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As usual, my chain smoking simian research staff has been doing some excellent work lately:

• Baghdad Journal Part 8: Yet another exceptional Mumford column. This installment details his experiences while embedded with a few US Military units. Interestingly, when I first read this article, it was in more of a journal format, including some more mundane observations (but no less interesting, imho) about life as an embedded reporter, but the article seems to have been significantly edited since then, giving greater attention to the more dramatic episodes in Mumford’s Journal. One of the remaining episodes that Mumford tells is the confrontation between an Imam who had organized a protest and an American officer, Captain Ricardo Roig. It demonstrates the fine line that such officers must walk between balancing the wants and needs of the Iraqis with the safety of his troops:
  

  The Imam is a handsome man who looks to be in his early 30s, with an elegant white turban, smoldering green eyes beneath a monobrow. He tells Roig through our translator that he’s giving him two days to release the prisoner. Roig looks offended by the Iraqi’s ultimatum.

  “You come to me with these demands — when I ask for your help, you ignore my requests. You’re supposed to get a cooperation request before having a demonstration. You don’t bother.

  “When have I ever gone into your mosques? When have I ever bothered your women? We try to understand your culture and be sensitive to it, but there are some bad guys out there who want to kill us. I’m not going to let my men get hurt.”

  The confrontation goes on, and it is a fascinating read. Also, the art included in this installment appears to be of a higher quality than usual. I’ve updated this post so that it still contains all of Mumford’s columns.

• Sabotaging the Soviets: Since the end of the Cold War, interesting espionage stories like these have been coming out.
  

  In January 1982, President Ronald Reagan approved a CIA plan to sabotage the economy of the Soviet Union through covert transfers of technology that contained hidden malfunctions, including software that later triggered a huge explosion in a Siberian natural gas pipeline, according to a new memoir by a Reagan White House official.

  Stories like this, or Operation Ivy Bells or any other of a host of Cold War espionage stories that I find fascinating, always make me wonder what sorts of things will be coming out twenty or thirty years from now. What sorts of espionage are we conducting against terrorists now, if any? [via Power Line]

• U.S. Push for Mideast Democracy: An ambitious U.S. effort to promote democracy in the Middle East. Word of this plan has been circulating quietly for a while, and it is always compared to the interestingly successful Helsinki Accords of the 1970s, which provided a framework for pressing democracy in the communist East Bloc. The only problem is that the Helsinki Accords’ most helpful bits about human rights and whatnot, if I understand correctly, were sort of snuck in as an afterthought. The Soviets would never have participated had they actually known how the accords would play out. In comparing this new plan to the Helsinki Accords, aren’t we telegraphing the blow to our enemies? [via OxBlog]
• Full Text of Zarqawi Letter: This letter has often been commented upon, but the full text, as usual, provides a better understanding of what Zarqawi is actually getting at than the media (and thus the susequent analysis based on media accounts). There are some things that do indicate American success, but there are also plenty of discouraging things in the memo as well.

• The Family Guy is Coming Back! On a lighter note, this show was one of the funniest I have ever seen, and it’s lack of new episodes despite it’s briliance was to be a subject of a rant on the blog at one time or another. Apparently, though, new episodes are coming. Score! We’ll have to wait until 2005 to get them, however…

Posting has been somewhat sparse lately, but you can still expect the weekly Sunday updates, even if the mid-week updates don’t happen as often…

Just a few interesting things I’ve stumbled across recently:

• A Ceramics Parable: This is one of those stories I read, and I think to myself, that is so true. I then promptly forget all about it and when the time comes to reference it to make a point in an argument, I cannot find it. It is totally consistent with my experiences though. Here it is:
  

  The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the “quantity” group: fifty pound of pots rated an “A”, forty pounds a “B”, and so on. Those being graded on “quality”, however, needed to produce only one pot -albeit a perfect one – to get an “A”. Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the “quantity” group was busily churning out piles of work – and learning from their mistakes – the “quality” group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

  You’d be amazed at just how much you could accomplish if you just rolled up your sleeves and gave it a shot. Planning is important too, but you need to be careful not to get too carried away with it. [the link chain on this goes all over the place… near as I can tell, the story originated from Monkey Magic via James McGee and eventually ened up on Photon Courier]

• Mille Collines, Part One: Tacitus writes of his travels in Rwanda, including a brief history of the horrific genocide that took place there. Towards the end he talks about something that is nearly incomprehensible: “It is difficult to describe, and even callous to say, but there was almost an element of acquiescence in the victims’ slaughter.” He goes on to explain how he came to understand just how that was possible:
  

  Social conditioning, respect for hierarchy, a yearning for efficiency for its own sake, a tradition of state-run collective work in the corv�e, deference to authority at all costs — these are the elements of a well-run genocide. The victimized Tutsi did not acquiesce because they were cowards, nor because they were weak fatalists (although surely fatalism was there). Those that acquiesced did so out of habit. They did so because theirs was a society that, in its moment of cruel crisis, valued process and form over content.

