Northrop p-61 Black Widow Pilot's Flight Book

The book is a fascinating account of the myriad ways Lockheed Martin has jammed its tendrils down our collective throats without us really noticing. For example, the company is "involved at one level or another in nearly everything the [U.S.] government does, from providing instruments of death and destruction to collecting taxes and recruiting spies." It also does the U.S. and Canadian censuses and handles the U.S. fingerprint database. Oh, and it wrote the new Constitution of Afghanistan. And, for all intents and purposes, Harting argues that the company isn't particularly good at making death machines to begin with. What it's great at is owning government's ass. Its executives, lobbyists and lawyers filled "more than half a dozen important policy posts in the Bush administration," so the company was largely responsible for steering the U.S. war machine into Iraq part deux. The rare times it doesn't get its way in Congress it goes McCarthy and accuses anyone in its way of anti-Americanism and shouts what-if worst-case d-day scenarios to the masses to generate hysteria. The book wasn't particularly well organized and jumped around a lot, but it was worth the slog for the valuable information on how the pork-barrel politics of war really work.