Invisible Experiment

2008-05-30T22:06:00.000-07:00

The New Networks

Human beings are social animals. Long before we became human – or even recognizably close – we became social. For at least 11 million years, before our ancestors broke off from the gorillas and chimpanzees, we cultivated social characteristics. In social groups, these distant forbears could share the tasks of survival: finding food, raising young, and self-defense. Human babies, in particular, take many years to mature, requiring constantly attentive parenting – time stolen away from other vital activities. Living in social groups helped ensure that these defenseless members of the group grew to adulthood. The adults who best expressed social qualities bore more and healthier children.

--Mark Pesce

2008-05-30T21:56:00.000-07:00

...humans are manageable and our behavior is stochastic.

They never know which particular rat is going to do whatever. But they have a pretty good idea as to what proportion of the total rat population will do whatever or something very close.

--Source

2008-05-26T23:29:00.000-07:00

The binary trap of us vs. them thinking ensures that victory will be both difficult and temporary. Playing a zero-sum game, like “King of the Mountain,” is ultimately a losing proposition for the winner. The United States of America has been playing at the top of the hill for a long time—although that means we’ve enjoyed an insane standard of living that whole time, it also means every other opponent in the game has been studying and preparing for conflict with the King of the Mountain.

The imperative for Invisible War is to recognize that we’re all intimately attached to our “enemies” and “opponents.”

2008-05-26T23:27:00.000-07:00

Abundance is equal to freedom. Look at the most free people in the world these days and it doesn’t really matter what country you’re in; it just matters if you have more than enough of the things you need.

--Harflimon

2008-05-26T23:20:00.000-07:00

Up to 100 repeaters are needed per square mile, depending on the density and height of nearby buildings. As many as 100 people can comfortably share a DSL line; Meraki calculates they're getting 1 megabyte per second on average. As with any network, speed drops as more people log on, but heavy traffic automatically reroutes to nearby, less-trafficked connections. Six months into the project, Meraki had installed upward of 750 repeaters, covering about 10% of San Francisco; they'll need at least 10,000 -- and many more DSL lines -- for the entire city. (If you're in the city and looking for a Wi-Fi signal, the network is called "Free the Net.")

2008-05-26T23:07:00.001-07:00

I’m frequently amazed how easy it is to break some pretty big-name security systems. There are a lot of reasons for this, but the big one is that it’s impossible to prove that something is secure. All you can do is try to break it.—if you fail, you know that it’s secure enough to keep you out, but what about someone who’s smarter than you? Anyone can design a security system so strong he himself can’t break it.

Think about that for a second, because it’s not obvious. No one is qualified to analyze their own security designs, because the designer and the analyzer will be the same person, with the same limits. Someone else has to analyze the security, because it has to be secure against things the designers didn’t think of.

--Bruce Schneier

2008-05-23T12:14:00.000-07:00

"So in a sense, (John) Boyd saw conflict not just as a contest between two (or more) knowledge / novelty-generating systems but between dissipative structures."
--Chet Richards

NOTES: Isolate your opponent from the external environment to prevent energy acquisition and trap entropy (force them towards thermodynamic equilibrium and "heat death"). Increase your own connectivity to acquire energy and expel entropy faster (movement farther away from thermodynamic equilibrium and greater structural complexity).
--John Robb

2008-05-22T16:28:00.000-07:00

2008-05-20T14:56:00.000-07:00

The key requirements to become "superempowered" are comprehension of a complex system's connectivty and operation; access to critical network hubs; possession of a force that can be leveraged against the structure of the system and a wilingness to use it.

2008-05-20T10:37:00.000-07:00

Because guinea pigs require much less room than traditional livestock and reproduce extremely quickly, they are a more profitable source of food and income than many traditional stock animals, such as pigs and cows; moreover, they can be raised in an urban environment. Both rural and urban families raise guinea pigs for supplementary income, and the animals are commonly bought and sold at local markets and large-scale municipal fairs. Guinea pig meat is high in protein and low in fat and cholesterol, and is described as being similar to rabbit and the dark meat of chicken. The animal may be served fried (chactado or frito), broiled (asado), or roasted (al horno), and in urban restaurants may also be served in a casserole or a fricassee.

The guinea pig is able to breed year-round, with birth peaks usually coming in the spring; as many as five litters can be produced per year The gestation period lasts from 59–72 days, with an average of 63–68 days. Litters yield 1–6 pups, with an average of three. Males reach sexual maturity at 3–5 weeks; females can be fertile as early as four weeks and can carry litters before they are adults.