  Read the whole thing, as they say, and keep an eye out for part two.

  Part Two is now online:

  But they’ve been through genocide. And who are we to tell them what must be done after that? The RPF has learned to distrust and detest foreign advice, and the notion of the “international community” carries no moral weight with them. The international community stopped them from overthrowing Hutu Power before the genocide could occur; the international community facilitated the escape of the genocidaires and prolonged their work; the international community reprimanded them for retaliating against interahamwe cross-border raids; and the international community condemned their handling of returning Hutu refugees far more vigorously than it condemned the genocide itself. The international community has even contested Rwandan extradition requests of genocidaires abroad; it is not unheard-of for Rwanda to ask for a Hutu Power chief to be sent to Kigali for justice, only to have the United Nations tribunal in Arusha claim precedence. These things are stupefying and enraging to Rwandans, especially to Tutsis, and rightly so. Why, then, should we expect them to take the international community’s advice on the killing of journalists and the rigging of elections?

• Green Quagmire: Sylvain Galineau comments on honest environmentalism. A small quote from Dr Patrick Moore, co-founder of Greenpeace:
  

  Moore will be one of eight experts from around the world who will demonstrate from first-hand experience how environmental extremists deny destitute nations electricity, and deepen the poverty, malaria, malnutrition, tuberculosis and dysentery that kill their people.

  Ouch. There’s lots of good stuff in Galineau’s post, so check it out. Also on this topic, don’t miss Michael Crichton’s speech about the “environmental religion”.

• The Diary of Samuel Pepys: Presented in weblog format, complete with annotations (and you can enter your own annotations using their commenting system; the whole thing is powered by Movable Type). Cool stuff. [via Random Jottings]
• The Howard Dean / John Dean Meme: This is an interesting (Freudian?) meme…
  

  …refers to the many, unexplained instances in which political commentators refer to 2004 presidential candidate Howard Dean as “John Dean”. In all cases so far, this appears to be an completely unintended reference to the embittered former Whitehouse Counsel to President Nixon of Watergate fame.

Sorry, twas a busy weekend. Boy, this weekend stuff sure is a drag… I can’t wait to get back to work tomorrow.

*ahem*

Yeah, so if you’re really itching to read some stuff, check out Dan Gable, which I wrote last week (just a bio, but I might be building a post around it sometime next week). Also, DyRE aims to incite jealosy in me by talking about a few movies, including The Battle of Algiers, in the forum. He was mostly successful.

I’ll be traveling this weekend, so there will most likely be no new post on Sunday (as my schedule normally dictates). In the mean time, as always, there are other things to do at Kaedrin than just the blog. Check out the Tandem Stories for some interactive storytelling, or stop by and have a chat in the forum. There’s lots of other stuff to do here at Kaedrin, so check it out if you’re so inclined…

By the way, I am typing this post on Zempt, basically a local Movable Type client (running on Windows) that can interact with the Movable Type installation on my server. It has some nice features, including a much better entry GUI, but it is lacking in some things as well. It has some nice shortcuts for inserting code (links, bold, centering, etc…), a nice preview function, and (my favorite) a spellchecker. The interface is somewhat customizeable, but at the same time I rather like how the browser interface has all the post options visable on one screen. The options are easily accessed in Zempt, but the operation isn’t quite intuitive. For instance, I don’t know what will happen when I say “Publish New Post” here. I was playing around wiht this earlier, and wasn’t acting the way I thought it would…

All in all, I like it, but I’m not sure it will completely overtake the standard browser interface. Then again, I’m using version 0.3 of Zempt, so perhaps the future releases will exceed expectations

Well, I’m off, have a good weekend, see you soon…

Update: Funny, the words “blog” and “Zempt” were not included in the dictionary for spellcheck…

My body hath been besieged by a foul sickness, held at bay only by my weakened immune system’s army. Like the warriors trapped in Minas Tirith, my only hope lies in our ability to overcome odds, with a little help from my friends (namely, the Riders of DayQuill and the hoards of Chicken Noodle Soup).

