Arbeit Macht Freitag: Ice, Ice, Baby
Friday. Awesome. Lots to do, lots to do, but hopefully enough time to relax a bit and work on a couple of little projects.
One of the little unintended consequences of the South Ossetian War may wind up being that Australia may stop selling Uranium to Russia. We may not be lobbing artillery rounds at Russia, but one of the benefits of having a strong network of civilized contries in a global economy is that non-military pressure can be applied to rogue states as an alternate measure to influence them. Even so, Russia's a pretty big elephant in a room full of people - including myself, to some degree - who didn't want to consider it just a few months ago.
Following the French rescue of two sailing tourists a couple of days ago, the Somali pirates(!) have hijacked a Greek ship. Meanwhile, in Mauritania, military forces are making a concerted effort to prevent AQIM attackers from escaping the country. How this is effective a day or two later, when they're in the Sahara, and the attack took place near the border with Western Sahara, which is near the border with Algeria, I don't know. Something tells me that Mauritanian troops and a few recon planes aren't going to be able to stop even a large band of attackers, but we'll see what happens.
Today on the Wired.com's Danger Zone blog, a contract OSINT guy details how to improve OSINT. They also have an interesting article on recent failures of al Qaeda's propaganda network.
On that last note, there have been some interesting developments lately. People enjoy hating President Bush, and there's certainly room to criticize him, but President Bush doesn't generally get credit for the things he deserves credit for. One of the things that he deserves credit for is the War on Terror, even if you don't like to call it that. The major problem at this point is loosely affiliated al Qaeda "franchises" in places like Iraq, the Maghreb, and various countries in the West. However, the core of al Qaeda, which is both influential and politically important to the greater jihadi movement. However, as I've noted before, al Qaeda has faced a recent international backlash amongst Islamists. On 9/11/2008, the Jerusalem Post had an article detailing al Qaeda's current dysfunction after seven years of hard fighting. However, despite their military ineffectiveness, al Qaeda has had two advantages: they were highly adept at manipulating the media, and they were able to take greater casualties than we were. Without getting into tactics, the Wired article I cited indicates that the al Qaeda core's ability to spread their message is being severely hindered. Part of that may be due to the possible death of Azzam al Amriki, otherwise known as Adam Gadahn, in an air strike in Pakistan earlier this year.
Things in Afghanistan may still be rough after seven years, but President Bush's decision to attack what was then the most flagrant state sponsor of terrorism, thus baiting al Qaeda to attack us on foreign turf, appears to have not only sucked up al Qaeda's resources, but also to have turned Muslim opinion against al Qaeda by exposing their brutal and repressive ideology. Now, due to a far more coherent strategy than was being pursued during the middle years of the Iraq War, we're winning, and al Qaeda has lost an expensive bet. You may not like President Bush, and you may hate the war, but either way President Bush's war on Islamist terrorism has been far more effective than he's been given credit for.
I was originally going to post a third episode of "Mary Olson", but it appears to have been taken down, so I'll substitute with the following.
I had originally planned for today's post to include an update on my fitness plan, and pictures of my place. Unfortunately, a great deal of my time has been consumed on other pursuits during the last couple of days. The one thing I will share is this: I have an ice maker! It took me more than a year to figure this out, but I purchased a couple of ice tube trays (like ice cubes, but for bottled drinks) and I filled one and put it in the ice tray. Well, I must have bumped the little lever into the "on" position, because the next time I went to get ice, there was more than just ice tubes in the tray. That brings the total of things I've accidentally discovered since I moved in to three: my dishwasher (late July or early August of '07), my medicine cabinet (May of '07), and now the ice maker. The Fly's adventure in bachelor living continues to be hilarious.
I'm having some folks over this evening, which will hopefully involve putting the last of my maps and posters up. If I don't have pictures and a full post over the weekend, expect it for early next week. In the mean time, enjoy your Friday, and have a great weekend.
One of the little unintended consequences of the South Ossetian War may wind up being that Australia may stop selling Uranium to Russia. We may not be lobbing artillery rounds at Russia, but one of the benefits of having a strong network of civilized contries in a global economy is that non-military pressure can be applied to rogue states as an alternate measure to influence them. Even so, Russia's a pretty big elephant in a room full of people - including myself, to some degree - who didn't want to consider it just a few months ago.
Following the French rescue of two sailing tourists a couple of days ago, the Somali pirates(!) have hijacked a Greek ship. Meanwhile, in Mauritania, military forces are making a concerted effort to prevent AQIM attackers from escaping the country. How this is effective a day or two later, when they're in the Sahara, and the attack took place near the border with Western Sahara, which is near the border with Algeria, I don't know. Something tells me that Mauritanian troops and a few recon planes aren't going to be able to stop even a large band of attackers, but we'll see what happens.
Today on the Wired.com's Danger Zone blog, a contract OSINT guy details how to improve OSINT. They also have an interesting article on recent failures of al Qaeda's propaganda network.
On that last note, there have been some interesting developments lately. People enjoy hating President Bush, and there's certainly room to criticize him, but President Bush doesn't generally get credit for the things he deserves credit for. One of the things that he deserves credit for is the War on Terror, even if you don't like to call it that. The major problem at this point is loosely affiliated al Qaeda "franchises" in places like Iraq, the Maghreb, and various countries in the West. However, the core of al Qaeda, which is both influential and politically important to the greater jihadi movement. However, as I've noted before, al Qaeda has faced a recent international backlash amongst Islamists. On 9/11/2008, the Jerusalem Post had an article detailing al Qaeda's current dysfunction after seven years of hard fighting. However, despite their military ineffectiveness, al Qaeda has had two advantages: they were highly adept at manipulating the media, and they were able to take greater casualties than we were. Without getting into tactics, the Wired article I cited indicates that the al Qaeda core's ability to spread their message is being severely hindered. Part of that may be due to the possible death of Azzam al Amriki, otherwise known as Adam Gadahn, in an air strike in Pakistan earlier this year.
Things in Afghanistan may still be rough after seven years, but President Bush's decision to attack what was then the most flagrant state sponsor of terrorism, thus baiting al Qaeda to attack us on foreign turf, appears to have not only sucked up al Qaeda's resources, but also to have turned Muslim opinion against al Qaeda by exposing their brutal and repressive ideology. Now, due to a far more coherent strategy than was being pursued during the middle years of the Iraq War, we're winning, and al Qaeda has lost an expensive bet. You may not like President Bush, and you may hate the war, but either way President Bush's war on Islamist terrorism has been far more effective than he's been given credit for.
I was originally going to post a third episode of "Mary Olson", but it appears to have been taken down, so I'll substitute with the following.
I had originally planned for today's post to include an update on my fitness plan, and pictures of my place. Unfortunately, a great deal of my time has been consumed on other pursuits during the last couple of days. The one thing I will share is this: I have an ice maker! It took me more than a year to figure this out, but I purchased a couple of ice tube trays (like ice cubes, but for bottled drinks) and I filled one and put it in the ice tray. Well, I must have bumped the little lever into the "on" position, because the next time I went to get ice, there was more than just ice tubes in the tray. That brings the total of things I've accidentally discovered since I moved in to three: my dishwasher (late July or early August of '07), my medicine cabinet (May of '07), and now the ice maker. The Fly's adventure in bachelor living continues to be hilarious.
I'm having some folks over this evening, which will hopefully involve putting the last of my maps and posters up. If I don't have pictures and a full post over the weekend, expect it for early next week. In the mean time, enjoy your Friday, and have a great weekend.
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