--thanks to Duke Whitey

2008-05-20T00:43:00.000-07:00

Idea of fast transients suggests that, in order to win, we should operate at a faster tempo or rhythm than our adversaries -- or, better yet, get inside adversary’s observation-orientation-decision-action time cycle or loop.

Why? Such activity will make us appear ambiguous (unpredictable) thereby generate confusion and disorder among our adversaries—since our adversaries will be unable to generate mental images or pictures that agree with the menacing as well as faster transient rhythm or patterns they are competing against.

--John Boyd, Patterns of Conflict

2008-05-19T22:19:00.000-07:00

Discussions of Israel's military trade usually focus on the flow of weapons into the country--US-made Caterpillar bulldozers used to destroy homes in the West Bank and British companies supplying parts for F-16s. Overlooked is Israel's huge and expanding export business. Israel now sends $1.2 billion in "defense" products to the United States--up dramatically from $270 million in 1999. In 2006 Israel exported $3.4 billion in defense products--well over a billion more than it received in US military aid. That makes Israel the fourth-largest arms dealer in the world, overtaking Britain.

Much of this growth has been in the so-called "homeland security" sector. Before 9/11 homeland security barely existed as an industry. By the end of this year, Israeli exports in the sector will reach $1.2 billion--an increase of 20 percent. The key products and services are high-tech fences, unmanned drones, biometric IDs, video and audio surveillance gear, air passenger profiling and prisoner interrogation systems--precisely the tools and technologies Israel has used to lock in the occupied territories.

--via Naomi Klien

2008-05-19T22:04:00.000-07:00

This is how this Golden Shield will work: Chinese citizens will be watched around the clock through networked CCTV cameras and remote monitoring of computers. They will be listened to on their phone calls, monitored by digital voice-recognition technologies. Their Internet access will be aggressively limited through the country’s notorious system of online controls known as the “Great Firewall.” Their movements will be tracked through national ID cards with scannable computer chips and photos that are instantly uploaded to police databases and linked to their holder’s personal data. This is the most important element of all: linking all these tools together in a massive, searchable database of names, photos, residency information, work history and biometric data. When Golden Shield is finished, there will be a photo in those databases for every person in China: 1.3 billion faces.

--via Rolling Stone

2008-05-19T18:00:00.000-07:00

In a globalized environment, military technologies will be developed at an accelerating pace, some of which might have the potential to render established capabilities obsolete.

For example, a cheap, simple-to-make and easy-to-use weapon might be invented that is effective against a wide range of targets and against which established countermeasures are ineffective. Based on civilian developments, which have become widely available this could flood the world’s arms markets, from the OECD nations to the bazaars of Africa and Asia, altering perceptions about the use of force and power balances.

--source: Global Trends 2007-2036

2008-05-19T17:59:00.000-07:00

Break any rule, sooner than lose the initiative.

In counterinsurgency, the initiative is everything. If the enemy is reacting to you, you control the operation and, provided you mobilize the population, you will win. If you are reacting to the enemy – even if you are killing or capturing him in large numbers – then he is controlling the environment and you will eventually lose. This is because, in counterinsurgency, the enemy almost always has the tactical initiative. He initiates most attacks, targets you unexpectedly and withdraws too fast for you to react. So instead, you must focus on the local population, build your own solution to the environment and its systemic problems, further your own game plan and fight the enemy only when he gets in the way. This helps you keep the initiative.

2008-05-19T17:46:00.000-07:00

Wal-Mart maintains personal data – names, addresses, social security numbers – on its 1.6 million current employees; millions of additional former employees; and 47 million members of its Sam’s Club operations. It keeps records of anyone who has tried to use fraudulent checks or filed a claim against Wal-Mart; anyone who uses a Wal-Mart’s pharmacy; as well as the Vehicle Identification Number (VIN), license plate number and home address of any motorist who has had his automobile’s oil changed at a Wal-Mart, said [David] Harrison [Wal-Mart's "first manager of 'threat assessments and collection, analysis and dissemination'"].

2008-05-19T14:11:00.000-07:00

Blitzing the system
The key to unlocking the disruptive potential of cities within this new form of warfare, is to attack key points (systempunkts) within target infrastructure and social networks to force a change in the city's dynamic. Infrastructure attacks, particularly on power/fuel/water, negate the ability of the government to deliver political goods (for example, in October Baghdad only received 2.4 hours of electricity a day). This halts economic activity and forces the population to rely upon primary loyalties for daily survival (families, neighborhoods, religious organizations, gangs, etc.). It also damages the ability of the government to deliver political goods, which are the key to legitimacy. As a result, primary loyalties rise and nationalism falls. Next, attacks on the social fabric along fault lines (religious, ethnic, class, etc.), are then used to force these primary loyalty groups to arm themselves for security. Finally, as these manufactured groups naturally come into conflict (for access to resource, protection, or revenge), the city's intrinsic interconnectedness allows it to assume its own emergent dynamic, replete with feedback loops that accelerate conflict.

