Be A Good American: Issue 1

"Be A Good American" is going to be a collection of items that I... Collect that I think every American should know, or learn, or at the very least be acquainted with. You should be able to get some honest self-improvement value out of these things if you give them a whack, but at the very least they'll be interesting and fun. If they're not, you're probably not cut out for this whole "land of the free" thing. I hear Russia needs voters that Politburo can intimidate; you might find a home there.

Learn Middle Eastern Geography!
Everybody has seen those statistics about how whatever percent of Americans can't find whatever country on a map. Firstly, I'd like to say that there are a great many countries out there that are so small and pointless that they deserve to be forgotten until they come up with a new umbrella drink. However, there's not much excuse to not be familiar with Middle Eastern and Central European geography, so the above game is here to teach you.

Get Familiar with the NATO Phonetic Alphabet!
Sure, you could use names or common objects to spell out words that phones can't seem to pick up correctly. But everyone uses different names and objects, and some people clearly don't get the point of it at all. I had a bilingual operator tell a caller that a letter was "C like 'cat'", but she was speaking spanish so it came out "C de 'gato'". As you may have noticed, there is no "C" in "gato". If nothing useful ever comes out of NATO again, this will. This is what you learn in flight school and in the military. It's used there because it works so well, and everyone's playing from the same sheet of ridiculous words.

Understand The Russian Public: Learned Helplessness!
Yes, you're going to have to read some psychology. Learned Helplessness is a relatively new psychological principle that has some serious predictive value. Understand learned despair, and you'll have some real insight into the Central European condition.

Help The Third World: Private Micro Loans!
A Micro Loan might be anywhere from $50 USD to $1000 USD, and while that amount might not do much to start a business in the US, it can do some serious economy-stimulating in a third-world country. Kiva grants these loans to individual third-world entrepreneurs so they can build a business on their own. It's a charity effort that promotes self-reliance and ingenuity, which is really quite a thing. The Cracked.com forum, of all places, has already embraced the hell out of this.

If none of these things make you a better American, you may be hopeless. I'll leave you with this music video of Joe Satriani. He's an American, it's cool.

Satch Boogie - Joe Satriani

CIA Outsourcing: Time's Response

Time Magazine ran this editorial yesterday by Robert Baer, their intelligence columnist. It alleges that the real reason behind the outsourcing to Blackwater was a combination of political connectivity with former CIA officials and an attempt to get some old friends a sweetheart contract.

It's plausible to a point, certainly. Several CIA officials have gone to work for Blackwater and probably do keep in touch with current officials at the agency. It'd be a very odd bureaucracy in which that didn't happen. And there's little doubt as to the wastefulness of a number of contracts written between the US government and PMCs; this also isn't news and contract wastefulness has happened any time the US has gone to war since World War Two. It's not out of bounds to think this might have happened again.

However, I think this explanation ignores the context of the CIA's work at the time the contract was dreamed up, which I explained in the last post. Baer seems much more preoccupied with what a bunch of bad dudes Blackwater is, and the state of private contracts in the prosecution of war, rather than getting to the heart of why they're doing it. Undoubtedly, Blackwater is not comprised of nice men and family-friendly entertainment. I wouldn't want them anywhere near a counterinsurgency I was running for an array of reasons. But the fact that they're not the good guys doesn't solve the rest of the equation automatically.

I will say though, this comment makes me interested to know what Baer seems to know:

Even more troubling, I think we will find out that in the unraveling of the Bush years, Blackwater was not the worst of the contractors, some of which did reportedly end up carrying out their assigned hits.

Not that I have a problem that a PMC contractor was successful in the role for which it was hired. But it would be interesting to know the details of what Baer is suggesting to see when and where it was, to see what the state of CIA thought was at the time. It may help us get to a more certain answer as to why they were used, and how often.

CIA Operations Outsourcing

Yesterday the NYT ran this story on the CIA trying to get Blackwater PMCs to work counterterrorism around 2002 or so.

What's interesting to me is that they attempted it in earnest but still had significant doubts about the wisdom of the program, which eventually won out. What that probably means is that the Directorate of Operations needed more personnel and didn't know of a way to get them any faster than hiring them, even with the amount of risk involved in bringing private contractors into a clandestine environment.

I've read two books on this particular period; one by Ron Suskind called "The One Percent Doctrine" and the other by Bob Woodward called "Bush at War". Both are very credible journalists, so I'm willing to trust what they wrote on the subject.

After 9/11, the intelligence services spent a lot of time hunting shadows in an attempt to stop a "second wave", another attack or set of attacks that was supposed to follow on the heels of the 9/11 attacks. For a time, analysts didn't know what to regard as a credible threat and what could be ignored, so a lot of items that were unrealistic still made their way up the chain, which forced the people in charge to react to them. Intelligence services were jumpy, didn't have a realistic threat assessment, and the combination probably convinced DCI George Tenet that he had two options: start ignoring things that the Directorate of Intelligence told him shouldn't be ignored, or beef up the Directorate of Operations to try to augment the CIA's ability to prosecute those threats.

With concerns over Pakistan dealing in nuclear secrets with al-Qaeda mounting - a concern that served as a trump card in "second wave" discussions - the decision probably looked painful but obvious.

Blog Reset!

Ok, I doped off for a while but I'm back. School will be starting again soon and there might be interesting things to talk about. I'll try to post regularly even if it's short. If I get a really good grade on a term paper, I'll put it here to show off. I may put old term papers here to show off and provide content when I'm feeling lazy. That's what you get for reading independent media, you dirty hippies.

For now, I'll offer only these interesting points:

- The apartment across from mine has been vacated but was not locked. I looked around; it's much smaller than mine, smells like dog, and the bathroom has clearly been built into what used to be a walk-in closet.

- Speed Reading courses work better when you actually do them. I will finish before school, I swear.

- The Special Alt homebrew is still sitting in my cabinet. I figure I'll age it until I'm out of everything else and see how it is. Shouldn't be long now.

- I am reading a book on suicide terrorism. I will probably talk about this a lot because I find it fascinating as all hell and the theory proposed by it is very powerful, and puts some serious hurt on a lot of earlier theories of what drives suicide terrorism. Economic status and mental stability theories are right out.

- If anyone, anyone at all, happens to find a faceplate for a JVC KD-AR560 car stereo, they should leave a comment.

I'll come up with something worth looking at soon.