Crisisville

Green Circles: A Carbon Mitigation Proposal

2008-03-09T20:48:32-04:00

This is a ten-minute presentation for a fellowship that I'm applying for. It describes a membership-based social support and discount program to help middle income households achieve reasonable carbon loss based on a personal version of Socolow’s Wedge concept. Yeah, so, as you can maybe tell, it's not as high on the entertainment meter. Still, it's a concrete proposal for a way to cut households emissions using current technology. Let me know what you think!

Download GREEN-CIRCLES.mov

Next podcast?

2008-02-28T00:40:59-05:00

What should the next podcast be about, oh loyal listeners?

I've been thinking about

* Apocalypse by Pandemic
* Apocalypse by Fire
* Apocalypse by Multi-Tasking

Vote for one of those or suggest your own in the comments...

Ice Ice Baby - Podcast

2008-02-25T01:42:58-05:00

Some say the world will end in fire, some say in ice.... We visit the four zones of the frozen ninth level of hell (plus South Park and Dennis Quaid) as we look at how climate change could make things colder, not warmer. Plus stories from a fight on a glacier in Kashmir, and the end of the world a la Kurt Vonnegut. Let's rock the apocalypse, baby! .... With Mitch Stripling. Download the episode in MP3. Get it on iTunes here.

Community Hypoxia, or, Breathing Hard on Nothing

2008-02-05T00:50:43-05:00

In the Gulf of Mexico, there are 7,500 square miles where nothing lives. Amberjack and other fish lay dead on the sea floor, their bodies feeding sulfur-oxidizing bacteria that turn the sand black for miles. The water is hypoxic, which means there's not enough dissolved oxygen in it to support marine life.

Sometimes, sea water gets hypoxic naturally. When rivers empty out into oceans, sometimes the fresh water doesn't mix. It creates a cover over the saltier water; algae grow on this cover. Gradually, the algae suck the oxygen out of the salt water; they choke the life right from it. It takes a storm, a big storm like a hurricane, to break the cover up, mix the water, and dissolve new oxygen.

Mainly, though, these hypoxic areas - dead zones, they're called - are caused by chemical fertilizers. See, it's not that the rivers have no oxygen. It's that they are crammed full of plant nutrients - like nitrogen - that force out the oxygen. The water gets so crowded there's just room for the oxygen to dissolve. So there's nothing for the animals to breathe.

The Black Sea used to have the largest dead zone in the world, until the Soviet Union collapsed. Fertilizer became too expensive to use, and the sea sprang back to life. It was an unintended consequence, but it showed pretty clearly that the only way to bring back these dead areas was to get rid of the stuff choking out the oxygen.

Hypoxia can also happen when the body doesn't get enough oxygen. This could happen at altitude or, because, just like the ocean, there's no oxygen in the air to breathe. Environmentally, this is a huge problem. And a growing one. As we deplete the soil, we're using more and more fertilizer to support "first-world" agricultural practices, . The runoff has more nutrients, which crowds out the oxygen, which makes the dead zones grow. And grow.

Even beyond that problem, there's a metaphor here, I think. Communities live on a kind of oxygen, which is the social relationships of the people within them. The commitment of those people grows the spirit of the community, makes it more cohesive. This cohesion won't just disappear; it's what put the community together in the first place.

Instead, cohesion gets pushed out by all the complication we put on life to maintain the system we live in. We lock ourselves in gated neighborhoods and behind headphones; we avoid eye contact and sit in our houses. We only associate with known quantities. Just like the rivers, we have jammed ourselves with activities and technologies that stop us from mixing.

Nowadays, researchers can tell that environmental stress is growing. As we stop mixing in our neighborhoods, they get more dangerous, which is hazardous to our health. Hazardous enough that Johns Hopkins made alleviating neighborhood stress their #1 way to improve urban health.

Community hypoxia is the state of a community, or a nation, where the different don't mix. Without that mixing, the community has no air, no way to live as an independent entity. The walls we have to put up to make that happen make us sick because, as humans, we need that interaction to survive.

If we let our communities go hypoxic, there will be casualties, make no mistake about it. We already have dead zones in communities all across the country. The question is, will we stop filling them with all the negative things that drive the air out - all the violence and the separation. Or will we let the oxygen in?

Internet falls; Rails down; What's Next?

2008-01-31T12:34:20-05:00

Fragility. That's what the news says. Blizzards made it impossible to deliver coal on China's fragile rail network, so power is out in frozen China. A boat anchor sliced a fragile undersea information pipeline, and the internet drops out in the Middle East. These systems are just like glass or origami, you know? Breathe on them and they just wilt.

Fragility, though, implies that we can bulk it up. That these systems can be strengthened to withstand impacts. Or, to put it another way, that we can make this stuff not be news anymore.

That overlooks a couple of traits of complex systems. First, it assumes that they fail slowly, in ways you can prepare for. Second, it kind of implies that by adding more complexity to the system, we can make it better.

Neither of these things turns out to be true. Prove it, you say? Well, the idea isn't new, but let's see how it broke down in this case. Here's how the internet crashed:

Link: Cable damage hits Internet connectivity-India-The Times of India.

An anchoring ship off Egypt's Alexandria coast damaged Indian-owned FLAG cable and also SEA-ME-WE on Wednesday morning and urgent repair teams had set sail for the location. An official of Reliance group, which owns FLAG, said the repair will take about 10 days.

Apart from the sea of acronyms, what happened is basically that a boat put it anchor in the wrong place.

One problem with infrastructure, then, is that it relies on these bottlenecks, these critical junctures that connect different systems. They might be the connections between different power systems, for instance, or just the exit ramp off the nearest interstate. These things tend to be fragile and overloaded. Making the cable stronger doesn't change the fact that there's no failover--and it tends to make it a more viable target.

Build it stronger and you've just got a more resource intensive bottleneck that will cause even more chaos when it breaks. And it will break rapidly, and all at once. Let's look at the consequences in China:

Link: The Associated Press: Chinese Fight to Get Home Amid Blizzard.

Crowds of frantic Chinese fought for seats Wednesday on the few trains leaving southern China, where the worst winter storms in half a century have crippled the nation's transport system during its busiest travel season....The storms have caused dozens of deaths and airport closures. China's antiquated power grid, powered largely by coal, ground to a near halt, plunging many cities into darkness. The storms have caused economic losses of $3 billion since they began Jan. 10, the Civil Affairs Ministry said Tuesday.....When bus doors finally opened, women started screaming in the mob. Others discarded their trampled luggage. Mothers holding babies stood nearby, looking despondent.

We feel like we can count on our infrastructure. But it was engineered to live within a narrow set of specifications - certain temperature and weather pattern assumptions; assumptions that excess economic capacity will be available for maintenance; antiquated threat assumptions. Day by day, the world is proving each assumption untrue.

The problem we face as those assumptions change won't just be the bottlenecks. These systems won't go gently into any good night. They will rage, and lock, and then be gone.

Imagine a complex system as a set of interlocking, moving gears. Those gears might be massively engineered, and strong as hell, but something can still slip in between them. Something cheap and small that nobody would suspect will disrupt one of the gears. A small one, just some insignificant piece of the whole. A rail car can't get to a power plant, say.

But what happens then to a complex system - if the disruption is above a certain level - is that the whole system gets overwhelmed. The power plant calls frantically for coal, which is rerouted to meet it and then stalled, blocking part of the tracks which makes other cars not able to make get to other power plants which prevents clean-up crews from clearing the first affected parts of the track. And so on.

See? The connectivity of the system causes a cascading systems failure that spreads to everything it touches. And if it touches everything, everything will go down.

Now, that's not an apocalypse. It's more like a systems reboot for the whole freaking world. If we're rich enough, and have enough technical capacity, we can totally pull that off, no problem. Just like we recovered after the 2003 blackouts. Just like China and Dubai are going to fix it, now.

But, you know, China has already lost $3 billion and is getting trapped in an inflationary spiral. So we maybe want to start saving up.

read more | digg story

Faster, puberty, swell, swell!

2008-01-30T21:16:24-05:00

I have two daughters, and when I signed the daddy contract in blood six years ago, it was understood that puberty was a teenage phenomenon. It would come along at 13 with fits of giggling, a solid dedication to making my life miserable and an incurable fixation with wild horses. Also, eerily, breasts.

But, check that, I've only got two years and counting. See, eight years old used to be the medical definition for abnormally early puberty. But now, it's the new normal. Based on several studies, scientists are recommending that the age of abnormal puberty be dropped to 7 for Caucasians, 6 for African-Americans. Eight is the new normal.

In fact, puberty has been coming earlier by a month every decade for a long time. That adds up. Why? Well, for a while, it was because our lives were improving. The body was just ready earlier. But not anymore:

In short, that finely tuned biological process may have reached a tipping point. Since the 1960s, Herman-Giddens says, the decline in the age of maturity has crossed the line from positive reasons, such as better diet, to negative ones, such as eating too much, exercising too little and the vast unknowns of chemical pollution.