--via John Robb

2008-05-18T21:37:00.000-07:00

The global population has mushroomed from 2.5 billion to over 6 billion in the last 50 years. And more folks keep showing up at the party. We live on a planet of children, where almost 2 billion people are under the age of eighteen.

2008-05-18T09:22:00.000-07:00

Roughly one-fifth of all U.S. households are disconnected from the Internet and have never used e-mail, according to research firm Parks Associates.A recent phone survey of U.S. households by Parks found 20 million households are without Internet access, approximately 18 percent of all U.S. households.

2008-05-18T01:29:00.000-07:00

The insurgency will continue to improve over time Despite losses, the macro behavior of the Iraqi insurgency will become more complex (virulent) the longer it operates.….
Breakout is possible. While it is unlikely that the insurgency will spread horizontally to other countries in an incremental fashion, it is very likely that those trained in this environment will seed other movements (and inevitable that the knowledge of this will initiate activity). Further, this breakout can occur globally and in unexpected locales — since this neutral method isn’t tied to any single motive, it can be applied to any cause.

--John Robb

2008-05-18T00:51:00.000-07:00

During the Korean War, American servicemen stationed in Korea and Japan invented the “speedball,” an injectable mixture of amphetamine and heroin.

U.S. troops in Vietnam preferred marijuana, but when subject to a sudden marijuana ban, they turned to heroin. Discipline problems quickly rose; as one commanding officer
lamented 2 years after the marijuana crackdown, “If it would get them to give up the hard stuff, I would buy all the marijuana and hashish in the Delta as a present."

--Paul Rexton Kan

2008-05-17T23:36:00.000-07:00

The affairs of man are conducted by our own, man-made rules and according to man-made theories. Man’s achievements rest upon the use of symbols. For this reason, we must consider ourselves as a symbolic, semantic class of life, and those who rule the symbols, rule us. Now the term ‘symbol’ applies to a variety of things, words and money included. A piece of paper, called a dollar or a pound, has very little value if the other fellow refuses to take it; so we see that money must be considered as a symbol for human agreement, as well as deeds to property, stocks, bonds. The reality behind the money-symbol is doctrinal, ‘mental’, and one of the most precious characteristics of mankind. But it must be used properly; that is, with the proper understanding of its structure and ways of functioning. It constitutes a grave danger when misused.

When we say ‘our rulers’, we mean those who are engaged in the manipulation of symbols. There is no escape from the fact that they do, and that they always will, rule mankind, because we constitute a symbolic class of life, and we cannot cease from being so, except by regressing to the animal level.

--Korzybski

2008-05-17T23:33:00.000-07:00

Billions of pounds spent on Britain’s 4.2 million closed-circuit television cameras has not had a significant impact on crime, according to the senior police officer piloting a new database.

Detective Chief Inspector Mick Neville said it was a “fiasco” that only 3 per cent of street robberies in London were solved using CCTV.

Britain has more CCTV cameras than any other country in Europe.

--source: Times Online

2008-05-17T23:25:00.000-07:00

The researchers saw a similar pattern of brain activation when subjects viewed video clips of a person performing some of the actions described by the phrases. This type of “mirror” activity has been described previously (ScienceNOW 23 February, 2005), and many researchers view it as a neural mechanism for interpreting the actions of other people by recreating them in one’s own brain. The new findings suggest that mirror activity not only reflects directly observed actions, but also extends to inherently more abstract verbal descriptions of actions, Aziz-Zadeh says.

But there may be a limit to how much abstraction the brain’s mirror mechanisms can handle: the researchers found that metaphorical phrases like “kick the bucket” did not activate motor planning regions. Even so, says Aziz-Zadeh, the findings suggest that the brain processes language--in part--by cueing up its own representations of the actions conveyed by the words. “Language is often thought of as a higher cognitive function, but it’s actually rooted in these motor representations,” says Aziz-Zadeh, whose team reports its findings today in Current Biology.

--via Science Now

2008-05-17T21:47:00.000-07:00

Vibrational Resonance Chart of the Human Body from OSHA

2008-05-17T21:44:00.000-07:00

"World War Three will be a guerrilla information war, with no diversion between military and civilian participation."

-- via Marshall McLuhan

2008-05-17T21:34:00.000-07:00

New weapons concepts are completely different from new concept weapons. New weapons concepts is a broad conception of weapons that transcends the military field- whatever method can be used to fight a war is a weapon. In this view, whatever provides benefits to mankind can also be turned around to be a weapon to harm mankind.

