Stratfor and Bar Refaeli

This week's Stratfor article concerns the strategic quandary that would face Israel should the uprising in Egypt lead to the cancellation of the Camp David accords. 


The Hot Babe I decided to connect to this article is the Sports Illustrated cover girl and Israeli model Bar Refaeli. 

Not for the obvious reason of the dangers that the Muslim Brotherhood would pose towards swim suit models, although that is a most alarming thought, but rather because of a controversy in Bar Refaeli's past.


Apparently Bar Refaeli, who is an Israeli swimsuit model,  dodged the Israeli draft by marrying a relative to avoid being called up, and then quickly divorcing him when that possibility passed. This caused a bit of an uproar in Israel, with calls for boycotts and criticism from other models who were serving their time in the military. 

You can read about it, and gawk a picture of her in a rather fetching gray dress, in The Independent's article: Israeli supermodels in catwalk spat over draft-dodging.        

 
EGYPT, ISRAEL AND A STRATEGIC RECONSIDERATION

By George Friedman, February 8, 2011

The events in Egypt have sent shock waves through Israel. The 1978 Camp David Accords between Egypt and Israel have been the bedrock of Israeli national security. In three of the four wars Israel fought before the accords, a catastrophic outcome for Israel was conceivable. In 1948, 1967 and 1973, credible scenarios existed in which the Israelis were defeated and the state of Israel ceased to exist. In 1973, it appeared for several days that one of those scenarios was unfolding.

The survival of Israel was no longer at stake after 1978. In the 1982 invasion of Lebanon, the various Palestinian intifadas and the wars with Hezbollah in 2006 and Hamas in Gaza in 2008, Israeli interests were involved, but not survival. There is a huge difference between the two. Israel had achieved a geopolitical ideal after 1978 in which it had divided and effectively made peace with two of the four Arab states that bordered it, and neutralized one of those states. The treaty with Egypt removed the threat to the Negev and the southern coastal approaches to Tel Aviv.

The agreement with Jordan in 1994, which formalized a long-standing relationship, secured the longest and most vulnerable border along the Jordan River. The situation in Lebanon was such that whatever threat emerged from there was limited. Only Syria remained hostile but, by itself, it could not threaten Israel. Damascus was far more focused on Lebanon anyway. As for the Palestinians, they posed a problem for Israel, but without the foreign military forces along the frontiers, the Palestinians could trouble but not destroy Israel. Israel's existence was not at stake, nor was it an issue for 33 years.

The Historic Egyptian Threat to Israel

The center of gravity of Israel's strategic challenge was always Egypt. The largest Arab country, with about 80 million people, Egypt could field the most substantial army. More to the point, Egypt could absorb casualties at a far higher rate than Israel. The danger that the Egyptian army posed was that it could close with the Israelis and engage in extended, high-intensity combat that would break the back of the Israel Defense Forces by imposing a rate of attrition that Israel could not sustain. If Israel were to be simultaneously engaged with Syria, dividing its forces and its logistical capabilities, it could run out of troops long before Egypt, even if Egypt were absorbing far more casualties.

The solution for the Israelis was to initiate combat at a time and place of their own choosing, preferably with surprise, as they did in 1956 and 1967. Failing that, as they did in 1973, the Israelis would be forced into a holding action they could not sustain and forced onto an offensive in which the risks of failure -- and the possibility -- would be substantial.

Maybe Obama was telling the truth after all?

When Obama claimed he was a huge Bears fan I figured he was just making that up to foster some "Man O' The People" cred. However, it appears that Obama has yet to call the Packers and congratulate them. Hahaha... that is the sort of pique one expects from a Bears fan, so maybe he was telling the truth.

Although, I have to admit, as a Packer fan if I were President (unlikely) and the Bears won the Super Bowl (even more unlikely) I would make them cool their heels for some time before calling them and gagging out my congratulations. In fact, I would probably also do the bit where I crinkled paper near the phone and faked that there was static on the line and I couldn't hear them.

