Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

You live thirty years and you figure out a thing or two about how it works. Life, and all the nonsense drivel that comes with having a set pattern of behaviors. Then you learn how to stand on your head and survive, and all of that comes to a screeching halt.. like your significance in the larger working of humanity, for example.

Then I come to the conclusion that we don't really need a larger place - the concept of life widens into US owing THEM. Which of course, logically speaking, relegates US to a point of obsolescence or at least owing THEM some kind of apology.

I was listening to an NPR interview on Fresh Air with Garry Wills, author of Bomb Power: The Modern Presidency and the National Security State. link

And some thoughts occurred to me regarding the military state and how massive an enterprise the whole thing really is. If the US was able to establish the whole Manhattan Project, with multiple sites and thousands of scientific participants (and it was); and it was able to maintain multiple secret testing sites for military activity (and it does), then how does that affect the person who is elected as "free leader" of this country.

Wills makes an excellent point in this podcast, saying that President Obama was quite idealistic going into the first year of his term, and now he is quite subdued with his political status. Here you have someone who was iconoclast when it came to foreign and domestic policy, and now he is quiet about all the things he was running for in the first place.

Guantanamo Bay, as one example.