To our way of thinking, a planned stock market crash, a computer virus attack, making the currency exchange rate of an enemy country erratic, and spreading rumors on the Internet about the leaders of an enemy country can all be thought of as new concept weapons.

This new way of thinking puts weapons into the daily lives of civilians. New concept weapons can make of war something that even military professionals will find hard to imagine. Both soldiers and civilians will be disturbed to see items in their everyday lives become weapons that can attack and kill.

--via Unrestricted Warfare

2008-05-17T21:30:00.001-07:00

“In biology, if you look at groups with large numbers, there are very few examples where you have a central agent,” says Vijay Kumar, a professor of mechanical engineering at the University of Pennsylvania. “Everything is very distributed: They don’t all talk to each other. They act on local information. And they’re all anonymous. I don’t care who moves the chair, as long as somebody moves the chair. To go from one robot to multiple robots, you need all three of those ideas.”

One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one’s in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing.

--via National Geographic

2008-05-17T20:57:00.000-07:00

By all accounts the amount of money involved is immense. In aggregate, the networks that form this parallel "black" global supply chain, have a "GDP" of $1-3 trillion (some estimates are as high as 10% of the world's economy) and are growing seven times faster than legal trade. These networks supply the huge demand for:

* Drugs (both recreational and pharmaceutical).
* Undocumented workers (for corporations, home services, and the sex trade).
* Weapons (from small arms to RPGs, many come from cold war arsenals).
* Rip-offs of intellectual property (from digital content to brand named consumer goods).
* Laundered and unregulated financial flows.

This supply chain isn't run by the vertically integrated cartels and mafias of the last century (those hierarchies are too vulnerable, slow, and unresponsive to be competitive in the current environment). The new undifferentiated structures are highly decentralized, horizontal, and fluid. They specialize in cross border movement and therefore can handle all types of smuggling simultaneously. They are also very reliant on modern technologies to rapidly transport and coordinate their global operations.

--source: John Robb

2008-05-17T20:54:00.000-07:00

Instant repairs to the human body has been a science-fiction dream for nanotech since the idea was first put forward. Researchers at MIT have taken the first step towards that amazing goal with a material that can stop bleeding in seconds.

The clear liquid acts almost like a "healing potion", instantly staunching blood flow and thereby stabilizing potentially fatally wounded patients. The material is a cunningly constructed peptide (a short polymer chain made of alpha-amino acids) consisting of a comb-like structure with a central spine (which hates water) and a large number of projecting teeth (which love water). On contact with the wet, salty kind of environment you get inside the human body these schizophrenic peptides instantly twist themselves into a bunched, compact ribbons. In a liquid of peptides these scrunched up chains overlap, thus instantly meshes to form a fibrous grid which covers the wound site and holds whatever's meant to inside inside.

--source: Daily Galaxy

2008-05-17T19:06:00.000-07:00

The closest that park officials often get to catching poachers is stumbling across carcasses days or weeks after the culprits have fled the scene. Now a new surveillance system may help locate, track, and intercept poachers before they strike.

The system consists of a network of foot-long metal detectors similar to those used in airports. When moving metal objects such as a machete or a rifle trip the sensor, it sends a radio signal to a wireless Internet gateway camouflaged in the tree canopy as far as a kilometer away. This signal is transmitted via satellite to the Internet, where the incident is logged and messages revealing the poachers’ position and direction are sent instantly to park headquarters, where patrols can then be dispatched.

“[This system] is a force multiplier,” says Steve Gulick, an electrical engineer and director of Wildland Security, a Brooklyn-based organization that develops antipoaching technology. “It could potentially make the patrols more efficient. They would know where to go and could mount a real-time response.”

--via MIT Technology Review

2008-05-17T19:03:00.000-07:00

To put it simply, in the world of venture capitalism, there has been a race going on between greens on the one hand, and guns and garrisons on the other - and the guns and garrisons are winning.

According to Venture Business Research, last year North American and European companies developing green technology were neck and neck in the contest for new investment with those companies that focused on "homeland security" and weaponry: green tech received $3.5bn (£1.7bn), and so did the guns-and-garrisons sector. But this year, guns and garrisons have suddenly leapt ahead. The greens have received $4.2bn, while the garrisons have nearly doubled their money, collecting $6bn in new investment funds. And 2007 isn't over yet.

--Naomi Klien

2008-05-17T19:01:00.000-07:00

According to Haaretz reporter Amira Hass, a Sept. 21 article on the Israeli paper Yediot Ahronoth's Web site, Ynet, states that "the separation fence to be built in the Gilboa region will include remote-control machine guns that will be operated by female soldiers from their command posts and will shoot at those suspected of being terrorists."

