Whoah! Cool story of the day.

It just doesn’t get much cooler than this.  Forget the Wii, I want one of these.

Here’s the story from the AP.

Poo problems

I live in an apartment complex and one of the ground rules for living here is that you’re supposed to pick up after you dog.  Now Shiloh has a thing about privacy and so prefers to go in the woods to poo (perhaps he thinks he’s a bear…or the pope?)  When he’s in the thick underbrush I refrain from picking up after him because:

1. The highly unlikely possibility someone would walk there and step in it
2. He’s a small dog and creates correspondingly small poo

When he gets the urge to poo in public however I always pick up after him (I haven’t kept track but I suspect he does that sometimes when he just wants to see me carry around a bag of crap).

About a year ago, I noticed a lot of people getting large dogs and walking them around and they all seemed to have one thing in common (other than having large dogs and walking them around that is):  none of them were picking up the huge dog patties their pooches were leaving everywhere.  It was getting so bad that I wasn’t able to walk Shiloh in our regular circuit and we had to go further afield in order to find a ‘poo free zone’.

Now, our current bathroom area has been invaded by a husky who produces massive poos right in the areas people are most likely to walk.  The owner used to just open up his door and let his dog out (attached to a leash) making it go to the bathroom within six or eight feet of the guy’s door.  I always thought that was kind of gross but since I never needed to get within eight feet of his door it didn’t really bother me.  Now that the weather is getting better, the owner is willing to walk distances up to 20 or 30 feet from his door and let his pooch relieve itself in a wider area. The owner doesn’t even pretend to make an effort to clean up after his dog.

Now, Shiloh and I have to relocate yet again.  I’m starting to feel like some small Gothic tribe getting pushed around by the Huns during the migration period.

More music news

Wow, who knew early May was such a big music month.

Nine Inch Nails is releasing their new album online…for free!  (thanks Digital Detritus for the news).  Just a short while ago Trent Reznor (the person behind NiN) offered an instrumental (Ghosts I-IV) 4 CD set for download for only $5.

You gotta love this guy.  He’s expressed his extreme dislike for the recording industry for quite some time now and the fact that he doesn’t have to sweat rent gives him the freedom to experiment with alternative ways of getting his music out there to the public.

Absolutely brilliant.

The Golden Hour

I was checking my Amazon recommendations and I saw that Firewater is coming out with a new album tomorrow! Check out their stuff. No, really. Check it out. Great lyrics. Great sounds.

The album is called The Golden Hour.  Here’s a video of Tod A explaining the album a bit.

Could you please pass the salt?

Well, if you needed any further proof that the military is scraping the bottom of the barrel, I was just promoted to Master Sergeant yesterday.  I wish I had a ‘way back machine’ so that I could see the expression of the 18 year old version of myself as I tell him I’d be a master sergeant one day.  I seem to recall telling a first sergeant at one point in my early years “I’ll sell pencils on the street before I reenlist in the Army.”

I’m still eating crow over that one (and I’m a vegetarian!)

Good vs. Evil

I just finished reading The Lucifer Effect by Philip Zimbardo. Zimbardo is best known from running the Stanford Prison Experiment in which a number of men were randomly assigned the roles of ‘prisoner’ and ‘guard’ and placed in a mock prison setting in order to see how otherwise healthy, well-adjusted, people would react.

The subtitle of the book is “Understanding How Good People Turn Evil” and Zimbardo uses the Stanford Prison Experiment to demonstrate that situations exert a great deal of influence over the actions of individuals. He then describes research (including the famous Milgram experiment) which further highlights the power of situation and authority to get people to do things they otherwise wouldn’t believe they would do. He then goes on to demonstrate how the events at Abu Ghraib mirror those of the Stanford Prison Experiment.

Now, I know what you’re thinking and Zimbardo goes to great lengths to say that his argument is not an attempt to enshrine ‘excusology’ into our lives and or eliminate the concept of personal responsibility. What he does say is that despite how most of us read about the Holocaust, the genocide in Rwanda or lynchings in the U.S. and say that we’d never do such things the fact is that if placed in those specific situations many of us would pull that gas lever, pick up that machete or pull on that noose. As he often repeats in the book, the problem may not be (and often is not) that there are some bad apples who do evil but that there’s a bad barrel that can make virtually everyone do evil. In short, the potential is in every human being to engage in the most despicable and most heroic actions.

