This movie trailer for Four Lions made me “explode” with laughter.

“You are gonna die in that gear, lads.”
“S’all for a good cause though…”

Innit, though?

Part 2 of my obsessive compulsory coverage of Robert D. Kaplan’s trip to Tokyo.

Yours truly with Robert Kaplan, Tokyo, 12 March 2010

After Robert D. Kaplan spoke at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation, I approached him and he graciously invited me to attend the exclusive reception. His assistant whispered the location and time, and I went outside for a breather and to send off this misspelled missive (soon followed by this amelioration).

The reception started at 8PM, at a nearby Italian restaurant. I had to catch a bullet train back to Nagoya that night, so I could only spare an hour. Many of the invitees were already standing around inside the restaurant, drinking wine and talking with one another. I waited outside for Kaplan and his assistant who came a little late. Read the rest of this entry »

What follows is a description of my experience, in fanboyish detail, of Robert Kaplan’s speech at the Sasakawa Peace Foundation on March 12, 2010. I was lucky enough to sit and chat with Mr Kaplan for more than a half hour after the event, at an exclusive reception. I will describe that in my next post. Today I would like to fill you in on the speech itself, and provide you with my notes which I think will give you insight into his new book Monsoon, due later this year. Also, Kaplan will be publishing an article about Chinese geography in the next issue of Foreign Affairs, a topic he broached a bit in the speech.

Read the rest of this entry »

Robert D. Kaplan speaking in New York, 2005. Photo by Younghusband.

In the early autumn of 2005 I took a 12 hour night bus from Ontario Canada to New York City to meet Robert D. Kaplan. It was a harrowing journey. At the border crossing, at about 2AM, all passengers filed off the bus to have their passports checked. It was about a 45 minute operation. I went through with no problems, but the officer looked at me a little funny.

You see, I had just come back from Iran, and had visas for China and Kazakhstan in my passport. When asked why I had visited, I answered honestly, “Recreation.” Upon asking my affiliation I promptly replied, “Royal Military College of Canada”. That must have triggered something.

Once everyone was back on the bus (and in one location, mind), a customs officer with the manner of a doberman boarded and pointed an accusatory finger towards the back of the bus — at me! “You, come with me.” he barked with authority. I grabbed my bag and made my way to the glass holding area beside passport control for questioning. The officer there was actually pretty friendly, and when I told him my business in America it turned out that he too was a Kaplan fan. All was fine and I was out within 10 minutes.

Unfortunately the Glass Cube of Interrogation was in full view of all the passengers on the bus. So once I came back aboard and made my way to my spot near the back of the bus, I received a number of suspicious stares. It seemed that every American around me thought that I was either a spy or a terrorist. Not a relaxing journey.

Anyways, I didn’t mean to bury the lede, but that story needed telling. Once again I will be making a pilgrimage to meet the man himself: Robert Kaplan will be speaking about the Indian Ocean in Tokyo on March 12. I have already made my reservation with the Sasakawa Peace Foundation and will be going up to Tokyo for the day by Shinkansen. I am of course willing to meet up with any readers, or anyone else going to the talk. Feel free to contact me at myname@mydomain (obscure enough?). Or use the contact form.

Finally, there will inevitably be a question and answer period. Dear readers, what do you want me to ask him?

View U.S. drone strikes in Pakistan in a larger map

The New America Foundation has mapped drone strikes in Pakistan over the past 6 years using Peter Bergen and Katherine Tiedemann’s drones database. Their policy paper is here, describing their methodology. Although they estimate the “true civilian fatality rate since 2004” to be “only” 32 percent, they criticize the use of drones as ineffective, and no substitute for a proper strategy in Pakistan. At the same time, “drone attacks in the tribal regions seem to remain the only viable option for the United States to take on the militants based there who threaten the lives of Afghans, Pakistanis, and Westerners alike.”

The drone database is an ongoing project. The latest map update was March 2nd.