I had wanted to wait and talk to my daughters about the birds and bees after they could at least spell the words. Scratch that, I had wanted to bribe my wife into talking to them about it. But now, it's going to be out of pull-ups and into tampons.

Maybe I'm exaggerating. And there is a main point here besides my daddy freakout.

See, lots of researchers have theorized about this. Maybe its hormones in milk! Maybe its just tweenie boobs from all that Mickey D fat! Or maybe its that estrogen in the water that's making the hermaphrodite fish! No, seriously.

But there's no conclusive evidence for any chemical, or for obesity or any other lifestyle cause. And it would be unethical to, you know, drug children until you found the answer.

This points to the idea of one problem, one solution. Classically, scientists are trained to hypothesize and prove a single solution for a given problem. But given the complexity of life, that may not be possible any longer.

Most resilience theories put people squarely within an intersecting set of influences: social, environmental, economic, and organizational, to name a few.

Maybe it's not a particular chemical. It could be the interaction between the environmental factors and the lifestyle choices (milk, McDonald's) that people are making. That means that the problem could hit economically vulnerable kids more strongly - because they are more dependent on unhealthy food and often live in more contaminated areas.

Actually, its depressing that I have to write that some kids live in contaminated areas. But, hell, if we're making fish hermaphrodites against their will, something scary is going on. No offense intended toward fish that freely choose a safe, hermaphroditic lifestyle.

The point is that all of these factors influence each other. If we focus on eliminating estrogen in water or obesity in kids, we win a battle but not the war. We have to start thinking of our communities as urban eco-systems where everything effects everything else. To fix the problems, we've got to heal the community as a whole. We have to connect the symptoms-even the freaky breast budding symptoms-to the whole network of influences. Or we risk tipping the balance even more when we try to help.

And, believe me, my three year old is not ready for puberty, yet.

read more | digg story

Endless Entertainment by Griefing the Virtual

2008-01-29T22:47:12-05:00

Man, I love destroying websites. This thing is my favorite new toy. There's something really satisfying about watching a blimp fly through Ted Kenndey's nose. Or sending meteors into Neil Cavuto, over and over gain.

And it doesn't mean anything right? Because it's just a freakin' website. It's not even graffitti unless I youtubed the destruction.

And what about these guys from Wired? They made penises rain down from the sky onto this girl during a CNET interview in Second Life. That's pretty funny, lol. Griefers, they're called. People that live to fuck up virtual worlds.

And man, back in the day when this stuff was just text, this griefer named Mr. Bungle raped this chick with chat text over and over in Lambda Moo until she screamed and cried in real life and never wanted to login again.

No way am I saying we shouldn't send blimps through Ted Kennedy's nose. That's just too tempting. But the more of ourselves we put in virtual worlds, the more substance digital attacks will have. It's only once they have substance that people would attack, anyway. Who wants to grief something no-one cares about?

If the online world is made of light, it's also made of relationships. Attack those and you attack the substance of the thing itself. If nothing else, it blurs the lines of what terrorism means. After all, terrorism isn't about the explosions, it's about the fear. And if your home is threatened, you get the fear, even if the home in question is rendered polygons.

Right now, we don't know it, but we're redrawing the line of terrorism one griefer at a time. Whatever, right? I'm going to go throw meteors at Dick Cheney's shiny head.

read more | digg story

Death by iPhone

2008-01-28T21:09:55-05:00

Don't get me wrong, I love Steve Jobs. I love him so much I even love fake Steve Jobs. I have an iPhone tattooed on my iPhone.

And, Steve lover that I am, I can't help but notice that he's now pronounced the death of the written word. Here is real Steve, dissing the Kindle:

“It doesn’t matter how good or bad the product is; the fact is that people don’t read anymore,” he said. “Forty percent of the people in the U.S. read one book or less last year.”

And, so, I think the iPhone the sign of the apocalypse. The issue is multi-tasking and focus. Focus is a meta-power. It helps to align and lift up other powers, like reason and problem-solving and other powers I would remember if I weren't also texting right now.

See, multi-tasking, it turns outs, downshifts your brain both temporarily and permanently. Your brain literally atrophies (shrinks - size matters) from the stress of mental shifting. So it's a lot like blowing the transmission on your Porsche - only there's no dealer left. Anywhere. And so you're just sitting there screwed in the driveway until your metaphor runs out of steam.

Multi-tasking makes you more prone to hypnosis and can precipitate huge tactical errors. See the immortal Richard Armitage quote that fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan would be like walking and chewing gum at the same time. Sure, it's fine when you're drinking coffee while driving 90 MPH south on I-75 and texting the babysitter not to give the kids sugar. But sometimes, things might get dangerous, you know?

The real trick is that we don't think that it's getting is. We still feel like we're in control of our full capabilities, because we're conscious of concentrating. But thinking about concentrating saps some of our brainpower. It's like keeping the TV Guide up on the screen. It feels like we're watching TV, but there's no way to actually get into the show.

Pretty soon, one of those days will come when the sky falls - storm, invasion, etc - and our brain will have literally forgotten how to focus. And we just won't have that rigid determination of mind anymore that has saved the ass of humanity quite a few times until now.

God, I love my iPhone. But it could just be the most beautiful objet d'art that ever caused my self-annihilation. Sometimes, I can feel my brain just dissolving as I switch between candy icons.

Anyway, maybe I'll buy a Kindle, dive into a deep book, something by Kierkegard. It only displays four shades of gray. That can't be too distracting, can it?

read more | digg story

I know what's killed more people than your wussy brd flu...

2008-01-27T23:32:41-05:00

So, in honor of last week's New York Times declaration that the number of human cases of Avian Flu (that crazy "global threat") is down, here is the Crisisville list of things that kill more people than H5N1. BTW, bird flu sent 59 poor souls to the cosmic cleaners last year.

* Medical Error (178,000 Americans per year)
* Masturbation (3,700 Americans per year)
* Car accidents (45,000 Americans per year)
* Flesh-eating bacteria (100 Americans per year)
* Exercise equipment (150 per year)
* Golfing on the 18th hole (300 per year)
* Women getting the old cunnilingus (900 per year)
* Lightning (82 Americans per year)
* Post-Viagra (11,000 per year)
* Bad breath (30,000 per year)
* Yawning while driving (1,400 per year)
* Kissing (Mono) (7,000 per year)
* Poisoning (17,000 Americans per year)
* Pushing too hard while taking a crap (1,200 per year)
* Radiation Exposure (20,000 per year)
* Barbecuing (200 Americans per year)
* Food additives (60,000 per year)
* Murder (17,000 Americans per year)
* Falling (20,000 Americans per year)
* Suicide (2,000,000 per year)
* Work releated injuries (5,000 Americans per year)
* Anaphylactic death due to food (125 Americans per year)
* Terrorism (1,700 per year)
* Getting it on with a sheep (200 Americans per year)

Yeah, there are sources. But the beauty of a blog is that I don't have to write 'em down. But I'll tell ya if ya ask. Watch your back, where you stick your privates, and how you do your bidness, 'kay?

digg story

Water Wars: Podcast companion to Salon piece

2008-01-07T14:15:10-05:00

http://www.salon.com/news/feature/2008/01/07/water_problems/

The most compelling policy point for me is how clear it makes the Great Lakes Region's stance: No water pipeline for Atlanta. Maybe everybody down here really will move back to Detroit when we get thirsty enough.

(Folks from Salon, I just did a podcast that breaks down the history and consequences of water wars through stories and sarcasm over the past few thousand years. Three ghosts visit, a la a dehydrated Dickens. It's here, if you want it:

http://www.crisisville.com/2007/12/water-wars---po.html

Disaster Evacuation and Smart Growth

2008-01-02T16:11:05-05:00

Happy New Year!

Here is an 18-minute presentation I put together for the Florida Department of Health on the intersection of smart growth transportation policy and health issues in disaster evacuation. It features some footage from just after the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, as well as a discussion of the evacuations in Katrina and Rita (including some audio commentary from Mayor Ray Nagin).

It turns out that densely populated areas can be more smoothly evacuated if they have robust public transportation infrastructures, and that even using one dedicated bus lane can cut down evacuation times by a whole bunch.

Check it out here:

http://www.myfloridaeh.com/learning/evacuation-health/index.htm

(Note that however formal this may be, it's in no way Florida policy. It's the governmental equivalent of a think piece...)

Water Wars - Podcast

2007-12-24T01:09:28-05:00

The first podcast! Can increasing pressure on water cause the decline and fall of civilization? Mitch breaks down the history and consequences of water wars through stories and sarcasm over the past few thousand years. Three ghosts visit, a la a dehydrated Dickens. Download the episode in MP3

Rob Thomas's Apocalypse

2007-10-22T22:22:18-04:00

I thought since one of the signs of the apocalypse had occurred -- cf. Revelations c.23 v. 5 - Yea, verily, at the end of times Mitch Stripling will like a Matchbox Twenty song -- I'd honor it with a regular feature of Crisisville, me breaking down some bit of cultural ephemera about the end of the world.

