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Tuesday, July 06, 2004 |
 Doc provided me some extremely nice feedback on global guerrillas. It is much appreciated. Now back to work on the book.
5:12:56 PM 
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BW. Mark Zandi on the US economy. Today's data suggest that the President won't be able to tell voters the economy has recovered all the jobs lost on his watch. There's no chance. In June, private-sector jobs were 109.8 million. The peak was February of 2001, at 111.6 million. So we're 1.83 million away. There's no chance we'll regain those by Election Day, That will make him the first President since Hoover not to have added jobs on his watch.
It has been a very difficult four years. The 5.6% [unemployment] rate sounds low, but if you add the people who are underemployed or have stopped looking, the underemployment rate is probably closer to 10%. And if you're unemployed, you're stuck: The duration of unemployment is about as long as it has ever been. In June [the average] was 19.9 weeks -- it doesn't get much longer than that.
3:52:52 PM
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The Atlantic: Bruce Hoffman on Netwar in Iraq. The Iraqi insurgency today appears to have no clear leader (or leadership), no ambition to seize and actually hold territory (except ephemerally, as in the recent cases of Fallujah and Najaf), no unifying ideology, and, most important, no identifiable organization.
1:32:03 PM
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Right wing death squads in Iraq: The Movement of Salvation targets Zarqawi. "Who is Zarqawi to allow him to do what he has been doing in Iraq ... killing, kidnapping and slaughtering innocent foreign workers," the gunman said.
1:23:21 PM
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Another way to look at the effectiveness of our defense spending. Let's assume that there are only 5,000 hard core terrorists in the world (not a bad assumption). We spend, all in, $700 billion a year on defense/security. That's $140,000,000 per terrorist. This is a gross simplification, but you get the idea.
1:18:39 PM
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TSC. Global guerrilla attacks in Iraq and Kremlin pressure on Yukos drive oil prices to $39.
8:48:11 AM
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Here's a low rez version of Zarqawi's video. Footage of car bomb attacks.
6:51:52 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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