In case you cannot tell from that first paragraph, my body was not the only thing negatively affected by this enemy I face. I grow tired of both body and mind, and thus do not have the energy to do much else but throw a few links at you and rest. So here we are:

• Tales of Teenage Life, as told by 22-year-old Russian, Irina Denezhkina. This article is little more than a short glimpse at the author and her rise from obscurity (her works were originally published on the internet, then published and translated all over – to be released in the US in mid-2004), but her work sounds interesting nonetheless. Plus, she’s really cute:)
• A Terrorist Training Guide: I found the emphasis on low-tech means (especially of communication) to be interesting.
• Robert Philip Hanssen: “A Review of the FBI’s Performance in Deterring, Detecting, and

  Investigating the Espionage Activities of Robert Philip Hanssen” I’ve not finished reading this, but I am always fascinated by such stories.

• Let it Snow

  by David Sedaris : A winter story in the New Yorker. It’s no SantaLand Diaries, but it’s fun.

Well, that’s it for now. Thanks to Crypto-Gram and of course my ever-faithful chain-smoking monkey research squad for the links.

Update: I’m a cheater, I added the Sedaris story long after this post, but I didn’t want to create a whole new post just for that, and it fit here, so there. Take that. If your reading this at all, I suppose.

Just an overview of some books, movies, and music that I’ve experienced lately.I may end up fleshing some of these out with full reviews eventually…

• Red Army by Ralph Peters : Known more to me for his perceptive political essays, Peters shows a similar aptitude for fiction here… This military procedural depicts the theoretical invasion of West Germany by Soviet forces in the late eighties. The choice of telling this story solely from the Soviet perspective was a daring one, as you cannot help but root for those whose viewpoint you are reading (Nevertheless, I found myself rooting for the British or the West Germans at times). This also allows Peters the opportunity to humanize the faceless mass of the Soviet military. Peters himself gives a good description of the book in his Author’s Note:
  

  My fundamental goal in writing this book was to attempt to bring those men to life in their rich human variety, to see them as a bit less faceless and enigmatic, in the context of modern battle.

  While Peters is quite adept, if a little graphic, at describing the modern battlefield he does not go to absurd lengths describing the technical details of battle. He does not focus on gadgetry or technology, like others of this genre, but rather on behavior. The book isn’t really about the hardware or even the war; its about the men behind the guns. As he says:

  When asked what the Soviet military is “really like,” I have often joked that it’s a lot like sex: Much that you’ve heard about it isn’t true; when its good it can be amazing; but when it’s bad, it’s inexpressibly embarrassing.

  There are some steriotypes in action here, but for the most part Peters’ characters are compelling, believable, and, most importantly, sympathetic. From the lowly foot soldier to the MIG pilot to the tank commander to the general in charge of the attack, Peters leaves no perspective unturned.

  Also worthy of note is the bitter critique of NATO that fills the pages, and particularly the ending. I won’t say how it ends, but given some of his recent writings, his thoughts and feelings obviously haven’t changed much.

  Peters has a new collection of essays called Beyond Baghdad: Postmodern War and Peace which looks promising (it comes out October 1st). He is also writing fiction under the pseudonym Owen Parry (I haven’t read any of them, but they look like Civil War era mysteries, which sounds sufficiently interesting enough for me!)

