Well, I received my copy of the official summary of ballot measures for the upcoming statewide election (March 2nd – those of you in the state, make sure you’re registered!) and read through them. And much to my surprise, I may end up voting a somewhat different pattern than usual. Here are my current thoughts on all four upcoming statewide measures; I’m splitting them into two posts because of length.
Thoughts on the ballot measures, Part 1: Propositions 55 and 56
Local (California) Politics
Umm…
From Barron’s Law Dictionary, 5th edition:
Crime of Passion: … For instance, a man’s attack on another person with an axe after that person insulted the attacker’s wife might be considered a crime committed in the heat of passion.
One more news post for the day…
One third of the Iranian parliament has just resigned. This comes in protest of the Guardian Council’s decision to ban over half the candidates for parliament for standing for office, including a large number of incumbents. The move comes after a three-week sit-in which the current parliament held in protest.
The situation is heating up; whether this will be the thing that triggers a large-scale change remains to be seen. Best of luck to the reformers.
Spy vs. Spy
The userpic is a bit more appropriate than usual in this case. It’s a report about a CIA operation back in the early 80s to deal with how the Soviets were “acquiring” US technology secretly. If this is indeed the case, and I have no reason to believe otherwise, I must say that this was simply beautiful. The story, by William Safire, here.
Psst! Wannabuyanuke?
So Abdul Qadeer Khan, the father of Pakistan’s nuclear program, has signed a detailed confession about how he provided a great deal of nuclear how-to, including lots of details, to Iran, Libya and North Korea. (NY Times story here)
President Musharraf is of course shocked, shocked! to find out that this was going on.
The American and Pakistani statements, of course, put the blame squarely on Khan, and not on any members of the government, since we’ve found ourselves in the unenviable position of needing Musharraf to stay alive and in power since he’s far and away the best of several options for the rulership of Pakistan. (For one, he’s somewhat opposed to the fundamentalists, despite the fact that they control the army and de facto a good fraction of the country.) Unfortunately, quite a few of his countrymen disagree with that last estimation, or at least so it would seem given the number of people who have tried to kill him in the past few months.
So is anyone at all surprised by any of this?
Interesting read…
Just finished Keegan’s Intelligence in War. Despite the issue in my prior post, I think this is a remarkably well-written and well-thought-out book. I recommend it to anyone interested in the role that intelligence has played in military operations in the past few centuries. (It covers from Napoleon to the second Gulf War)
But incidentally to the main thread of its discussion, reading this book drove home the extent to which our present situation (with regards to hazy terror groups, not Iraq) is different from what our military has been designed to handle. Even Keegan states that “no smaller power has ever won a protracted war with a larger one” – by which I assume he was thinking only of traditional, symmetric wars.
It makes me very curious about the entire subject of the structure of informal networks such as al Qaeda, and how they may be most effectively monitored and interdicted. I’ve got some preliminary thoughts, but there’s a very basic missing piece in my trying to think about this.
An organization like al Qaeda can be thought of as a large network of people. What, precisely, is it that propagates along this network? Do specific commands propagate? Does information propagate upwards as well as downwards? What about materiel, raw resources like money, training data? How are expert proficiencies handled – are people already in situ trained at something, or are specialists moved into position by central planning?
I think a lot of these questions are answerable without access to classified information, and a bit of thinking about these issues could lead to some very interesting structural models that could provide useful information about how to destroy these groups irretrievably.
The lord’s our shepherd, says the psalm…
So the founder of Pakistan’s nuclear program, A. Q. Khan, was just fired from his post as a high-ranking adviser and placed under house arrest amidst increasing evidence that he was personally involved in the sale of nuclear technology to a number of fairly dubious states, such as Iran and Libya. (“Increasing evidence” such as “his sales brochure with his picture on the cover”)
As a side note, Khan is revered as a hero in Pakistan for being the person to give his country the bomb (mostly by stealing the techniques from Germany, but that’s neither here nor there), and this is part of Pres. Musharraf’s attempt to bring various radical elements under control, including another directive issued a few days ago to get his generals to use more aggressive means to bring terrorist elements in the Pashtun hinterlands near the Afghan border under control.
I would not sell Musharraf any life insurance right about now.
The more interesting question is, how will things unfold if/when he’s gone?
The opposition to intelligence
This is likely not of much interest to most people, but it’s something I noticed while reading a book…
Opinions about military intelligence
Hmm…
I just finished watching Chaplin’s “Modern Times.” The film is better than I remembered – both very funny and deadly serious in its larger meaning.
The special features on the DVD are, however, a bit odd. There’s a Ford propaganda film from 1940; there’s even a karaoke version (with subtitles) of the nonsense song from the film. Yes, the subtitles are nonsense too.
Yonatan Zunger’s Blog 