individual forecasts which can be relied upon and those which are subject to a large chance of error. At bottom, this is the reason for the wide diversification practiced by the investment funds. For it is undoubtedly better to concentrate on one stock that you know is going to prove highly profitable, rather than dilute your results to a mediocre figure, merely for diversification’s sake. But this is not done, because it cannot be done dependably. 4 The prevalence of wide diversification is in itself a pragmatic repudiation of the fetish of “selectivity,” to which Wall Street constantly pays lip service.*
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Use of Average Earnings In former times analysts and investors paid considerable attention to the average earnings over a fairly long period in the past—usually from seven to ten years. This “mean figure”* was useful for ironing out the frequent ups and downs of the business cycle, and it was thought to give a better idea of the company’s earning power than the results of the latest year alone. One important advantage of such an averaging process is that it will solve the problem of what to do about nearly all the special charges and credits. They should be included in the average earnings. For certainly most of these losses and gains represent a part of the company’s operating history. If we do this for ALCOA, the average earnings for 1961–1970 (ten years) would appear as $3.62 and for the seven years 1964–1970 as $4.62 per share. If such figures are used in conjunction with ratings for growth and stability of earnings during the same period, they could give a really informing picture of the company’s past performance.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Calculation of the Past Growth Rate It is of prime importance that the growth factor in a company’s record be taken adequately into account. Where the growth has been large the recent earnings will be well above the seven-or ten-year average, and analysts may deem these long-term figures irrelevant. This need not be the case. The earnings can be given in terms both of the average and the latest figure. We suggest that the growth rate itself be calculated by comparing the average of the last three years with corresponding figures ten years earlier.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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The OSS had developed a uniquely American cadre of intelligence analysts, but Donovan and his star officer, Allen W. Dulles, were enthralled by espionage and sabotage, skills at which Americans were amateurs. Donovan depended on British intelligence to school his men in the dark arts. The bravest of the OSS, the ones who inspired legends, were the men who jumped behind enemy lines, running guns, blowing up bridges, plotting against the Nazis with the French and the Balkan resistance movements.
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Tim Weiner (Legacy of Ashes: The History of the CIA)
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and talked about sports and weapons before the morning briefings, their camaraderie interrupted only by the occasional locker-room prank. It was home, and Josh had to admit that he had missed it, although the conference was rewarding in ways he hadn’t anticipated. Knowing he was part of a larger community of chief analysts, people who shared the same life experiences as him, people who had the same problems and fears as he did, was surprisingly comforting. In Jakarta, he was head of analysis, he had a team that worked for him, and he answered only to the station chief; but he had no real peers, no one to really talk to. Intelligence work was a lonely profession, especially for the people in charge. It had certainly taken its toll on some of his old friends. Many had aged well beyond their years. Others had become hardened and distant. After seeing them, Josh had wondered if he would end up that way. Everything had a price, but he believed in the work they were doing. No job was perfect. As his thoughts drifted back from the conference, he realized the elevator should have opened by now. When he turned his head to look around, the elevator lights blurred, like a video in slow motion. His body felt heavy.
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A.G. Riddle (The Atlantis Gene (The Origin Mystery, #1))
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I have little confidence even in the ability of analysts, let alone untrained investors, to select common stocks that will give better than average results. Consequently, I feel that the standard portfolio should be to duplicate, more or less, the DJIA.
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Benjamin Graham (The Intelligent Investor)
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Psychoanalysis does not only heal by making an individual's life intelligible. It is not only about making the subject understand his life, but also about making him live again and liquidating, within his relationship with the analyst, his ancient conflicts. With transference, the subject takes up the totality of his attitudes toward people and objects that make him what he is. All of his past object relationships reappear in his current relationship with the psychoanalyst. This relationship has nothing to do with his life's relations. The analyst does not intervene, he does not speak, he observes with an absolute impartiality. In not deciding for the subject, the analyst makes the subject decide for himself. The analytic situation substitutes the transference neurosis for a neurosis. It is therefore about an entirely different thing than a simple operation of knowledge. The relations revealed by psychoanalytic psychology could be true without psychoanalytic practice succeeding to heal, as inversely psychoanalytic art could be beneficial without Freud's theoretical explanations being founded. Psychoanalytic ideology could constitute a symbolic system that grasps neurosis without necessarily requiring that we hold it for a true philosophy. The diffusion of psychoanalytic psychology is inevitable because it is interested in everything and it is necessary for its progress to know.
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Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Child Psychology and Pedagogy: The Sorbonne Lectures 1949-1952 (Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy))
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During this time of high tension between the Americans and Soviets, any incident in which nuclear weapons were even marginally involved commanded immediate attention at the highest levels of the military. The more intelligence analysts learned from the Halibut’s photographs, the more ominous the picture became, and the more urgent their quest for answers.
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Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)
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startling and unthinkable conclusion of Defense Intelligence Agency analysts was suppressed in 1968, and has been kept from the public ever since.
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Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)
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The Halibut crew and intelligence team took more than twenty-two thousand photographs of the wreckage. They were able to gather such valuable intelligence because K-129 broke apart on impact, and its interior was exposed for the probe to explore. The myth later circulated by the CIA that K-129 lay intact on the ocean floor has been shattered by careful examination of bits and pieces of leaked information. The submarine had broken into four or five large sections, most likely torn apart at the compartment joints where the hull structure was the weakest. It had hit the floor of the sea at very high speed, building forward momentum in its long descent. Since the compartments were torn open, the Halibut’s probe could easily be maneuvered to photograph far inside each section of the submarine. The fish was able to take close-up pictures of every operational aspect of the boat and get a firsthand look at the remains of the crew, to help analysts determine what happened in the last minutes of K-129’s mission.
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Kenneth Sewell (Red Star Rogue: The Untold Story of a Soviet Submarine's Nuclear Strike Attempt on the U.S.)