Surviving the unthinkable

Above is an Australian educational film which was made in the the 1980s and only recently 'discovered'. It gives tips on surviving WWIII. There is much pragmatic and valuable information in it. (HT: Open Culture)

Two-faced politicians

 The other day I stumbled across Julian Wolkenstein's post Symmetrical Portraits. He took frontal photos of people, and then split the photos in half, flipped them and made images of the people if their face were composed of two left or right sides. I was struck how different the two manufactured faces ended up appearing. Inspired by that, I decided to try my hand with current political types.

First I did Barak Obama's official portrait. As with all pictures in this series, the first is his right side and the next his left. The difference in his skin tone between the two pictures is from the lighting of the original picture, I did not adjust it at all. Still, at the risk of being accused of racism, I was amused by how scrawny, dorky albeit friendly looking, the right-faced version of him was while the pursed lips and intense stare of his left-faced version gives off a hint of menace. 

Right-faced Sarah, again because of the lighting of the original portrait, looks like she fell asleep in a tanning bed. Meanwhile, left-faced Sarah looks positively demented with her giant smile and large eyes.

 

Right-faced Reid, with his close set, beady eyes looks pretty dodgy, but left-faced Reid looks like a fiendly old coot.

Yikes! John Boehner is either an NFL lineman or a bobble-head doll. Unless his face was titled slightly to the left in the photo I used (and it didn't appear to be), he has a very asymmetrical face to say the least.

Gadzooks!!!  And I thought Boehner was a asymmetrical. Thick or thin, the right and left faced versions of the botoxed Pelosi both make her look completely bonkers. Hmmm... I wonder if there is a message in that?

I hope you enjoyed this foolishness, but I don't think I dare find out if the two faces of Pelosi can be topped for strangeness.

Stratfor and M.I.A.

The most recent Stratfor article discusses using social media as a tool for protest. The hot babe I've chosen to link to the article - in a shameless and transparent attempt to draw extra traffic to Flares - is the rapper/singer M.I.A. (Mathangi "Maya" Arulpragasam). 

Her connection to protest and social media is admittedly a thin one: she is the daughter of one of the leaders of the Tamil separatist movement and she was one of the first musicians to sucessfully promote herself largely through the internet.

Her biography is rather strange. She was born in England, where her parents met, but her family returned to Sri Lanka when M.I.A. was a baby. Her father became one of the founders a Marxis militant group, that also welcomed radical Sri Lankan Moslems as members, called Eelam Revolutionary Organisation of Students (EROS). An altogether nasty group as you'll see if you follow the link.

As a child M.I.A. was estranged from her father. For what I imagine were security reasons he lived apart from M.I.A. and her mother. When he did visit her he was introduced as her uncle. Eventually the civil war got dicey enough that M.I.A. and her family, sans Dear Ol' Dad, returned to England as refugees. This is when M.I.A. learned English. 


She received a degree in fine art, film and video from London's Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design. She started in graphic design, and only later moved into music. She mixed all of her early music and distributed it via file sharing. As such, she is considered on of the first sucessful musicians to use the internet to distribute her music and build a fan base.

Her music probably won't appeal to most of the older readers of this blog, but it is actually pretty good. Of course her lyrics are the usual nutty leftest flapdoodle, but her rhythms can be quite clever. She does a combination of electronica, rap, hip-hop and world music. If you're interested, here's a link to a YouTube video of her song Bucky Done Gun.

SOCIAL MEDIA AS A TOOL FOR PROTEST 

By Marko Papic and Sean Noonan, February 3, 2011

Internet services were reportedly restored in Egypt on Feb. 2 after being completely shut down for two days. Egyptian authorities unplugged the last Internet service provider (ISP) still operating Jan. 31 amidst ongoing protests across the country. The other four providers in Egypt -- Link Egypt, Vodafone/Raya, Telecom Egypt and Etisalat Misr -- were shut down as the crisis boiled over on Jan. 27. Commentators immediately assumed this was a response to the organizational capabilities of social media websites that Cairo could not completely block from public access.

The role of social media in protests and revolutions has garnered considerable media attention in recent years. Current conventional wisdom has it that social networks have made regime change easier to organize and execute. An underlying assumption is that social media is making it more difficult to sustain an authoritarian regime -- even for hardened autocracies like Iran and Myanmar -- which could usher in a new wave of democratization around the globe. In a Jan. 27 YouTube interview, U.S. President Barack Obama went as far as to compare social networking to universal liberties such as freedom of speech.