Matchbox Twenty - “How Far We've Come”
Sometimes, there's a lot to learn from the way an artist deals with the end of the world. Here, not so much. But it's hard to argue with those drums! I think a big reason why this is such a good tune is that M20's self-hating drummer finally gave it up and switched to rhythm guitar, which let them get a really who's not afraid to pound those skins like they were a cheap, do-it-yourself sex doll.

But what does it have to tell us about the apocalypse? Read on, MacDuff.

First off, for an end times drama, it's pretty self-absorbed. Rob says:

I’m waking up at the start of the end of the world
But it's feeling just like every other morning before
Now I wonder what my life is going to mean if it's gone.

So, the world's ending, and he's worried what it will mean to him? Newsflash, Robbie, when the world ends, you're ending with it, greatest hits album or no.

In the chorus, Rob gives us his take on the great Frostian Fire v. Ice debate. Rob Thomas's answer: a solid fire.

But I believe the world is burning to the ground
Oh well, I guess we're gonna find out
Let's see how far we've come

Let's break this down. It may not be obvious, but Thomas's thought here is functioning in a Hegelian dialectic with You (yes, you) functioning as interlocutor. He expresses his belief in the coming end. You demur; you scoff, practically. Bad you!

But Thomas is confident. He expresses his belief that you'll find out (aka die a fiery death). When you counter, full of hostility, transferring your own impotent rage onto him (Shame on You!), he presents his synthesis, “Let's see how far we've come”.

This may not make much sense on the surface. But don't worry-it doesn't make much sense in the depths, either. Thomas is saying we'll die from the progress of history, which will kill us (in the video) with a dire weapon--stock footage lifted directly from Billy Joel's We Didn't Start the Fire.

What does it all mean? In the bridge, Thomas finally lays his soul bare, drenching us in the deep power the end times hold over his psyche:

Well it was cool, cool, it was just all cool
Now it's over for me and it's over for you

Don't you see? It's the ice, the ice. The progress of history chills us out, spreading glaciers over our souls. Thomas believes the fire is the only thing that can open us up; Trouble is it, uh, kills us at the same time. As he says:

Said where you going man, you know the world is headed for hell?
Say your goodbyes if you've got someone you can say goodbye to

Oh, you kick us in the teeth, Matchbox Twenty. Right in the philosophical teeth. But if it helps us connect to our loved ones and repurpose video footage from 80's adult contemporary classics, maybe it will let us see how far we've come. Rob Thomas, will you be someone I can say goodbye to?

So what?

2007-09-25T22:45:31-04:00

what happens if I do this...

Disrupt me but good

2007-02-23T08:48:00-05:00

One tenet of ecological sustainability (riding the Holling/Gunderson wave) is that we need those damn forest fires. The promote innovation in the system. Without them, the whole eco-system would harden up and eventually collapse entirely.

There's an analague there; I don't like it but I want to ride it a bit. It goes like this: Developing systems need catastrophes in order to grow resilience.

I'm fine with that as an abstract idea. Certainly, we see that resilience grows in systems that have been damaged, but not to the point of collapse. Florida has gotten much more resilient after its multiple hurricanes, New Orleans has not.

When we start looking at this from the point of view of insurgency, though, the cloudiness comes. Is it possible to argue that infrastructure systems need attacks?

Certainly you can say that the tenet only states that their resilience will grow if they're attacked. It's not saying that they "should" be attacked.

But in the ecological world, we need these minor catastrophes in order to keep the major ones at bay. The analogy leads me to think of low-intensity conflicts as venting systems for global social networks. We may need them to keep happening, just so the network as a whole doesn't get brittle enough to fracture back into major war.

Hellfire Advocacy

2007-02-23T00:40:50-05:00

There are so many Smokey Bear-pandering treatises on the horrors of forest fire. 20,000 bunnies fried; 100,000 acres burned; 4 McMansions brought down by embers.

I'm tired of it; I want to look at it from the point of view of the fire.

What does the fire get out of the rampage? Fuel, you might say. Okay, the fire gets sustenance. It gets to grow and feed off the energy its violence releases.

What else? Time, I'd argue. Initially, the fire uses the sustenance to buy itself time to survive. To grow. Later, time gifts wildfire will a full arc of destruction.

That's it; close the books. But no, hold on. There's a reason I'm writing about fire. Mcluhan's tenet holds here: the glowing medium is the message. Fire, maybe not a particular fire but the wholeness of platonic fire, gets notoriety. Fear, even. All those dead bunny's children telling other bunnies about the evil red monster, warren to weak-linked warren.

But fire can't hold territory, can it? It can only feed off other systems; it cannot generate sustenance, it only leaves ash. Except, of course, where it is handled by a larger agency, some creature with a mind. Who tends fire; circumsribes it to extend its time by focusing its power.

I'm running out of metaphor. Or, better to say it's burning off. The deeper I get into Holling/Gunderson's Panarchy, the more I'm dwelling on linked systems.

In this case, fire and system disruption. System attacks can also fuel an insurgency, allow it to continue, gain it notoriety. But how do they hold territory? They can destroy a given order, but how can any group defined by that tactic hope to build a system. They will have destroyed all their raw material.

So, you argue, maybe they don't want to hold territory. Territory has taken a back seat to identity politics, right? They fight to define themselves.

But, natch, they are defining themselves in opposition to these systems they keep ramming. Pity the fools when the systems are destroyed. They'll have nothing left to feed on, and will die themselves.

Remake Core : Just add web

2007-02-22T07:14:00-05:00

Everyone is buzz, buzz over the reconstitution of Al Qaeda in North Waziristan, from the trad media to the Counter-terrorism Blog to John Robb's Al Qaeda Redux . The fact that this reconstitution is occurring, though, speaks to something other than that failure of the Pakistani government. Here's what I want to know: How is it that there are enough feeder networks of Al Qaeda left with enough interconnecting hubs to organically gel again?

Or ask it like this: How, five years after its last round of physical sanctuaries were bombed, is Al Qaeda a dense enough network to regroup en masse? I think it speaks to a central point about Al Qaeda as a 'global insurgency'-- it's use of virtual sanctuaries on the internet. I think, in fact, that history will show that these virtual sanctuaries are more important than any given physical sanctuary. So, to break that down, let's go to the Hoff (not Hassel).

Al Qaeda Uses Web as 'Virtual Sanctuary,' Experts Say -- 05/12/2006.

Al Qaeda has used the World Wide Web for the past 15 years, but the Internet became especially important to Osama bin Laden's terror network after U.S.-led coalition forces deprived the terrorist group of its "physical sanctuary" in Afghanistan during late 2001, according to Bruce Hoffman, a terrorism expert at the nonprofit RAND Corp.....

"Today, the movement is present on more than 50 different sites," which he said provide a "virtual sanctuary -- an effective, expeditious and anonymous means through which the movement can continue to communicate with its fighters, followers, sympathizers and supporters worldwide."

So, in traditional insurgency theory, scholars from O'Neill to Stephen Metz to Ian Beckett have cited two features that distinguish successful insurgencies. First, they have external support from outside nations or groups (like a diaspora). Second, they have a secure base outside their battlespace (like across the border of a neighboring country).

The question is, can global insurgents do away with physical bases through the use of information infrastructure? Can they also do away with external support? Yes and yes.

Magnus Ranstorp's The Virtual Sanctuary of Al-Qaeda and Terrorism in an Age of Globalisation starts to make the argument:

Adopting a multi-dimensional cyber approach, combined with creative new communication technologies, allows operational agility and stealth mode far in excess of what was possible previously for terrorist organisations. It facilitates a polymorphic structure or design with multiplicity of nods or pods swarming towards a mission or resurrecting shortly before or after an operation. More fundamentally it allows survivability through a constant virtual presence with no real or tangible physical centres of gravity and in constant stealth mode and ideological motion. Having simply an online presence confers a certain degree of legitimacy which they otherwise would not have. It also allows them to resurrect and reconfigure at any time.

This is Al Qaeda as phoenix, always resurrecting in nearly the same form from any kind of ash. Or, you know, let's not give them that dignity. Let's call it the Virtual Weeble scenario: you knock them down and they just fall into bytes to pop up again in another physical plain.

Ranstorp gives a list of activities which jihadi groups now complete primarily through the Internet "...publish propaganda; proselytise, indoctrinate followers; recruit new members; communicate, train; engage in information gathering and reconnaissance; raise funds and other material resources; transfer funds; plan operations; and engage in information attacks on enemy websites or other critical
information infrastructure."

To me, the centerpiece of his argument is something he never comes right out as says. If you take the Netwar analysis as true (that the five core tenets of success are integration on the organisational, doctrinal, technological, social, and narrative level) then the need for a physical base is not integral. Although a physical base provides geographic linkage, which increases organizational/social networking, its certainly not necessary.