According to Ynet's reporter, the system is be installed in the coming months in the mountainous Gilboa region, along the path of the "Separation Wall." The army's purpose in installing the system is to compensate for the small amount of troops and the difficulties of moving in the area--"and to shoot at terrorists who try to cross the fence." In a concession to humanitarian considerations, rather than making the guns fire automatically at anything that moves they will be fired "by the female soldier who manages the lookout post and has been trained for this."

--source

2008-05-17T18:58:00.000-07:00

Brookings Institute: Time to Leave (Jan 2007)

The US must draw up plans to deal with an all-out Iraqi civil war that would kill hundreds of thousands, create millions of refugees, and could spill over into a regional catastrophe, disrupting oil supplies and setting up a direct confrontation between Washington and Iran.

The unremittingly bleak document, drawing on the experience of civil wars in Lebanon, the former Yugoslavia, Congo and Afghanistan, also offers a remarkably stark assessment of Iraq’s “spill-over” potential across the Persian Gulf region.

It warns of radicalisation and possible secession movements in adjacent countries, an upsurge in terrorism, and of intervention by Iran, Turkey and Saudi Arabia. Ending an all-out civil war, the report says, would require a force of 450,000 - three times the present US deployment even after the 21,500 “surge” ordered by President Bush this month.

--via

2008-05-17T18:19:00.000-07:00

THE US Government cannot account for 190,000 weapons issued to Iraqi security forces in 2004 and 2005, says the Government Accountability Office.

According to its July 31 report, the military "cannot fully account for about 110,000 AK-47 assault rifles, 80,000 pistols, 135,000 items of body armour and 115,000 helmets reported as issued to Iraqi forces."

The weapons disappeared from records between June 2004 and September 2005, as the military struggled to rebuild the disbanded Iraqi forces from scratch amid increasing attacks from Sunni insurgents and Shiite militias.

--source: AFP

2008-05-17T18:12:00.000-07:00

Afghanistan will produce another record poppy harvest this year that cements its status as the world’s near-sole supplier of the heroin source, yet a furious debate over how to reverse the trend is stalling proposals to cut the crop, U.S. officials say.

U.N. figures to be released in September are expected to show that Afghanistan’s poppy production has risen up to 15 percent since 2006 and that the country now accounts for 95 percent of the world’s crop, 3 percentage points more than last year, officials familiar with preliminary statistics told The Associated Press.

--source: AP Wire

2008-05-17T17:58:00.000-07:00

Veterans make up one in four homeless people in the United States, though they are only 11 percent of the general adult population, according to a report to be released Thursday.

And homelessness is not just a problem among middle-age and elderly veterans. Younger veterans from Iraq and Afghanistan are trickling into shelters and soup kitchens seeking services, treatment or help with finding a job.

--source: AP WIRE

2008-05-17T17:55:00.000-07:00

U.S. forces in Iraq soon will be equipped with high-tech equipment that will let them process an Iraqi's biometric data in minutes and help American soldiers decide whether they should execute the person or not, according to its inventor.

"A war fighter needs to know one of three things: Do I let him go? Keep him? Or shoot him on the spot?" Pentagon weapons designer Anh Duong told the Washington Post for a feature on how this 47-year-old former Vietnamese refugee and mother of four rose to become a top U.S. bomb-maker.

Though Duong is best known for designing high-explosives used to destroy hardened targets, she also supervised the Joint Expeditionary Forensics Facilities project, known as a "lab in a box" for analyzing biometric data, such as iris scans and fingerprints, that have been collected on more than one million Iraqis.

The labs "collapsible, 20-by-20-foot units each with a generator and a satellite link to a biometric data base in West Virginia" will let U.S. forces cross-check data in the field against information collected previously that can be used to identify insurgents. These labs are expected to be deployed across Iraq in early 2008.

Duong said the next step will be to shrink the lab to the size of a backpack so soldiers who encounter a suspect could find out within minutes if he's on a terrorist watch list and should be killed.

2008-05-17T17:46:00.000-07:00

Costs of US Military Operations, adjusted for 2007 dollars:

World War II $3.2 trillion
Iraq and Afghanistan To Date $695.7 billion
Vietnam War $670 billion
World War I $364 billion
Korean War $295 billion
Persian Gulf War $94 billion
Civil War (both Union and Confederate costs) $81 billion
Spanish-American War $7 billion
American Revolution $4 billion
Mexican War $2 billion
War of 1812 $1 billion

--source: Center for Arms Control and Non Proliferation

2008-05-17T17:42:00.000-07:00

Members of Congress have as much as $196 million collectively invested in companies doing business with the Defense Department, earning millions since the onset of the Iraq war, according to a study by a nonpartisan research group.