Social media alone, however, do not instigate revolutions. They are no more responsible for the recent unrest in Tunisia and Egypt than cassette-tape recordings of Ayatollah Ruholla Khomeini speeches were responsible for the 1979 revolution in Iran. Social media are tools that allow revolutionary groups to lower the costs of participation, organization, recruitment and training. But like any tool, social media have inherent weaknesses and strengths, and their effectiveness depends on how effectively leaders use them and how accessible they are to people who know how to use them.

How to Use Social Media

The situations in Tunisia and Egypt have both seen an increased use of social networking media such as Facebook and Twitter to help organize, communicate and ultimately initiate civil-disobedience campaigns and street actions. The Iranian "Green Revolution" in 2009 was closely followed by the Western media via YouTube and Twitter, and the latter even gave Moldova's 2009 revolution its moniker, the "Twitter Revolution."

If the minute hands ticks towards midnight.

Any regular reader of this blog knows that I have little use for Obama. However, the notion that Obama fumbled away Egypt is misguided in my opinion. Yes, he was caught flat-footed, and I have little confidence he'll do anything other than make a bad situation worse, but in the end it will be the Egyptians, and nobody else, that have fumbled away Egypt if it sinks into a theocracy. 

Above are two pictures from Phyllis Chesler's post The Steady Erosion of Women’s Rights in Egypt: A Photographic Story. They are both of Cairo University graduating classes, the top one is from 1978 while the bottom is from 2004. In the first they are dressed in secular fashions, in the second the women all wear hajibs.  Their dress is not something the West forced on them. Their dress is a cultural reaction to the failure of the Islam against the West. 

Whether forced or not, and let's remember that Saudi Arabia, the epicenter of Wahhabism, has to enforce Moslem piety with canes and police beatings, their dress is their embrace of political Islam. Further, that embrace is spreading as Arab push-back against it falters.

When 9/11 happened I feared a widespread war. I still harbor that fear. There was a long thread at Slashdot after the 9/11 attacks. Every one was wondering what the future held and to do moving forward. There was on post in the midst of it all that worried that we already knew the answer to our dilemma: we had reduced both Japan and Germany to rubble and misery, and we could do it again. What a horrible thought, to bath the 21st Century in even more blood than the 20th. Still, it is a potential end game if all goes pear-shaped.

It is a knife's edge the world has been balancing upon, as each side increasingly sees existential threat in the other. I hope we can maintain the balance, because the alternatives are ghastly.  

Then again, maybe I'm just being jittery. I do tend to brood and fear the worse. Perhaps we'll all come out of this crisis in better shape than we entered it. Perhaps the Egyptian populace will embrace the Iraqi rather than the Gazan model of Moslem democracy; and, who knows, but there may be people in Tehran tonight -- and I don't mean the Mullahs -- who are looking at Cairo and seeing an opportunity to reignite their struggles against their repression. After all, history never moves in a straight line.

I apologize for this somber post. If it is any consolation, I am not an Arab or Islamic expert -- I'm just a dilettante. Ah, I should have never gone back and revisited Wretchard's Three Conjectures this afternoon. 

The silver lining of slaughter

You probably think that the Mongol slashing their way through Europe and Asia were a bad thing. Over the course of two centuries they destroyed civilizations and sacked numerous cities. They were also known being astonishingly cruel; when they captured the capital of Persia they murdered all of its inhabitants, even killing the dogs and cats in the streets. Estimates vary, but they killed tens, if not hundreds, of millions of people.

Can any good be wrung from such misery and suffering?

Well, perhaps that depends where your priorities lay -- people or carbon. How Genghis Khan cooled the planet discusses a Carnegie study by Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira that examined large scale historical disasters, the Black Death and the like, and estimated their effect on carbon production. From the post:

"It's a common misconception that the human impact on climate began with the large-scale burning of coal and oil in the industrial era," says Pongratz, lead author of the study in a press release. "Actually, humans started to influence the environment thousands of years ago by changing the vegetation cover of the Earth‘s landscapes when we cleared forests for agriculture."

The answer to how this happened can be told in one word: reforestation. When the Mongol hordes invaded Asia, the Middle East, and Europe they left behind a massive body count, depopulating many regions. With less people, large swathes of cultivated fields eventually returned to forests, absorbing carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. 