To me, this means that the hidden base of the insurgency can be parasitic to our own information pathways. The country that sustains the insurgency is the same as its antagonist.

And external support? Well, what's external to a global insurgency? In an analogy to the way the information systems have upended campaign financing over the last several years, there are parasitic networks of financing that can utilize the came virtual bases for funds transfers.

So, I think it's important to treat physical bases like North Waziristan (or Anbar Province) as tactical or forward locations. They are operational areas, and their destruction shouldn't be thought of as decisive.

We treated the Afghan training camps as the soul of the network, and I think that was a mistake. In a war that's not being fought for territory, the core of the enemy will hover across the globe, right next to us, whispering across our transmissions.

Systems Disruption and Panarchy

2007-02-20T13:42:50-05:00

What do the roadside bombs have in common with cheese in Fedou? Other than semantic associations with a certain nation state?

Well, John Robb and the Global Guerrillas set of memes (systems disruption, systempunkt, etc.) have begun a systematic look at how attacks on resource targets can lead to cascading systems failures across a range of networks.

To me, the trick now is to look at how to develop a theoretical framework for these system failure. Yes, everyone says, attack the hubs and the scale-free networks will fall. But how many interacting networks can be linked? How many hubs, and how hard do you hit them?

One place where this discussion has been underway for a long time is in the study of social-ecological systems. For thirty years, C.S. Holling and his compatriots have be dissecting the links between resource-based environmental systems and their human-based governance bodies.

Their work has a lot to say about why and how linked systems fail or succeed. And--climate change or roadside bombs--I don't think we should ignore them. So let's go to the data.

Holling grabbed the phrase "Panarchy" to describe the linked non-hierarchical systems that are in play within these networks. Panarchy tries to map the transformations of the systems like this:

There's no real starting point here, but Alpha is a system organizational phase, with Omega as a Systems Collapse phase. The system grows in organization (and rigidity) from r to K, whereupond the rigidity precipitates a crisis. The resilience of the system determines whether the linked systems will maintain their integrity ("Remembering" and regrouping at point r) or initiate a full collapse of the system ("Revolting" to point Omega and neccessitating a full reorganization. The small graph is there to show that these associations are nested within other associations; crises in local systems can tricker crises in regional systems and vice versa.

Yikes. Did I lose you yet?

This matters because it give an evidence-based framework to look at what will cause a given system (or set of systems) to collapse. You know, when do those pipeline attacks become a system drain, when do they provoke a full system shutdown, and what elements let the oil system "remember" itself and hold together.

Beau-coup work to do here, but a new paper in Ecology and Society (Resilience and Regime Shifts: Assessing Cascading Effects) starts putting some of the pieces together. Ann Kinzig and the crew come up with two main features of these social-ecological systems.

First, its important to recognize that there have multiple thresholds (change states) connected to a host of variables that operate in different spaces and at different time scales. So, at any given time, there are lots of options that the system could shift to. And each option has different resilience levels. In effect, this is like the river argument: You can never step in the same river twice. And, every day it's a different pipeline system which is always looking to shift. It's always either organizing or collapsing.

Second, whether it organizes or collapses depends on the threshold changes or multiple sub-systems. As small edge-systems cross their collapse thresholds, for instance, it becomes ever more likely that the general system will collapse. These would be things like small processing areas, transportation linkages--even food service, care package delivery. Peripheral systems are all interconnected and can be used to predicate the general welfare of the larger system. This means that leaders have to be careful about looking at systems that operate in different scales of time and space (tiny systems, quick systems, slow systems), because they also effect the prioritized system's health.

In particular, the authors chart three kinds of scale (Patch, Farm, Region) and three kinds of interaction (Ecological, Economic, Social/Cultural). By looking at how the variables intersect, they can make predications about the fault lines in the system. That's all it takes, they argue, just a handful of variables. As long as you take into account the space/time scale changes in place, and the nested networks that effect the resilience of the current focuse systems.

Now, this is very much from a resource management perspective, but the deeper you get into the work, the more applicable it is for systems disruptive attacks. After all, what's more natural to us these days than fossil fuels, money trails and communications link-ups?

Reprisal Against Non-State Actors

2007-02-19T13:14:00-05:00

It could just be me, but it seems like one of the key constitutional questions of our time is how to circumscribe military action against non-state actors. That is, how far can the President dive into warfare before before being brought up short by Congress. The War Powers Act doesn't seem to be doing the job in the current rapid age, and various bodies have been flailing for a solution.

Now, one of the last times that non-state actors threatened state security, they came in the form of pirates. Not just your Keith Richards-style Caribbean scalawags, either, but Malay pirates (and others ) who appropriated whole swaths of the sea that became unavailable to nation-state warships.

The Constitution, wise document that it is, contains specific language that deals with this issue, right there in Article 1. Ten points if you know what it is.

What powers does the Congress have concerning warfare? Take it, Framers:

"To declare war, grant letters of marque and reprisal, and make rules concerning captures on land and water"

Letters of Marque and Reprisal, eh? You may have heard of those. They're like privateer commissions. So saith Wikipedia:

The formal statement of the warrant was to authorize the agent to pass beyond the borders of the nation ("marque", meaning frontier), and there to search, seize, or destroy assets or personnel of the hostile foreign party ("reprisal"), not necessarily a nation, to a degree and in a way that was proportional to the original offense. It was considered a retaliatory measure short of a full declaration of war, and by maintaining a rough proportionality, was intended to justify the action to other nations, who might otherwise consider it an act of war or piracy.

Doesn't that sound oddly relevant? Now, scattered groups have had this thought, and Douglas Kmiec (Dean of Columbus Law) did his best to shoot it down in Senate Testimony:

Letters of Marque and Reprisal are grants of authority from Congress to private citizens, not the President. Their purpose is to expressly authorize seizure and forfeiture of goods by such citizens in the context of undeclared hostilities. Without such authorization, the citizen could be treated under international law as a pirate. Occasions where one’s citizens undertake hostile activity can often entangle the larger sovereignty, and therefore, it was sensible for Congress to desire to have a regulatory check upon it. Authorizing Congress to moderate or oversee private action, however, says absolutely nothing about the President’s responsibilities under the Constitution.

He's saying, basically, that we can't require the President to get a Letter of Marque from Congress before deploying troops. Fair enough. But he also couldn't write such letters himself, if they were in use.

Letters of Marque and Reprisal, in fact, have been archaic since the Treaty of Paris ended the Crimean War--which is also about the time that nation-state Armies and Navies outdistanced the force capabilities of private actors, like those pesky pirates.

But these days, it seems like asymmetric warfare tenets have closed that force gap considerably in certain circumstances.

Now, I don't know that we want to equip our outsourced defense contractors with authorization to just go hunt down terrorists around the world. A new culture of privateers would have immense foreign policy ramifications.

Two big "buts" here, though:

1. The Armed Forces have been continually criticized for not being nimble enough to find and stop these networks. This argument, coupled with a lack of resources, was also employed back in the age of pirates (and became part of the justification for privateers).

2. It's already happening. Defense contractors have been involved in battle actions several times during the Iraq conflict.

In my view, it's much better to get a handle on this threat early and to frame it via the Constitution. Letters or Marque and Reprisal does provide a window for that, and I think it the idea should be taken more seriously than it has until now.

The attached essay goes into more detail about the justification involved.

Download Circumscribing-Reprisal.pdf

Community Overdrive

2007-02-16T08:24:00-05:00

So everybody's talking about making new urban land use policies that use Smart Growth to build community resilience. I don't think you can put new wine into old suburban policy, though, and so it becomes key to describe a new methodology for community research.

How, exactly, do we research all the ramifications of these policy changes, many of which seem eerily subjective (aesthetics, etc.)? Well, we dig into the theory of other areas that have made this jump before. We're basically going into the community unconscious here, right? We have to bring out all the identity buried with the gas mains and fill it with light.

That makes it fully appropriate to incorporate the methodology of postmodern and, to some extent, psychoanalytical observation into community-based research.

Okay, so how exactly do you delve into a sidewalk's sex drive?

The basic idea is that, first, you have to blend targeted scientific data with participatory dialog. Fine so far; lots of groups are doing that.

But at a certain point, unconscious dialog is needed. This can involve "undercover" researchers and the intent is to catch knew-jerk reactions generally hidden in dialog sessions.

This is coupled with Nonverbal and Symbolic Analysis, which is perhaps the most unorthodox aspect of the model. Some examples of this include:

A survey and breakdown of fictive and non-fictive ideas in media
presentations of community through the past quarter-century. This
breakdown would focus on community influence and
interrelationship portrayed through all media, with special
influence on notably influential media and media that directly
concerns our targeted archetype areas.
Direct surveillance on the targeted areas of the study, including
video, audio and email surveillance. This may be prohibitive or
necessitate a surveillance waiver. In any case, this would provide
quantifiable data of time spent under various community
influences in an archetype area over the course of the surveillance.
Spatial or virtual symbolic analysis of communities related to the
archetype areas. This would include a study of advertisements,
layout, interior design, community logos, fashion, etc.