Evgeny Morozov bangs his drum again questioning the democratizing power of the Internet. Though I find him overly reactionary, I do generally agree with Morozov. My original master’s thesis proposal was on the Internet as a propaganda tool for clerics in Iran. Morozov’s basic point over the past couple of years is that the Internet is just a tool, to be used for good or ill — with an emphasis on the ill. This article sums up his view once again, except he brings up an excellent point about techno-utopian bias that he dubs “orientalism-in-reverse”:

While we fret about the Internet’s contribution to degrading the civic engagement of American kids, all teenagers in China or Iran are presumed to be committed and engaged global citizens who use the Web to acquaint themselves with human rights violations committed by their governments.

Read the whole article and the comments. I follow Morozov’s blog and his writing in FP. Often I find his op-eds heavy in rhetoric and light on data, so I am looking forward to his book on the Internet and democracy, which will be released later this year.

Related: Evgeny Morozov’s TED talk

Andy Zaltzman delivers the longest historical joke ever for The Bugle Episode 104a:

Audio clip: Adobe Flash Player (version 9 or above) is required to play this audio clip. Download the latest version here. You also need to have JavaScript enabled in your browser.

Please, John, come back.

Maybe you prefer your queens to be a little more randy? Check out the bit that Curzon posted a few weeks ago: It’s not Victorian. Mitchell & Webb are also excellent at challenging conventions in this Nazi skit.

Not really a joke, but a similar effect to Andy’s bit but in the field of philosophy, check out the Duck’s story of two philosophers shoveling snow.

Now, get back to work.

Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power by Robert Kaplan will be released October 19, 2010. It is already available on Amazon for pre-order. No cover art yet.

I was thinking about a reverse Facebook, an unFacebook . The key difference is that this is not a social network that is populated by willing participants, but populated with people by information gatherers.

For example, I meet you, and unbeknownst to you, I add you to my unFacebook. I meet another person and add them. Later I find out that you and he are business partners. I then “friend” you to him on my unFacebook. I give access to this database to all the people in my organization and send them out with iPhones and a handy little app that they can use to snap facial photos, grab a GPS point for last location, and fill in some quick details about subjects. Sometimes my people use their iPhones to show photos of subjects to other people to verify names or aliases, corroborate last known locations, and make links with other subjects in the database. Multiple aliases could be resolved through face recognition software. Multiple spellings could be resolved through morphological analysis. Personal details, links, and geolocation data can all be captured on the go in a very simple and familiar system (everybody knows how to use Facebook). As these bits of disparate information come into my UnFacebook, I use this data for an advanced type of link analysis, or scalable social network analysis (SSNA). It seems to me that a system like this would be handy for soldiers fighting an insurgency.

I would assume that law enforcement organizations have something like this that has been the result of a long evolution of link analysis technology. Doing a little research I found a list of tools used by the NSA in James Bamford’s The Shadow Factory (pp. 149): PatternTracer, Agility, AMHAS, Anchory, ArcView, Fastscope, Hightide, Hombase, Intelink, Octave math, Document Management Center, Dishfire, CREST, Pinwale, COASTLINE, SNACKS, Cadence, Gamut, Mainway, Marina, Osis, Puzzlecube, Surrey, Tuningfork, Xkeyscore, and Unified Tasking Tool. This is simply a list of tools used by the NSA. I could not find out what many of these did. That may be because they are specific to the NSA, or historical with no trace left on the net. ArcView is the only social network analysis tool I could confirm. Pinwale is data-mining software, which can be used for SSNA. But this is beside the point.

The military has its own needs and different ways of collecting intel than domestic law enforcement agencies, or even the NSA. With all the COIN work Western militaries have been conducting in the past decade, a flexible, automated, unFacebook-style link analysis application could be a benefit. Such an application probably exists, and if anyone has some information on it, please share. If not, this is a potential market for an enterprising startup. Please contact me if you would like to collaborate. ;)

I tweeted this but it is too awesome not to share here: The world’s first Swiss Army knife has been revealed – made 1,800 years before its modern counterpart.

Makes you wonder if there was ever a Primus MacGyverus…

Via William Gibson, aka @GreatDismal.