Seems all a bit cold-blooded to me and I suspect their estimates are conveniently aimed guesses, but to be fair to Julia Pongratz and Ken Caldeira I haven't read their original paper, only this brief report on it, so I have no idea how sensationalized the article has painted their findings. Still, I wonder if they tried to match the Mongol Hordes' rampages with the actually historical temperature? I imagine they are trying to tie the Medieval Warming period to Genghis and his heirs, but it isn't clear from the part quoted.

At any rate, I'll leave you with John Wayne's portrayal of the newly anointed Mongol Eco Hero and Interpetive Dance enthusiast.

I speak English not Newspeak

Tuesday, during a discussion of the Chicago Mayoral election a guest said something about Rahm Emanuel being in the crosshairs of his opponents.

CNN's John King, in a fit of new found Civility Posturing pompously said, "We were just having a discussion about the Chicago mayoral race my friend Andy Shaw…used the term 'in the crosshairs' in talking about the candidates out there. We're trying, we're trying to get away from that language. Andy is a good friend, he's covered politics for a long time, but we're trying to get away from using that kind of language.  We won't always be perfect, so hold us accountable when we don't meet your standards." (source: Washington Examiner)

No, we are not trying to get away from 'that language'. 'That language' is English and we all understand what the common expression crosshairs means in the context it was given.

Further, you can take your smarmy apology, fold it up and stick it where the sun don't shine (that's also just an expression Mr. King, but if you literally follow my suggestion that's OK by me). The real reason you're trying to vilify commonly used and widely understood expressions is because you lot made fools out of yourselves with hair-brained, and faintly slanderous, political theories while trying to hang a lunatic's action on your political opponents.

Mr. King, I speak English and I'll be damned if I'm going to vilify a common expression to provide the likes of you a smoke screen for your stupidity and pettiness. If you really want to be civil, man up and apologize -- otherwise bugger off and take your nonsense elsewhere.

Narrow Footprints

Necessity is the mother of invention. Space is at such a premium in Japan that they'll build extremely narrow buildings to fit into rectangular slices of lots. Although the spaces are long and thin, they can still be ergonomically designed so as not to be confining. At least that's what they claim, some of them look sufficating to me.

Above are some examples, with more at the Web Urbanist's post Narrower Towers: 20 of Japan's Thinnest Buildings. 

Stratfor and bomber nose art

This Stratfor article concerns the seemingly never ending Moslem outrage over the Mohamed cartoons. They were published 5 years ago and plots against the cartoonists still surface like clockwork.

This intimidation is an attempt to enforce their religious sensibilities over our notion of free speech. I'll take free speech, but unfortunately our betters in the media didn't have the sense to tell the lot of them to bugger off and plaster the cartoons all over the place.

At any rate the babe that came to mind when I read the article were the pinup girls of WWII bomber nose art. The article Military Aircraft Nose Art: An American Tradition has this to say about nose art on planes deployed for the First Gulf War:

During the Gulf War, sexually provocative art was removed before an aircraft was deployed to Saudi Arabia to avoid offending inhabitants of the area. Bikinis were painted over to became long black dresses. After the war, artists restored the images to their original state upon the request of the crews and pilots (Walker, More, p. 34).

After the Gulf War and after the wave of negative public opinion, the military ruled against portraying women on aircraft. Nose art was removed from all 319th Wing and 384th aircraft in 1992. On the "Queen of Hearts," the name remains without an image.

Bah Humbug.  I guess cartoons just can't catch a break in this day and age.

THE MOHAMMED CARTOON DUST HAS NOT SETTLED

By Scott Stewart, January 6, 2011

When one considers all of the people and places in the West targeted by transnational jihadists over the past few years, iconic targets such as New York's Times Square, the London Metro and the Eiffel Tower come to mind. There are also certain target sets such as airlines and subways that jihadists focus on more than others. Upon careful reflection, however, it is hard to find any target set that has been more of a magnet for transnational jihadist ire over the past year than the small group of cartoonists and newspapers involved in the Mohammed cartoon controversy.