Yeah, I know it's wild. But I'm not sure how else to parse out all the relationships at play in a community, especially when you get to the level of detail which some of the new resilience materials discuss.

These ideas are couple with an appreciation for the analyst experience and the subjective aspects of their weighted matrix for the data.

That brings us to the results. When you are accruing this much geographic data, it's very difficult to create a useful narrative report. Instead, I advocate that the research product:

...should take the form of an actual network map of theories based on the study. Using [a relational] database, a visual map should be constructed that relates the researchers’ ideas about the network of overlapping community relationships through depictions of the spatial and virtual environments frequented by the study’s object population. This will allow forthcoming researchers to view geographic and Internet areas with overlapping color regions of community affiliation that may or may not be spatially related. Researchers can then analyze a given demographic area or population (united spatially or virtually) and view the study’s ideas about how communities overlap and interrelate within that population. This kind of work is already being done in such fields as medicine and construction; urban policy seems a logical extension.

Of course, some of this work is being done in urban policy now. But this aspect goes beyond mapping facilities on Google Earth; I think we need to map actual concepts geographically to see where certain innate biases really live--and where they commute. That way, we can tell (for instance) the relationships and community placements of those who want this or that improvement--so we can get as close as possible to the greatest good for the greatest number. I think the real resilience of a community will live at this level of detail. The residents know this inherently. But if we're coming in to do research, a lot of what we come up with will be bollocks unless we can understand it, too.

Read the Research Design

Postmodern Community Theory

2007-02-15T10:59:00-05:00

So, we're starting to hear a lot about community resilience in the context of global climate change. I would argue that it's not merely that we need to change policies in order to build this resilience, we need to change the policy process as well.

Postmodern urban theory is a kind of theoretical outgrowth of architectural ideas like new urbanism. It deals with fragmentary communities, the need for intensive community discourse, and the various ways outlying growth is reorganizing traditionally central spaces.

So, great, but where do I park my car and can I get fries with that?

Like a lot of postmodern ideas, the discourse opens outward into multi-valent possibilities, which for me is awesome right up until you have to write a policy that actually helps a community. I'm just an old school Jamesian pragmatist like that, boo yah.

So, here's what I wrestle with...

...in this paper: By comparing the analogous frameworks of current liberal and postmodern urban policy, I try and sketch out a productive fragmentation that can be used to make coherent policies. Yep, the policy may look different--and it will certainly write across multiple sectors (nonprofit, social) in ways that current policy would never dream.

But it is policy, you can benchmark it, and that's what maters to me.

In a later paper, I sketch our a research methodology based on this approach. Stay tuned.

Theorize the Praxis, baby.

Witnessing Witnessing

2007-02-15T10:40:00-05:00

So, do Muslims knock on doors like Jehovah's Witnesses? The answer I've got is No.

This is the earliest paper I'm posting, and I can tell it's immature. But it's a useful model for the current situation and I post it in that spirit.

The situation is like this: In Christianity, there's a model of 'Witnessing' -- you know, you sit down with somebody and a tract with a title like "So, you want to avoid eternal hell?" and they give you a testimony and your heart is strangely warmed and BOOM there's a little Jesus in your heart. Amen.

The question is: Is there an analogous model for this kind of behavior in Islam?

Essentially, it's a network problem, although I didn't explain it that way at the time. Christian clusters witness to grow nodes; what do Islamic clusters do?

The classic idea is that Islam conjoins the secular and sacred so much that its witness model is indistinguishable from territorial expansion. But these days, of course, that's naive.

As I say:

What is perhap less obvious is the connection which exists between the new political activism and the Christian personal witness conversion rhetoric. Look carfully at the pattern: First, the believer (the coalition or fundamentalist group) opens a dialogue with the listener(the earching public). The fundamentalist groups put forth their ideas, creating another voice within American society. As more people begin to listen to this voice, the society becomes locked in a spiritual crisis. Even if all of the particulars do not hold, the next step is clear: The fundamentalist groups are trying to convince American society to internalize their ideas, in an effort to “convert” the society much as they would convert an individual. This conversion would involve an instituting of social programs ordained by God and an American populace who, despite their present fear of anyone telling them how to run a government, would have been involved in a social change on an almost jihadic level.

Yeah, it's kind of jingoistic looking back--but remember Jihad didn't have the same level of connotation it does now.

The key idea is that there may be an analogous Islamic witness that targets demographic groups rather than individuals through instruction and localized social projects. I do think we're seeing some of that play out, and it remains a useful (and less fearful) persepctive to use for that activity.

But, you know, maybe I was just reaching.

Judge for yourself here

Orpheus Drowning

2007-02-13T10:28:00-05:00

Theory alert on this one. It's a meditation on the Nietzschean concept of drama, and it wrestles with the Apollonian/Dionysian impulses.

Break it down like this: How will the world end? In an orgy of violence, or from becoming so stale and brittle that it just cracks apart? Or will one create the other?

This paper focuses on how Orpheus (singer, Greek, look it up) faces death, and how we can use that to decide how we will live our life. Sort of. Again, theory alert. It uses the Nietzschean drama in the language, so it's kind of a trip. Get it? Like, Orpheus went on a trip? Or Tim Leary did?

So the Drama

another robot post-apocalypse

2007-02-12T10:14:00-05:00

If there's one thing Jim Cameron has taught us over the years, it's that we will obsolesce ourselves.

Hell, if I've burned through 7 Ipods in five years and Steve Jobs keeps making new ones, how much longer can the human race stay top-of-the-line? Pretty soon, somebody's going to make us in candy pink and minty green, too.

SciFi (not the channel) keeps trying to teach us how to die; we keep trying to live. But there are real lessons here. How do the stories say that we will create our replacements? What will the consequences be? And, most importantly, will the coming robot apocalypse go over-budget?

In this paper, I try and wrestle with two touchstones of life creation: Frankenstein and Neuromancer. Not sure how well I do.

My conclusions come out like this:

Scientific progress should be rooted in a popular community driven
by pragmatic self-interest, to sustain the new sentience.
Radical emotions are involved in the creation of sentience, and these will infect the sentience itself.
Isolation turns sentience into monstrosity. Think about spiritual sustenance early on and continually.
Complexity alone can never create something sentient, because a knowledge
of mortality and the rush which that brings are seen as a necessary component
of life. So, sentience needs limitations to grow against.
The scientist is inside the process here, as much as in the quantum world. His/her frame of mind, spiritual aspect, and humility will play key goals in the nature of any created sentient, which makes a cultural understanding of these issues all the more
important.

I do get that it's pulp fiction (common noun). But stories make the man, and the first test shuttle was the USS Enterprise. So we glean, and try and use imagination to stay a half-hop ahead.

It's alive! Read about it here!

Prophets on Gin and Juice

2007-02-09T09:40:00-05:00

The thing you learn about prophecy is that it never comes from where you expect it. Especially in a crisis.

Remember, Jesus was a businessman. Dull. Confucius was a civil servant. Not likely to see much wild prophet-on-prophet action there. Augusto Boal was a chemical engineer. And Ice Cube is...well, Ice Cube. A hardcore, misogynist gangster wannabe.

Yeah, he now mostly does flicks where he scowls at cute kids or scolds, say, an errant racist puppy. But in the early 1990s he had a critical cultural task. And I don't just mean stopping Vanilla Ice.

Los Angeles in the 1990s, just south of Rodney King and north of O.J., was a town desperately in need of a prophet. South Central was under the thumb of an actual, honest-to-god oppressive regime writ teeny--in the form of the police. You know, the ones that needed a good f*ckin'.

There's a branch of theology called Liberation Theology that deals with practical ways to try and overcome oppressive regimes like that. It had been used in South America, some in Africa, and LA was eerily similar to those situations. All it needed was a liberator.

And the thing is, it almost seemed like Cube was volunteering for the job. Almost. But he never quite made it. And the story of how he never made it, and why it mattered, is the one this paper tells. It's actually the Part Two of my earlier sketch on LA in Crisis. But this one's better.

I mean, how often do you see a prophet struggling to be born? Especially one trying to do it stoned out of his mind and carrying an AK.

Download Radical-Urban-Communitas.pdf

Directed Terror Networks

2007-02-08T07:30:00-05:00

It's such a truism to talk about terrorist networks these days. About the hubs and nodes and how the edges connect the vertices and three jumps take us right from Osama to Big Bird.

Yes, a lot of genius work is being done. Valdis Krebs is a master, and John Robb is my own personal Jesus. But there's also a lot of smack being talked.