--source: Cryptogon

2008-05-17T17:38:00.000-07:00

As many as 200 U.S.-trained Mexican security personnel have defected to drug cartels to carry out killings on both sides of the border and as far north as Dallas, Rep. Ted Poe, R-Humble, told Congress on Wednesday.

The renegade members of Mexico's elite counter-narcotics teams trained at Fort Benning, Ga., have switched sides, contributing to a wave of violence that has claimed some 6,000 victims over the past 30 months, including prominent law enforcement leaders, the Houston-area Republican told the House Foreign Affairs Committee.

The slaughter has gained urgency amid high-profile assassinations of law officers in Mexico since May 1, claiming six senior officers, five of them with the federal police.

2008-05-17T17:36:00.000-07:00

Nine people were killed in 36 shootings over the weekend in Chicago, reflecting what some community leaders say is a deadly breakdown in discipline among gang members after a crackdown over the past few years put many of their leaders behind bars.

"The older guys in the past looked out for the little ones. Now they're all locked up," said Nick Stames, a social studies teacher at Crane Tech High School on the city's gang-ridden West Side. "There's no sense of discipline in the projects. Everybody's doing their own thing."

Now there is growing fear that Chicago could be in for a long, bloody summer.

--from AP Wire

2008-05-17T13:11:00.000-07:00

The characteristics of an average city include tall buildings, narrow alleys, sewage tunnels and possibly a subway system. Defenders may have the advantage of detailed local knowledge of the area, right down to the layout inside of buildings and means of travel not shown on maps. The buildings can provide excellent sniping posts while alleys and rubble-filled streets are ideal for planting booby traps. Defenders can move from one part of the city to another undetected using underground tunnels and spring ambushes. Meanwhile, the attackers tend to become more exposed than the defender as they must use the open streets more often, unfamiliar with the defenders' secret and hidden routes. During a house to house search the attacker is often also exposed on the streets.

--basics from wiki

2008-05-17T11:19:00.000-07:00

The United Nations defines "major wars" as military conflicts inflicting 1,000 battlefield deaths per year. In 1965, there were 10 major wars under way. The new millennium began with much of the world consumed in armed conflict or cultivating an uncertain peace. As of mid-2005, there were eight Major Wars under way [down from 15 at the end of 2003], with as many as two dozen "lesser" conflicts ongoing with varrying degrees of intensity.

Most of these are civil or "intrastate" wars, fueled as much by racial, ethnic, or religious animosities as by ideological fervor. Most victims are civilians, a feature that distinguishes modern conflicts. During World War I, civilians made up fewer than 5 percent of all casualties. Today, 75 percent or more of those killed or wounded in wars are non-combatants.

Africa, to a greater extent than any other continent, is afflicted by war. Africa has been marred by more than 20 major civil wars since 1960. Rwanda, Somalia, Angola, Sudan, Liberia, and Burundi are among those countries that have recently suffered serious armed conflict.

--source: Global Security.

2008-05-17T11:16:00.000-07:00

A Parallel Communications Backbone

What's more interesting than the actual fighting is what the conflict was about. In summary, the government made an attempt to slow the expansion Hezbollah's fiber optics network, which provides secure/robust communications and surveillance (via automated cameras) to the group. Specifically, the government tried to shut down surveillance nodes of the network overlooking Beirut International Airport. Hezbollah responded by defining the network as a core part of its organization and that they were willing to defend it with violence if necessary.

So, we can now conclude that in addition to 4GW militias and parallel social services, a parallel communications/surveillance network is a core feature set of virtual states. This tracks with our emerging experience in Sadr City. It also implies we may see interesting virtual variants of this via the parasitic piggybacking of open source insurgencies (the PCC, al Qaeda, etc.) on cell phone networks and the Internet.

--John Robb

2008-05-16T16:46:00.000-07:00

"Imagine, vibrant new squatter industries rivaling global bottled water markets with their own local brands. Farms rooting in arid places never deemed agriculturally viable before, harvesting brand new strains of exotic desert foods to solve famine crises across Africa. Refugee camps built out of ice. Nomadic tribes wander around refilling evaporated lake beds. Villages along neglected borders, no longer reliant on dwindling estuaries, intoxicated rivers, or polluted rains for their water resource.

Products like the AirWater machine and the Mobile Power Station could drastically change the patterns of global migration, the self-sustenance of informal settlements, not to mention help relieve the earth of our consumptive stress on the environment in general. I am sure the folks at WorldChanging could sum this up better than I, but these types of open-source pieces of emerging mobile infrastructure could go a long way in rebuking our dependencies on corporate energy, helping communities go off-grid, stabilizing the backlash landscapes to rampant global urbanism which has failed to acknowledge the most basic needs of 20% of the world's population."