• Watchmen by Alan Moore (writer) and Dave Gibbons (illustrator) : A fine example of how a comic book can be considered artistically valid literature, Watchmen nevertheless contains many of the mainstays of the medium. For instance, Watchmen has “superheroes” as characters, but they don’t even remotely resemble the superheroes we are all familiar with. It’s a tale of cold war paranoia, set in the eighties just before a Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (the world portrayed in Watchmen is not exactly the same as our own, due to the influece of “superheros” on society). (Spoiler alert!) Interestingly enough, its ending in which a shrewd businessman/superhero engineers a massive tragedy in New York to look like an alien attack, is an unflinching and horrifying example of how human beings go to extraordinary efforts not just to achieve superficial goals, but as an engine for social progress (albeit, in this case, the massive undertaking is somewhat less benign than the pyramids or space flight were.) This ending has some rather profound moral implications, and I was left very conflicted…
• Kukushka (The Cuckoo) : An oddly ambitious film from Russian director Aleksandr Rogozhkin, this movie tells the story of 3 unlikely companions towards the end of WWII. A Finnish sniper, chained to a rock and left for dead by the Germans, eventually escapes and finds his way to a farm which is run by a Sami woman named Anni. Anni has also found an injured Russian captain who had been condemned for writing anti-Stalinist thoughts in his diary. For her, they are not enemies; just men. Complicating matters considerably, none of this trio speaks the same language. Of course, we in the audience can see everything they’re saying, which makes for an interesting dynamic that Rogozhkin is thankfully able to pull off… If you can find it, its worth taking in…
• Donnie Darko : An odd but interesting little film which tells the story of Donnie Darko, a teen who has a chronic sleepwalking problem, and who starts to see things. Its a time travel story, but a rather odd one, and I’m not sure it makes perfect sense. It is, however, an ambitious and thought provoking effort. Not a brilliant movie, but this is adventurous filmmaking. The writer/director Richard Kelly shows promise with this effort…
• Keep it Together by Guster : Guster’s latest album is a departure from their normally unique sound. Eschewing their definitive instrumentation in favor of a more traditional sound, they have crafted a decent album, but one which does not distinguish them from many other similar sounding bands. I find myself feeling that I’ve heard several of the songs before, though I can never place the original source (the “hidden” track sounds disturbingly like the Christmas Vacation theme song). The real shame here is the downgrading of the bongos in the percussion. In several of the songs, the bongos are completely absent, replaced by extremely lame and simplistic drum beats. Everything seems toned down, and in that vein, the music is less distinctive than their previous entries. Its a disappointing listen, though ther are a few moments of livelyhood…

Update 9.16.03 – Added some info on Ralph Peters’ other books… Thanks to Lex for reminding me…

I’ve been relying on my chain-smoking monkey servants a lot lately, but they do good work, even when they don’t give me what I want. So here are some interesting links we’ve come across recently:

• Chicago Boyz’s Lexington Green points out a pair of columns written by artist Steve Mumford, who has been keeping a Baghdad Journal of his artistic endeavors in Iraq. My favorite line, when Mumford explains to Col. Scott Rutter that he’s wants to accompany his soldiers and make drawings. “He was perched atop his command Bradley, engines roaring. Make art? Terrific! That’s great, just great! Jump on! Hoo-ah!” Heh. Seriously, Mumford’s writings are good reading. As Lex notes: “Mumford does not downplay the dangers, but it is obvious that the situation in Iraq is much better than the mainstream media would have you believe.”
• Conversation with Walter Russell Mead : Mead originated the term Jacksonian in his book Special Providence: American Foreign Policy and How it Changed the World and there are a good deal of people out there who would benefit from a good understanding of this country’s Jacksonian base. This is a good interview… [thanks again to Chicago Boyz]
• Are suicide attacks the ‘ultimate weapon’? : An excellent Belmont Club piece challenging the conventional wisdom prevalent in the media that suicide attacks are the ultimate asymmetric weapon (“cost-effective both financially and in terms of the number of terrorist lives ultimately put at risk,” the kind of tactics that advertise themselves).
  

  But the logic is wrong. Suicide bombing is warfare’s least cost effective weapon because it puts any consideration of a negotiated settlement between the combatants out of the question. In economic terms, it destroys the Pareto optimal frontier and reduces conflict to a zero-sum game.

  …

  The natural outcome of the kamikazes was the atomic bomb over Hiroshima. Nothing else would do. The natural reaction of the passengers on Flight 93 was to fight on at all costs. Nothing else would do. And the eventual reaction of nuclear-armed Israel, Russia and India to the unlimited slaughter of their populations does not bear thinking upon. And it will not be surrender, but rather something else. That is the cost effectiveness of suicide bombing.

  Well said. Read the whole thing.

• The New American Way of War by Max Boot : I haven’t finished this one yet, and I can’t say as though I agree with everything I read, but it makes for some interesting reading at least.
• The Werewolf Principle : Well, whatdoyaknow? My simian friends finally came through on providing some info on post-war German resistence. Seriously, this is a good roundup of info on the Werewolves, a group of German irregulars I mentioned briefly a while back. Someday, I hope to go into more detail here on postwar Germany (and Japan) and how things there relate to the current occupation of Iraq. Of course, neither situation applies directly, but there are some interesting parallels…