I don't think it's enough to talk about terrorists as a network; I don't think it's useful to just dig deeper into those connections, either. For one thing, the amount of generated data is phenomenal, and even when you weight the relationships, there are still a lot of false leads.

So, I tried to step back and look at what it meant if we could define terrorist networks as specifically Directed Networks. Does framing the issue that way give us any new insight?

And yeah, I think it does.

So, a directed network is a network in which the connections aren't symmetrical. You click from one page to another and there's not immediately a route back. Like that.

In terms of social phenomena, I think it indicates that you can make relationship connections that it's hard to move back from.

Pair that with this idea: Most people are analysing these networks as if the nodes were actually people. But I think each node is actually the sum of the connections pouring into it. Yes, a person with a given set of qualities occupies it.

But remove that person and those connections are going to start looking for another node to latch onto. In a sense, then, people can move to occupy different nodes in a given relationship systems.

In a terrorist network, for instance, you might start off sympathizing, then supporting, then go operations. At each choide, you occupy nodes deeper and deeper into the network. After each choice, it's damn hard to get back where you were before.

This is really preliminary theory, rather than research. But to me, the idea of human networks and the concept of nodes as placeholder locations rather than people are both key to breaking down these nets.

Get the Paper

Early 90's L.A. - A Model of Broken

2007-02-07T15:21:00-05:00

We're human; we break things. Sometimes cheap blue glasses. Sometimes whole human beings, or clusters of them, and the sins pass down through generations. And then those generations are charged with the weighty task of making their own damn hope.

In the late 1990's, I was doing work on Liberation Theology--specifically how it could be used as a tool to improve oppressive societies in ways that weren't specifically Christian.

Los Angeles turned out to be just the land of dreams for the nightmares needed.

At the time I was writing, the big debate centered around the announcement made by a number of politicos that the city was entering an integrationist utopia. Rounded the hump; seeing the light.

But the data just wasn't there. It wasn't two Americas; it was a hundred shards all breaking into smaller pieces against the asphalts.

This paper is a sketch of the sources and status of racism and oppression in hell-A during that time. Hundreds of people have written about it before, but it's a good sketch of the scenario.

I'd build on the idea in a follow-on paper about Ice Cube as a failed prophet of liberation. Look for that one to come soon.

Read the sketch of L.A. in srisis

I wish there was a war...

2007-02-07T07:35:00-05:00

Have you heard the one about how warfare creates executive aggrandizement outside the Consitution? It's a old saw; James Madison told it.

Here's my take. I wish we were in a war. Yeah, war leaders consolidate power, but classical warfare was too draining on lives and resources to be continual. The burden of war itself would force the Congress to try and rein in the executive or risk the dissolution of the country.

In a constant state of military action that doesn't drain us to that point, though, Congress doesn't have as compelling a reason to act. And that allows the consolidation to continue.

Yes, they've recently sent W back to the puppy house and Condi has her sad face one, but I'm talking a scope of decades here. This is not a partisan issue. The fact is, we need to find some sort of constitutional framework for these military actions. Otherwise, the executive will keep gaining power through a cycle of buildup/deploy/buildup/deploy.

So, I have a vote about what to use.

Let's look at the actual definition of Congressional war powers given in Section 8:

To declare War, grant Letters of Marque and Reprisal [my emphasis], and make Rules concerning Captures on Land and Water

Both of these ideas--Letters of Marque and Reprisal--are generally considered archaic relics of the days of the privateers. A Letter of Marque was a certification given to a mercenary to conduct retaliation on the nation's behalf. Reprisal is, well, reprisal--it's conducting the act of retaliation itself. It's undertaking a military action short of war to ensure the safety of the nation and gain redress for some wrong committed. Archaic or not, that sounds pretty familiar.

So, we've got this era of violent non-state actors and limited engagements of foreign powers,
Letters and Marque and Reprisal may be archaic, but they also provide a Constitutional framework for circumscribing a state of continuous non-war military action. They enjoyed flexible (if early) use against the varied enemies of the United States—and they were initiated, granted and/or revoked by Congress. As Section 2 says, "The President shall be Commander in Chief of the Army and Navy of the United States, and of the Militia of the several States, when called into the actual Service of the United States". This clause is clearly meant to express a clear limit to the role of Commander in Chief. These ancient tools against piracy and seizure give the Congress a way to make a limited call to action that leads to "actual Service" instead of being drowned in the seductive lure of the presidency's symbolic power.

I think I just hit some kind of wonk threshold. Sorry. Dismantling my Lasswell engine.

Here's an essay that digs into it.

Um, yeah, there are no one liners in it. I'll try and ruminate about the same stuff here over the new few week, but I'll make sure and make fun of something while I do it. James Madison's hair? The funny ways those wacky founding fathers spelled "Marque"? I'll get the kids in the hall on it.

Towards a Modern Tragic

2007-02-06T21:13:12-05:00

Faulkner said that the young writers of his time only had one question, "When will I be blown up?"

At moments of crisis, I fear that something similar happens. We lock up the present into a kind of tunnelvision and lose our wider senses. The kind of behavior that causes a lack of policy ability, or freezes a deer on a highway.

The Greeks cuts through this sense with Tragedy, capital T, a balls to the wall anguish that cut them open again. In our most critical moments, whether we're responding or just watching the news, this is critical.

The attached paper fumbles toward just this sense of the tragic, but cast in a Modern realm. The trappings of the Greeks can't do anything for is--but we have to have some way to break through ourselves. Or we may just keep running toward the cliff without looking, or breathing.

So, the open question is, what can we do?

Be warned, this is heavy semiotics. Herbert Blau, Umberto Eco. But, for the rare Augusto Boal fans out there, you're in for a treat.

Go for the Drama

Climate Change: Not just heat.

2007-02-02T16:00:00-05:00

In all the coverage on climate change, one thing that's getting buried is the idea of precipitation changes. Center latitudes (where much argiculture is) are getting 20% dryer, while Northern Lats are getting wetter. This is dustbowl-level data and, consdering the water wars that are cranking up, could cause big traumja down the line. Maybe we just need huge H20 pipelines from Ottawa down to the South Georgie peanut fields?

Link: USATODAY.com - On Deadline | Archives | Climate change report released; read it here.

"Warming of the climate system is unequivocal, as is now evident from observations of increases in global average air and ocean temperatures, widespread melting of snow and ice, and rising global mean sea level," the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says.

I own you, Bird Flu!

2007-02-02T14:30:00-05:00

So, Indonesia is claiming intellectual property ownership of their H5N1 strain, because of a vaccine development deal they've got going with Baxter. They say they didn't give permission for the Australian Government to use their strain, and it shouldn't have developed a vaccine.

Indonesia (balding, on cell phone wearing aviator sunglasses): "What? You say you made something that will stop H5N1 from killing our people and decimating our poultry industry? What's our percentage? Oh, it's a government thing? Forget it, baby. We don't save lives unless we see the check."

To wit: AM - Indonesia claims ownership over strain of avian flu.

SITI FADILLAH SUPARI: I never gave permission to send a specimen of a virus to Australia.
GEOFF THOMPSON: And you think that that permission should've been asked for and it should've been granted by you?
SITI FADILLAH SUPARI: I think so. I think so.

Diseases are now intprop, man. Up next: Litigation for catching a cold without signing a non-disclosure.

Un-Mellow Yellow

2007-02-02T12:46:38-05:00

Link: RSOE HAVARIA Emergency and Disaster Information Service.

Russia's Emergency Ministry will fly a portable laboratory to the Omsk region in southern Siberia today to analyse oily yellow and orange snow which has covered an area which is home to 27,000 people

No jokes about yellow snow, please. Seriously, this is the kind of sceince fiction environmental damage that can be caused by these tight Russian confluxi of oil and gas refineries.

Of course, last week it was red snow, so maybe this yet another sign of environmental irresponsibility from the Big Crayola crayon cabal.

He Long

2007-01-25T22:39:03-05:00

China, 1916. He Long, frustrated by heavy taxation on salt carriers, breaks into the Salt Tax Bureau. He burns the records inside, then distributes the property among the most needy in the province. Sure, he killed a couple of people in the process, but that's not why other salt carriers came to his side,

They followed him because he disrupted two systems, and it had an immediate effect. First, he disrupted the information flow to the province, allowing the carriers to elude punishment. Second, he disrupted the symbolic system of taxation and authority.

This idea of Systems Disruption (which came from John Robb) is a real key to the idea of guerrilla warfare. Yeah, it won't get the headlines that a murder will. But if you look at network theory (and I'll be linking to some in the next few days) you see that systems disruption like this begins to break a whole network down into fragmented pieces. And fragmented pieces lead to greater violence in ways that not even the taking of a human life to do.

I'll be exploring this mor in coming days now that the blog is back online.

Why this Blog?

2007-01-25T22:09:13-05:00

We're at this point in history where two trends are converging. First, there's the ability of ever smaller groups of people to wield ever greater havoc. Second, there are the human-influenced changes in the natural world which are beginning to cause unnatural harm.