--from this Subtopia article

2008-05-16T16:17:00.000-07:00

Effective insurgents build their plans around a strategic communications campaign designed to shift their enemy’s view of the world.

It is clear that many insurgent groups understand this fact. Hezbollah’s strategy during the 2006 summer war with Israel is an excellent example. During the fighting, they focused not on damaging Israel, but on insuring they were perceived as defying the most powerful army in the Middle East.

Thus, the fact that Hezbollah fired as many rockets on the last day of the war as the first was critically important. They know 122mm rockets are notoriously inaccurate and cause little damage, but the rockets are highly visible. Their appearance “proved” the powerful Israeli Air Force and Army had not hurt Hezbollah badly.

--from Col. Hammes

2008-05-14T15:32:00.001-07:00

"Stigmergy is a method of indirect communication in a self-organizing system where individual parts communicate with one another by modifying the local environment."

--wiki, baby.

2008-05-14T15:30:00.000-07:00

"Thanks to telegraphs and modern communications, commanders are flooded with a tsunami of almost meaningless facts."

--Naval manual from...1949

2008-05-14T15:25:00.000-07:00

"In June 1998, the DSB task force on UGF (Underground Facilities) found that there are over 10,000 worldwide."

2008-05-14T15:14:00.000-07:00

"The basic A Team of US Army Special Forces is a 12-man unit that can train and lead a company-sized unit of local guerrillas -- 100 to 200 men."

2008-05-14T15:02:00.000-07:00

"English historian Cyril Northcote Parkinson observed in the 1950s that decision making is severely impaired in committees of more than 20 people. Now physicists have shown that the size of a country’s executive cabinet appears to be linked to that country’s overall efficiency, and they have found a possible mathematical explanation.

On average, the team found, a country’s development was tied to the size of its executive cabinet. For example, Iceland, which the United Nations ranks as the world’s most developed country, has a cabinet of just 12 members; the United States, which ranks 12th, has 17 cabinet members; Myanmar and the Ivory Coast, with 35-strong cabinets, rank 132nd and 166th.

The team simulated committees as networks in which each member was a node. Before a vote, each member’s opinion could be influenced by those of its immediate neighbors in the network; adjacent nodes could represent, for example, ministers belonging to the same political party. The simulation found that committees of 10 members or less could almost always reach a consensus (with one mysterious exception for the number 8). For larger committees, the chances of getting to a consensus were lower, and the chances decreased even more rapidly for committees of 20 or more. The results show that Parkinson’s law is not an accident, but “a robust consequence of the opinion-formation model,” Thurner says."

--from this Science News article.

2008-05-14T14:57:00.000-07:00

"Please explain what you mean by branding in whispers?

It is not boasting how great your products are, but showing how your brand can help people. It could be through services your company offers, or doing things for your community or the manner in which you sell your products. During the holidays when there were all these long lines and crowds, Apple's message basically was: "Here are these things and they really work." That's a whisper. When a store delivers something to your house or a bank gives you a ride to the local branch, those are whispers. When Mini gives people all these ways to buy their cars, the company is whispering to its audience."

2008-05-14T14:05:00.000-07:00

"One key to an ant colony, for example, is that no one’s in charge. No generals command ant warriors. No managers boss ant workers. The queen plays no role except to lay eggs. Even with half a million ants, a colony functions just fine with no management at all—at least none that we would recognize. It relies instead upon countless interactions between individual ants, each of which is following simple rules of thumb. Scientists describe such a system as self-organizing."

--2007 National Geographic article

2008-05-14T14:03:00.000-07:00

"Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. More than 500 different species of bacteria exist in our bodies, making up more than 100 trillion cells. Because our bodies are made of only some several trillion human cells, we are somewhat outnumbered by the aliens. It follows that most of the genes in our bodies are from bacteria, too."

--from this classic Wired article

2008-05-14T14:00:00.000-07:00

"The clues from hypnosis research, experiments into the influence of beliefs upon perceptions, and teachings from the mystical traditions, led Tart to see how normal waking consciousness is the product of a true hypnotic procedure that is practiced by parents, teachers, and peers, reinforced by every social interaction, and maintained by powerful taboos. Consensus trance induction -- the process of learning the "normal waking" state of mind -- is involuntary, and occurs under conditions that give it far more power than ordinary hypnotists are ever allowed. When infants are first subjected to the processes that induce consensus trance, they are all vulnerable and dependent upon their consensus hypnotists, for their parents are the ones who initiate them into the rules of their culture, according to the instructions that had been impressed upon them by their own parents, teachers, and peers."