That’s all for now. Hopefully more later in the week…

In a few days time I’ll be embarking on a much needed vacation, so I won’t be around to post this Sunday and possibly the next. I had planned to leave a few posts here to fill the void, but Road Runner decided to cut out on me last night and has only just come back…

While I’m out cruising the high seas, you might want to check out some of the other features here at Kaedrin. Tandem Stories are a form of interactive storytelling in which each successive paragraph is written by a different author (or by alternating authors). We’ve been playing around with this stuff for years here at Kaedrin, so take a look at some of these:

• Raindrops : I started this story just so everyone would have something to do while I was gone. Intern George McGraves loves the rain. Today, he’ll find out just how much the rain likes him, with the help of you!
• The Fantabulous Adventures of Mark and Bill – This is series of sit-com-like tandem stories that chronicles how a misguided programmer, Mark, gets his wife back with the help of Bill Gates. I just started off part 4, where Bill Gates and Steve Jobs confront each other in an ice cream shop, so have at it!
• The Rebel Fire Alarms – Kaedrin’s first and arguably, best, tandem story. Unfortunately, you can no longer add to this one, but its an interesting read. A menacing presence has invaded the Hickville University campus with only a small band of misfits to stop it. Malfunctioning fire alarms are only the tip of the iceberg as our heroes quickly find out that there is much more at stake than just Hickville U. Hijinks ensue.

There you go. And, of course, you could always have a chat in the forum with the regulars (they don’t bite… hard). Have fun, and I’ll see you in a week or two…

Update 8.24.03 – I’m back!

Usually when I need something to post here, I send my chain-smoking monkey underlings on a mission to find me some interesting links or to research a particular topic. I went slumming in the Hamptons this weekend, so I released my legion of loyal simians on the task of comparing and contrasting postwar Germany and Japan with the current U.S. occupation of Iraq. This is what they came up with:

• The Star Wars Kid (warning, there is a sound clip on the first page): This is so damned funny, though when you read what happened after, you really gotta feel sorry for this kid. Basically, this 15 year old kid made a video of himself pretending to wield a double-bladed light saber, a couple of other kids found the video and posted it on the internet, where it promptly spread and a series of remixes has appeared. The best is the Star Wars Kid 2.0 version, which is absolutely hilarious. But the kid was obviously overwhelmed by the the constant mocking and derision he received; it was so bad that he dropped out of school and entered a psychiatric institute.
• Strong Bad’s Emails: This is some funny crap. Basically, its just this character who answers emails, but it, too, is really damn funny. There are a ton of emails too, and its updated every Monday… I especially like the guitar one, and the dullard one, and… er, they’re all good. Check them out… Also, its always nice to see people using flash for something appropriate. Of course, they’re using Flash for the entire site (which is also funny, by the way) but, as I’ve ranted about before, personal humor sites like this are one of the acceptable uses of flash.
• Rumsfeld Accuses Saddam of Camping: Saddam is such a lamer.
• Since we can’t buy and sell terrorist acts on a futures market anymore, checkout Rinkworks’ Site Market Game, where you can buy and sell Rinkworks features and make money…

As you can see, my chain-smoking monkey servants spent the weekend drinking all my beer, urinating on my possessions, and otherwise goofing off. Seriously though, I do plan to write something about the troubles of postwar Germany and Japan, so stay tuned… In the mean time, enjoy the above.

Today marks the first blogiversary of IMAO, and since I do not want to be known as an enemy to IMAO (nor do I wish to be destroyed), I am linking to his uh… much anticipated… One Year Blogography. I’m a little short on the presents and offerings that Frank has demanded; I can only heap praise upon his brilliantly funny “In My World” posts, which have the unique distiction of being universally entertaining (as he notes in another blogiversary post: ” I receive very little hate mail. I’ve often seen liberals link to my posts saying, ‘Hey, look at this great Rumsfeld bashing.'”). Also, whenever his stories feature Bush, I picture the lines being delivered by Will Ferrell’s Bush (which I miss dearly – that new guy stinks). Seriously, every time I stop by IMAO, I laugh out loud, garnering some strange looks if I’m at work.

Incidentally, the Kaedrin Weblog will be celebrating 3 years of bloggy goodness this coming Monday. Yes, 3 whole years, and I can’t even claim a meteoric rise to fame. Given my generosity today, if I don’t end up on Frank’s Links of the Day list that day, there will be hell to pay. You hear me Frank? I’m just itching for a reason to test out the .50 AE Desert Eagle in a combat situation. Don’t tempt me… (Heh, j/k of course)