And it comes round full circle, cause the civilians running intell are ex military. (cf wild bill donovan

In a related vein, I found this an interesting take on the political right's utilization of CIA tactics from the past to destabilize the US government.

Must depend where you read, Emma.  TomDispatch covers it; Turse and Englehart watch that CIA/JSOC/Blackwater unholy alliance a lot.  Jeez; come to think of it, I've written about it several times.  Congress doesn't want to know about it except in the most perfunctory fashion, IMO. 

And come to think of it, the NGOs and social-psychologists used for instance, in Afghanistan, that really blur the lines.

My stars; I forgot Jeremy Scahill.

Search engines trolling the internets?  Throw in some more acronyms and see how high it will go. 

Some webbot seems to have gone bonkers on this post. The hit counter filters out most automated web spiders and bots, but some bots don't announce themselves for what they are, so the hit counter doesn't know to ignore them. It happens from time to time but not usually to this extent.

You can tell when the hit count is inflated by bot traffic if you go to the track tab at the top of a post. Most human visitors show some url in the "referrer" column. The bots tend to show blanks in the column.

So you do write for hits!   I remember some here suggesting that, and didn't quite get the drift.  Dunno what it gets you unless you sell ad space.

I'm intrigued by the fact that so far you have not chosen to comment in the thread.

I didn't answer you because I wasn't up to getting into it as it regards meta and I really don't wish to discuss it much. I am still hesitant to do so now, but what the heck. I don't want you imagining again that I have some special resentment towards you.

Just so happens I made a quick comment on another thread, by Dickday, around the time it started happening, and the reply to me from someone on that thread really really turned me off. It didn't upset me, it was more like this: wow, last straw, really this place is not for me, how clueless can I be to continually post here--for the most part, the audience is simply not interested in the same things I am, and what I like to do and say actually irritates some of them. And there was another reply from one of the proprietors of the site that just struck me dumb as to not being on the same wavelength as my interests and I thought: why continue to participate so much, it's not a good fit, it's just dumb of me.

Before that I was planning on making a "WTF?!" comment here on this thread, but by the time I came back, it was clear that the hits were coming from bots of some kind.

It's not at all a case of this thread going "viral" as you put it in your query to me on another thread. If you look at the " tracking" tab on this thread, you can see it's repeated IP addresses. So it really has nothing to do with me, it probably has something to do with some of the links or keywords. (Aside to David Seaton: if you ever come back to this thread: sheesh when are you going to learn that hit counters are not the same thing as number of readers?)

Subsequently when lurking, I saw that there is 0% interest by others in posting or discussing the kind of info. that interests me and without other input, it just reverts once again to very much being another "angry outrage at Obama vs. his defenders" site.*

I don't really find it useful or a wise use of time to read that day-in, day-out for months on end.  Don't get me wrong, I don't begrudge others who have a passion for spending their time that way, it's just not for me most of the time. It's the same discussions over and over and over and over. Mildly interesting if someone with some savvy introduces a new twist on the same old, but still mildly interesting. I also happen to find it very damaging to an understanding of what's going on in the world to skew one's news reading so heavily that way; it's like listening to a political spinner whispering in your ear 24/7 and tinting everything a certain color.

It's funny, I really would find it far more interesting to see someone with the knowledge necessary (I don't have it, Genghis?) dig into and investigate the reason for the enormous number of bot hits on this thread and why they happened (especially as there is the possibility that it might have to do with the intel agencies,) than read yet another thread of opinions about Obama or the tea partiers. But clearly the two latter topics are the main ones people want to talk about here. I find it a bit more tolerable right now partly because some of the more passionate are on hiatus and the more analytic are more prominent.  But that doesn't really change the part about the audience having clear preferences here.

*Except Donal, of course, who happens to be passionate about another topic that only mildy interests me--green energy--and one that doesn't interest me at all--tennis. Then there's those basketball posts in season (not just yawn how about active dislike)....