--from this article about Charles Tart

2008-05-14T13:58:00.002-07:00

"The illusion of freedom will continue as long as it's profitable to continue the illusion. At the point where the illusion becomes too expensive to maintain, they will just take down the scenery, they will pull back the curtains, they will move the tables and chairs out of the way, and you will see the brick wall at the back of the theatre."

--Frank Zappa

2008-05-14T13:58:00.001-07:00

"In his tour de force book Planet of Slums, Davis observes, "The Pentagon's best minds have dared to venture where most United Nations, World Bank or Department of State types fear to go. They now assert that the "feral, failed cities" of the Third World - especially their slum outskirts - will be the distinctive battlespace of the 21st century."Pentagon war-fighting doctrine, he notes, "is being reshaped accordingly to support a low-intensity world war of unlimited duration against criminalized segments of the urban poor".

2008-05-14T13:55:00.000-07:00

"Tice said his information is different from the Terrorist Surveillance Program that Bush acknowledged in December and from news accounts this week that the NSA has been secretly collecting phone call records of millions of Americans. “It’s an angle that you haven’t heard about yet,” he said. He would not discuss with a reporter the details of his allegations, saying doing so would compromise classified information and put him at risk of going to jail. He said he “will not confirm or deny” if his allegations involve the illegal use of space systems and satellites."

--from this interesting interview with NSA whistleblower Russell Tice.

2008-05-14T13:53:00.000-07:00

"In the midst of a six-year war on terrorism, widening income inequality and a growing fear of immigrants, America has become something of a police state, according to a new study, with as much as 25% of our entire labor force focused on protection rather than production.

The evidence is all around us, from the 47% increase in U.S. workers classified as security guards since 2002 to the sharp advance in the number of men and women under arms in Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere."

--Jon Markman

2008-05-14T13:50:00.000-07:00

"With 2.2 million people behind bars and another 5 million on probation or parole, it has approximately 3.2 percent of the adult population under some form of criminal-justice supervision, which is to say one person in thirty-two. For African-Americans, the numbers are even more astonishing. By the mid-1990s, 7 percent of black males were behind bars, while the rate of imprisonment for black males between the ages of 25 and 29 now stands at one in eight."

--David Lazare

2008-05-14T13:48:00.001-07:00

"There are 1 billion squatters in the world today, almost one in six people on the planet. If current trends continute, there will be 2 billion squatters by 2030 and 3 billion (more than one third of humanity) by the midpoint of the twenty-first century.

To keep up with the influx, the world must build 96,150 homes a day - roughly 4000 homes every hour. Generally, only squatters are prepared to make this effort. Their homes start out as mud and cardboard hovels. But once they know they will not be evicted and they can exercise control over their communities, they create permanent, thriving neighborhoods."

--Worldchanging

2008-05-14T13:46:00.000-07:00

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors...and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

--anonymous White House advisor.

2008-05-14T13:44:00.000-07:00

DARPA is actually a very small organization, roughly 240 people comprising about 140 or 150 technical people. Only about 2% of our budget is used for agency operations; the remaining 98% goes to industry and universities.

2008-05-14T13:42:00.000-07:00

"The American Corporate State employs a full time counterinsurgency infrastructure with resources that are unimaginable to most would be insurgents. Quite simply, violent insurgents have no idea of just how powerful the foe actually is. Violent insurgents typically start out as peaceful, idealistic, political activists. Whether or not political activists know it, even with very mundane levels of political activity, they are engaging in low intensity conflict with the ACS.

Most of what is commonly referred to as “political activism” is viewed by the corporate state’s counterinsurgency apparatus as a useful and necessary component of political control.

Political activism amounts to an utterly useless waste of time, in terms of tangible power, which is all the ACS understands. Political activism is a cruel guise that is sold to people who are dissatisfied, but who have no concept of the nature of tangible power. Counterinsurgency teams routinely monitor these activities, attend the meetings, join the groups and take on leadership roles in the organizations.

Because the corporate state’s counterinsurgency operatives have infiltrated most political activism groups, the radicalized members will be easily identified, monitored and eventually compromised/turned, arrested or executed."

--Cryptogon

2008-05-14T13:39:00.000-07:00

“An anti-something movement displays a purely negative attitude. It has no chance whatever to succeed. Its passionate diatribes virtually advertise the program they attack. People must fight for something that they want to achieve, not simply reject an evil, however bad it may be.”

--Ludwig Von Mises.

Manifesto

2008-05-14T13:37:00.000-07:00

The Invisible Experiment is very simple:

Single paragraph brainfood + tag cloud = tools for new ideas.

For further info, begin at Skilluminati Research.