Couple this with the declining power of the nation-state and the increasing proclivity of capital to congeal at the top of global markets while isolating other factors of society--man, you've got yourself a hell of a pitch for a disaster movie.

I'm not paranoid (who's there?); I don't think the world will end in a bang and/or a whimper within my lifetime. But there are children to consider, and mysterious forces at work. And, god help my fuzzy brain, I want to try and help sift through them.

Insect Life

2006-09-13T16:44:13-04:00

I knew this kid who was allergic to wasps. And one time, we were in a coffeeshop and we saw a wasp on the window--a big red one. I thought he would, like, run or something, but he stared into the window, face reflected on the glass, and he said i want to kill something.

So he went after the wasp with a brown paper bag.

That's what I feel like this week. We see a threat that ignites our knowledge of weakness in ourselves, and we have to kill it. Trying to kill it blunt force trauma. And that dance brings it in close enough to kiss us, right? Makes it a monster when it was just a bug before.

The kid killed the wasp; I mean, I'm not saying it's a perfect metaphor. But the second you set your jaw like that, watch out, Bucky. you just put yourself on the same level as something venomous.

Really? Because I totally think they're fine.

2006-07-22T08:13:19-04:00

From the File of Hideous Understatement comes this VOA headline:

Red Cross Concerned About Civilians in Lebanon

It may just be that Pierre Kraehenbueh (the Head of Ops for the ICRC) looks like he's chatting up hookers in Instanbul.

Pierre: Hey, sweetness! Let me tell you how concerned I am about Lebanon...i

Oxana, Oxana

2006-07-21T00:05:13-04:00

With all the wildness these days, odd that this story would make me write again. From The Telegraph:

Oxana is a feral child, one of only about 100 known in the world. The story goes that, when she was three, her indifferent, alcoholic parents left her outside one night and she crawled into a hovel where they kept dogs.

These are the images that spin cold chills up me. She was out there five years, has the mental capacity of a six year old (she's in her twenties), and still exhibits canine behaviors. On the plus side, she's got a mean bark.

There are all kinds of crises. Some are exquisitely individual, but potent enough in their horror to shake your bones, nonetheless. When she reunited with her father, she said, “I thank you that you have come. I wanted you to see me milk the cows.”

The 700 Gitmo Martyrs

2006-05-23T15:34:38-04:00

So, no surprise really that Amnesty “singled out the United States for particular criticism over the detention of suspected terrorists at a military base at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba”.

I'm not even going to address whether Guantanamo is ethical, involves torture, etc. There are enough tailspin wagging dogtags on that. Instead, let's ask the only question Jack Bauer would care about, does it work?

Technorati Tags: network, Gitmo, terrorism

Well, does it?

On Meet the Press (May 21, 2006), Condoleezza Rice defended the prison in this way: She stated that there were hundreds of dangerous criminals in the prison and then asked the question, “What else can we do with them?” By phrasing the problem in this way, she tacitly acknowledges that the question of obtaining viable intelligence from the captives is moot. These guys have got nothing to offer us, anymore.

And so we keep more than 400 men close to our vest to prevent them from slipping away into the murky terrorist network and attacking us again. Which some of the release prisoners have done.

This sounds logical, but when you break down the way network structures work, it starts to break down. Networks coalesce around volunteers motivated by ideas. They are pull organizations, not moved (as the U.S. military is, say) by push recruitment centers. (See Marc Sageman, Understanding Terror Networks).

Tactically, imprisoning these people creates 400 martyrs in the eyes of the world. This, then, gives exponential juice to both the global terrorist network and our other global detractors. It pulls those networks closer together and speeds their growth. The damage is worse than it would be if all 400 of these men were allowed to be foot soldiers, even active foot soldiers, in the terror network.

I'm not saying we give them $100 bucks and a suit and let them off in Miami. But an extradition program makes sense. And even if some of them slip through the cracks--even if some of them commit successful attacks, God help us--it still makes sense. Because, long term, the idea of the 400 martyrs is too strong, it provides glue to the very networks we're trying to dissolve.

It's all fun and games until someone loses an eye....or finds one.

2006-05-23T13:19:15-04:00

It's no surprise that hospitals across the developed world are losing beds. Here's an article (from the BBC) that spins it as a good thing. The glorious teaser:

People are getting better care despite NHS bed numbers falling by a third in the last 20 years, health managers say.

Ouch. The article brings up one key issue related to running wards at 100% full: MRSA and other antibiotic-resistant superbugs have a better environment in which to spread.

The other issue, of course, is surge capacity. While it's great that outpatient care has kept more people at home, the idea that it's hard to find a bed on any normal day at the hospital does not bode well for pandemic flu response.

Oh well, there are always DMATs, right? Thousands and thousands of 35-member DMAT teams in abandoned Wal-Mart parking lots across the country. Encouraging, no?

Technorati Tags: hospitals, surge capacity, healthcare

Implosion / No Motion

2006-05-22T14:42:51-04:00

My favorite part of CNN's piece on the implosion of the Nuke tower in Oregon?

The spent radioactive fuel rods, which sit above ground, must be moved to a federal repository that hasn't been developed yet.

All those fuel rods, just lying there, waiting for the day Congress builds a minimum-ten-thousand-year-secured-structure under a billion dollar's worth of creepy modern art. Good call.

(image from http://www.damninteresting.com/?p=160)

Technorati Tags: nuclear, nuclear storage, yucca

Under-Reactive: Katrina Success Stories

2006-05-22T11:08:00-04:00

So, um, not everything sucked in Katrina, right? Well, according to the Senate (when they proposed the FEMA-nator), two groups did well: the Coast Guard and private businesses.

Great! Rock on, let's copy those guys. What'd they do, again?

The Coast Guard and certain private sector businesses both conducted extensive planning and training for disasters, and they put that preparation into use when disaster struck. Both moved material assets and personnel out of harm’s way as the storm approached, but kept them close enough to the front lines for quick response after it passed. Perhaps most important, both had empowered front-line leaders who were able to make decisions when they needed to be made.

Interestingly, neither of these cases is discussed much in the actual document. But I think you can argue that all (okay most) (possibly some) of the governmental groups involved did the above things. The fact that these two groups were picked as the success stories is really instructive as to the nature of the failures. Why? Jump on, my friend.

Technorati Tags: crisis, disaster, hurricanes, terrorism

Katrina was not (as the House claimed) a failure of initiative. It was the triumph of reactivity. The Coast Guard and private sector success stories were success stories because their areas of the disaster reacted well to reactive thinking.

The principle success of the Coast Guard? Their 33,000 rescue missions. For the private sector? Their massive effort to restore their communications infrastructure.

It's not that either one of these efforts is not noble. Certainly, the image of people trapped in their attics as water crept up their legs stills keeps me in nightsweats.

But both issues fall squarely in the range of expected problems--the kind of problems you can drill for. I don't think that's so different than the FEMA effort or the state work. The problem for the actual response structure is that it failed massively to shift from reactive to proactive thinking.

Really, Mitch? You might say. Or, more cruelly, WTF? Nothing crashes that fast just because someone has to think proactively.

Yeah, well, the drill is written deep into the response training model. And even the exercises follow careful scripts. All I'm saying is that the Coast Guard and private sector success doesn't make them models for the response structure--it just means that their tasks fell into the accepted range of possibilities, i.e. they got thrown a pitch they could smack out of the park.

Gator Baiters

2006-05-22T08:24:00-04:00

Aren't they fricking cute? My cousin has a gator-chicken farm. He raises the chickens, and when they die off before he can sell them, he throws them into a round concrete pit full of hordes of cutie-pie carnivores. When the gators grow up, they can be eaten, in turn, or made into handbags. Egg to chicken to gator to purse; that's the circle of life.

Maybe the gators keep attacking to protest their loss of dignity. But I think in Florida, we like to tempt crisis. As soon as the technolgy is there, I fully expect us to build bubble houses right on the Everglades, to be drunk and dunk our heads in the swamps as the winds kick up to gale force, to die by the thousands as we ransack the last bastions of nature.

I mean, why else would we keep throwing up suburbs in Gator Land?

Technorati Tags: florida, alligators

Trust no one makes helping hard.

2006-05-21T22:45:24-04:00

Still, New Orleanians learned a valuable lesson from Katrina: Trust no one and nothing. They're not counting on the levees to hold or the government to rescue them this time. from Time

So last year was the year of the great failure. This year, we get to see the great miscommunication. Because mistrust (and boy hullabaloo is there mistrust) is like a virus in the network. In a disaster response (goes the theory from Flirting with Disaster, the breadth of the trauma is described by the distant between the government's expectation of what the victims will do, and what they will actually do.

Mistrust complicates that equation or, really, invalidates it.

Technorati Tags: disaster, hurricanes, Katrina, network, terrorism, crisis

Because a “self-sufficient” New Orleans will neither believe the government's offer of assistance nor expect it.