The implications for intelligence analysis (both in the military and law enforcement) are really amazing. Our culture is based upon the idea that situational influence plays virtually no role in individual behavior. Rather, as Zimbardo points out, virtually every aspect of our society (the medical, judicial, psychological, etc.) is based on such the assumption that all causes of behavior are dispositional (inherent personal factors like free will, genetic makeup or personality traits).   If we actually consider situational factors as motivators for specific behavior then we might consider a different set of responses to crime, terrorism or other negative behavior.

Lest you think this is all a bunch of namby-pamby, Nancy Pelosi loving, brie-eating nonsense  check this out:

Protracted popular war is best countered by winning the “hearts and minds” of the populace and separating the leaders, cadre, and combatants from the mass base through information operations, civil-military operations, economic programs, social programs, and political action. (FM 3-24)

In other words:  You win insurgencies through changing the situational factors for the population which (if successful) will make them less inclined to support your enemies.

It took the powers that be more than 3 years to figure out that while you can kill the number 3 man in Al-Qaeda, if you don’t change the environmental factors that created him you’re likely to only have a host of volunteers willing to step into his shoes.  It’s the old idea of winning ‘hearts and minds’ given scientific support.

While the DoD may have adopted this message the law enforcement community resists it strongly.  Virtually the only strategy offered to combat crime in the United States has been various schemes designed to ‘get tough’ on criminals.  Just as in our fight against Al-Qaeda however, you can arrest all the drug dealers, gang members and other criminals you want but if you maintain the same situational factors (social, economic, and cultural) you find that new ones spring up hydra-like.

There’s too much good stuff to continue in this post but I’m hoping to revisit this book in a future post and highlight some of the more revealing passages in it.

The only unfortunate part of the book is the author’s attempt to indict the Bush administration for ‘building the bad barrel’ and establishing the conditions that led to Abu-Ghraib.  It needlessly politicizes the book and, I fear, means that a lot of people might pass the book over.

Common sense prevails in the military?

This morning I was greeted by this story on CNN (I don’t know why I watch it anymore, the lack of real news is astounding) in which they were talking about the shocking (!!!) results of a new study which says that soldiers are reluctant to seek help for mental health problems because they think they will negatively impact their careers.  The announcer was asking how this could possibly be the case and the interviewee wasn’t particularly insightful, just saying that the military was increasingly encouraging soldiers to seek help.

To anyone in the military however, the answer is very clear.  Doors definitely close if you report any instance of mental health issues.  I’ve seen outstanding soldiers denied the opportunity to become officers because at some point in their past (even years earlier) they sought out help for depression or other conditions.  Evaluations by doctors that the problem(s) are under control or no longer remain are irrelevant.

Also, security clearances can be delayed or rejected if the applicant has a history of seeking treatment for mental health issues.  That strikes right at the heart of a soldier’s career since some jobs require a clearance as a prerequisite and in any case they are required as one reaches the senior levels of non-commissioned officer.

It was therefore nice to see that Defense Secretary Gates is about to announce that he’s changing the questionnaire for security clearances so that soldiers will not be required to reveal if they sought help for wartime related mental health issues.  It’s that sort of practical measure that is infinitely more effective than countless press releases and public statements.

And as an aside, let me express my extreme displeasure again at U.S. based news websites that often write stories about studies and reports and then don’t link to the source document.  The BBC doesn’t seem to have a problem placing a few related outside links to each story, why can’t CNN or MSNBC?

Great news from Africa!

Just when you think that everything is controlled by amoral corporations, corrupt governments and similar bottom feeders, you get some news that really provides some inspiration.

The Chinese sent a cargo ship (the An Yue Jiang) loaded with weapons and ammunition to Zimbabwe where it looks like the Leech in Charge (Robert Mugabe) has decided that 27 years in power isn’t enough and is preparing to destroy the country in order to continue ruling it.

No countries on the continent would allow the ship to unload the weapons at their ports which left Mugabe (Zimbabwe is land locked) out of luck.  The most dramatic refusal occurred on Friday where South African dock workers refused to unload the ship even though the government said it was had no legal authority to interfere with what was a legal transaction between China and Zimbabwe.