Are things going to be as bad as last year? No, too much mitigation has gone on. Too much engineering, etc. But could there be a clusterfuck of the first order. Sure.

Because right now FEMA is like a player at a the table with every ex-girlfriend he's cheated on. Might his intentions be good? Yeah, but who's going to trust him until he has the chance to screw the drunk bride and doesn't take it.

I might've let the metaphor get away from me.

Storm from Paradise

2006-02-28T13:36:00-05:00

Laurie Anderson is a seminal latter 20th C. performance artist in that cold, Germanic vibe that startles you just enough to stop you from throttling her from pretension. Kind of Madonna meets Brecht in a dark alley with synthesizers. She had a couple of minor hits in the 80s, but has always focused on building elaborate multimedia shows.

In fact, she's the kind of postmodern, ironic voice that I expected to find out of a job on September 12th, 2001.

Jump for the mystery of why I was wrong; why she's part of Crisisville after all...

On September 20, 2001, there appeared a concert at Town Hall in NYC. It began with the robotic pronouncement of a new world, a new opportunity to be seized with boldness. Early on, in fact, Laurie Anderson seemed to have tripped the postmod light fantastic, off into a the kind of valueless world that wakes James Dobson up at night, sweating through his flannel.

But then the music came in, and a kind of blessed transubstantiation occurred. The distance I had been mistaking for irony became an immediate stillness. A liquid stillness that bathed these torn ears in the long moment of now.

She sang

This is the hand, the hand that takes/ Here come the planes/They're American planes. Made in America/ Smoking or non-smoking?/ And the voice said: 'Neither snow nor rain nor gloom of night shall stay these couriers/ From the swift completion of their appointed rounds'

from O Superman, written in 1981. And she meant it. The coolness that I had always chafed at was suddenly revealed as the only way to contain the strength of her tragedy. The two of us, connected through headphones, citizens of Crisisville together.

Building the network to match the network

2006-02-28T09:49:00-05:00

Mark Kimmett, plans chief for the military, made this statement today.

“To defeat this enemy it is far more than simply the military,” said General Kimmett. “It will take a network -- interagency network, international network -- that brings together Department of the Treasury, brings together the State Department, brings together all the intelligence agencies, brings together all of our law enforcement agencies, so that we can develop a network, both here in America, and internationally, to fight this network and defeat this network.”

Find out why this makes me all warm and tingly after the jump.

For a long time, we've heard the benefits that Al Qaeda has maintained as a loose meta-group of coalitions which are themselves loose. They're incredibly fast, they have no rules, they can be anywhere at any time and can leap tall democracies in a single bound.

But as Michael Hirsh points out this week--until 9/11, Al-Qaeda was being torn apart by money woes, infighting and poor management. They were no paragon of complex network adaptability. More like an early dot com, they were over capitalized and under-performing.

Still, though, they are a network. More so now than ever--and that means that destroying them will take concentrated attacks on high traffic hubs through multiple loci. This is a soap box of mine that you'll hear more about, but the key point here is that the U.S. government works poorly as a network.

Notice that I didn't say, “The U.S. government is not a network.” I mean, duh. That's like saying Bobby Knight is not the Dalai Lama. The two things are so conceptually different you can't even align them enough to properly differentiate.

In those cases, however, when the U.S. government begins to work like a true network, bad things happen. People sidestep chain of command to call their friends at the White House. Graft occurs, and mixed media messages. Because informality is heavily mixed in with complex social network structures, networked government reverts back to a good ol' boys club. And not a good good old boys club like Alabama. More like Deliverance.

So, we should stop trying to turn government into a network. Rather, I think it's better to create formalized pockets of network within the hierarchy. That is, at some point the hierarchy stops, and a networked bubble occurs with certain rule-based areas of control and the ability to go as wild as they need to. Then, at a another point, the bubble close back into the hierarchy.

It's not as sexy as saying “Networked Government” maybe, but it allows accountability without bureaucracy and delineates a pure operating space for the network. More of this as my brain unmelts.

Evian Flu

2006-02-28T07:00:00-05:00

This chick's days are numbered. Beware! Across the globe marches the disease you get from French water!

Seriously, what's up with this trend? Last week, a trainer of mine kept saying “Evian flu, Evian flu.” And tonight Lou Dobbs did it. I mean, Lou Dobbs! That man enunciates when he talks in his sleep.

Evian flu. Did I miss this? Did Julie G. put out the bat signal? Is the WHO at Level 6 alert over a product that filters through the French Alps for 15 years?

ANTHRAX! The Musical.

2006-02-27T15:52:00-05:00

Because he's a drummer. Get it?

Upon further reflection, this is a) insenstive b) not so funny and c) probably libelous to the beloved old time folk group Anthrax.

But alas, blogs only move forward.

Anyway, Vado Diomande, the drum maker who acquired Anthrax from unprocessed goat hides in West Africa, is still in serious condition today. Although this is rare, cutaneous anthrax is a natural disease that is spread through animal hides.

In other words, there's no scary here. This, though, could be scary.

Disease Tipping Points

2006-02-27T13:34:00-05:00

I look to Malcolm Gladwell for advice in all things. Except hair care. And the central tenet of his The Tipping Point is that almost inconsequential things can create huge outcomes.

This is a key idea that hasn't been fully translated yet to the study of pandemic flu--which is ironic, since much of Gladwell's work is based on epidemiology. Scientists and talking heads keep discussing vaccines and treatments--which are very important concepts, to be sure. But there's very little discussion of the actual healthcare situation that will occur in a pandemic.

Let's look at three key factors: sanitation in healthcare, antibiotic resistance and biomedical waste after the jump.

Now, the first thing to realize is that modern hospitals have very little surge capacity. Affected areas will need to call in partner and federal resources--like DMAT teams--to help out. A best practice treatment environment would likely involve different treatment areas for different levels of illness. Hopefully, nobody will be dumb enough to try and separate families and this will work fine.

However, it brings up certain key issues that haven't been looked at. First, the sanitation of these areas is critical. Disease like MRSA and this new typhus strain are starting to pop-up in hospitals. At the same time, sanitation workers are starting to grumble about crappy (get it?) equipment and staff shortages. These treatment areas will likely be intense locales, capable of quickly spreading disease to treatment workers. Keeping them spotless will be one way to keep any pandemic from tipping into a catastrophe.

Antibiotic resistance. Remember that? It's the health crisis that was getting all the play before Avian Flu came along and stole its germ-y thunder. It's getting worse. Slowly, in fits and starts, but it is growing. Unless it's monitored and reversed now--with steps like decreased preventive antibiotics in livestock--it could create additional chaos within any pandemic. Also, of course, the phenomenon raises the spectre of antiviral resistance--which should be planned for as part of any pandemic response.

Biomedical waste. This is the stuff with blood on it that gets carted away from hospitals and, usually, incinerate. In a pandemic, of course, it will be the infectious stuff with blood on it. Biomedical waste is usually serviced by private contractors who are probably not of a particularly public service mind. In a pandemic, these contractors will have to expand their work considerably while dealing with a risk of infection. I'm not convinced they're ready to do that. And, if they don't, these treatment areas may spawn piles of infectious waste.

Any of these issues, though small, could be large enough to tip an epidemic into a pandemic or tip a pandemic into a true catastrophe. I'm no epidemiologist, but it seems like, you know, planning for them would be a good idea.

I see Mumbai, I see France, I see Chirac's underpants

2006-02-27T12:14:00-05:00

Our Avian Flu tracker pinged both India and France over the past two weeks. In the past few days, the commercial poultry industry in both countries is nearly collapsing as other countries ban their birds.

Demand has dropped from 30-50% so far in both places. Even foie gras exports to Japan have stopped--which is the actual dictionary definition for desperate. I mean, in my Webster's, next to the word desperate, is the picture of a Japanese man being denied foie gras.

Listen, I work in public health. From what I've learned there, I do think that a pandemic of some form is possible over the next few years. But now we're just being silly about this whole bird thing. There are much scarier things to worry about, like chikungunya, MRSA, and imitation boils.

Bush should really try the new Sylvan Learning Center program for Counter-Terrorism.

2006-02-27T12:01:00-05:00

The NYT harkens back to the 9/11 Commission's Report Card as the commission members say this battle over the Dubai ports is just so much smoke up our asses. Well, Tom Kean actually said:

“We’re not really debating whether the ports are secure,” said Thomas H. Kean, the group’s chairman. “We’re debating who should be running them. It’s the wrong question.”

But that sure sounds like a smoke screen for the unmentionables to me. And that report card? Well, they got an A-minus for disrupting terrorist finances. But that's looking a lot like my slow cousin's Freshman year gym grade, since most of the rest of the report card lists Ds and Fs--for things like, oh I don't know, port security, border security, and cargo screening.

So, will the Dubai deal make us worse? Well, as my cousin used to say, you can't do much worse than F.