So…a definite win for Africans!

Stronger than your average bear

This weekend I got the treat of catching a glimpse of a fox (no, not this kind of fox) running along the road (I’m not sure if it was a gray or red).

Then, upon arriving at my Fortress of Semi-Solitude, I found that the local neighborhood black bear decided to demonstrate his (or her) strength by bringing one of my bird feeders down to snacking height by bending the metal pole it was attached to.  That’s the third time that’s happened and I strongly suspect it’s the same bear.

So, what do I do?  Bend the pole back and load it back up with bird food.

Somewhere I heard that the definition of crazy was doing the same thing over and over but expecting different results.  Well, maybe but this time I’m sure it won’t happen again.

Street Gangs…just how organized are they?

A recent comment in one of my posts about 4th Generation Warfare brought up a common controversy in law enforcement/public policy circles. Are street gangs organizations with structure and hierarchies like traditional organized crime, networks of criminals that share some sort of loose commonality but essentially act independently, or some other type of grouping.

It usually serves the interest of law enforcement and elected politicians to claim that gangs are highly organized groups that resemble a corporation in structure like General Motors. After all, if you have a threat like that you can justify all sorts of policies and expenditures that wouldn’t otherwise pass muster among the general population.  Also, by making street gangs (or whatever the threat d’jour is) essentially evil mirror images of our police forces you get a nice narrative that explains why we have so much trouble eliminating them.

My experience has been that gangs want to be organized and structured (the desire screams through in their correspondence and rules that attempt to impose some sort of rankings to their members) but ultimately, members put their individual interests ahead of those of the organization. This leads to a sort of “Tragedy of the Commons” run amok. Most members, complements of an inflated sense of self worth, think that they are superior and have more intrinsic worth than their peers. Hence the large number of gang members willing to become informants and give evidence against those that they swear loyalty to unto death. My guess is that they watch Scarface and the Godfather too many times and draw the wrong lessons from each.

In some areas of the country I’m sure gangs do exhibit the sort of internal discipline necessary to establish a hierarchy and structure but the vast majority of gangs operate via informal relationships and try to take more out of their relationship with the gang than they’re willing to put into it. It matters more who grew up in the same project as who or who is the natural leader rather than which person has the title of ‘5 star general’.

I guess one argument against gangs being 4^th Generation warfare threats is their political blindness. Regardless of their criminal behavior, most gangs and gang members are firm believers in Western capitalism whether they know it or not. That is why, despite being economically deprived with little hope of advancing, gangs don’t try to alter the underlying political structure but rather just try to leap frog ahead of others in the race to get more stuff.

The problem with virtually all street gangs (at least from their point of view) is that they aren’t able to make decisions or plans that extend beyond the short term. My opinion is that this is because many people who become gang members have difficulty in conceiving of life in the long term (for an example of such thinking check out the documentary ‘Reversal of Fortune‘ which, while it doesn’t discuss gangs and crime, I think gives a wonderful glimpse into this mindset I’m talking about here) and so don’t seem to be able to plan much further beyond immediate needs or desires. That is why, the vast majority of crimes committed by gang members can best be described as ‘impulse’ crimes. That is, crimes either designed for immediate monetary reward or some sort of retaliation for a (real of perceived) slight. If street gangs are the scourge of many parts of the country than why, after more than thirty years of existence (in their present manifestation) are they still overwhelmingly focused on retail narcotics sales, robbery/burglary, assaults and other crimes that carry relatively low profit potential along with high risks of getting caught?

Now, please don’t misunderstand me. I’m not saying that street gangs today pose no threat to the general population. Research has demonstrated that gang members do commit more crime than their delinquent non-gang peers and certainly many people are legitimately frightened by gangs that may be active in their neighborhoods. But that does not necessarily mean that gangs are highly organized or that their actions are dictated by a centralized command structure.  And (finally) I can come full circle back to my original post.  I don’t think a threat has to intend to destabilize a system in order for it to be a threat to that system.  Street gangs are both a threat to the existing civic structure as well as a manifestation of the flaws within that structure.  The only way to get rid of the former is to eliminate the latter.