Every year STRATFOR publishes a forecast of the jihadist movement for the coming year. As we were working on that project for this year, we were struck by the number of plots in 2010 that involved the cartoon controversy -- and by the number of those plots that had transnational dimensions, rather than plots that involved only local grassroots operatives. (The 2011 jihadist forecast will be available to STRATFOR members in the coming weeks.)

Groups such as al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) have gone to great lengths to keep the topic of the Mohammed cartoons burning in the consciousness of radical Islamists, whether they are lone wolves or part of an organized jihadist group, and those efforts are obviously bearing fruit. Because of this, we anticipate that plots against cartoon-related targets will continue into the foreseeable future.

Joe Biden to the rescue

On New Year's Eve the Los.Angeles Times posted the article Biden is a linchpin of Obama's presidency. As you can probably guess from its headline,  the article is a massive hoot. Yeesh, talk about the pitfalls of a slow news day.

Below are a couple of excerpts to give a taste of it, although I recommend reading the entire thing to appreciate the depth of Biden ass-kissery and/or pundit nincompoopery (take your pick) it displays.

Yet with a new political order in Washington, the success of Obama's presidency hinges more and more on the negotiating skills and political instincts of his No. 2.

Facing a revived Republican Party, the White House is expected to increasingly deploy Biden as a presidential surrogate to find compromises and coax reluctant lawmakers into crossing party lines. Even Biden's penchant for veering off message is being reevaluated inside the White House as a bridge to ordinary voters who appreciate blunt talk.

Who can argue with that? I imagine that he likely does have the 'Ordinary Voter Who Appreciates Blithering Idiocy' demographic tied up for Obama.

Inside the White House, aides have developed a special Biden rule. Rather than squirm over the latest Biden gaffe, the administration treats it as plainspoken candor that may appeal to a portion of the electorate that is unmoved by Obama's disciplined, explanatory rhetoric.

"The rest of the White House is coming around to the idea that sometimes what the vice president says that's off message is just a really blunt and colorful way of expressing a truth, and they should embrace that," said an administration official who requested anonymity to speak more candidly about the matter.  

Plainspoken candor? Well, that's one way of spinning FDR giving his televised fireside chats.

I can't even begin to imagine the talent competition...

The latest Miss Venezuela, the lovely Reina Bella Guerrero, is a Barbie doll. The contest was held in Caracas in early December, and the above doll won the crown and will move on to the Miss Barbie Universe pageant.

The people entering the dolls in the contest, along with designing makeup and clothes for their beauties, also give them names an even invented biographies. The dolls pose in evening gowns, swim suits and also answer questions from the judges. As the post title alludes to... I would die to see the talent competition if they have one. 

Here's a few more pictures. Try not to drool over them.

The Christmas Tradition of the Ex Husband

When Ambi Jr. was but a young sprout he used to love claw crane games. Those are the machines where you maneuver a little crane to grab a toy or stuffed animal.

One year, just before Christmas, he managed to snag 'Ex Husband', the unshaven, beer drinking lout pictured to the right. While I just saw it as a mighty strange prize for a claw grabber game, when my son got home with it he decided it would make a fine Christmas tree ornament and so, with my collusion, on to the tree it went.

Needless to say, Mrs. Sinistral found Ex Husband rather less charming than we did and she promptly moved him to a hidden corner in the back of the tree. 

The war on, the poor guy's bounced from the back of the tree to the front and back again ever since as one of my family's cherished Christmas traditions. Well, at least Junior and I cherish it, I suspect Mrs. Sinistral would chose a different term.

Merry Christmas to you all from Ex Husband and the Ambisinistral family.   

 

Stratfor and Salma Hayek

Continuing my new found sleazy tactic of coupling Strafor articles with hot babe pictures -- I probably should be ashamed of myself for it but I'm not -- this week we have Salma Hayek.

The screen cap above his her first appearance in the movie Desperado. Her entry causes a number of guys to crash their cars as she sashays across the street. I once had a friend who had a minor fender-bender going to work. He jumped the gun at a stop light and rear-ended the car in front of him. When he got out the car to talk to the other diver, that fellow laughed and said, "you were looking at the blond too, eh?" He was, so I guess her entry scene isn't completely unbelievable. 

What is unbelievable is that she runs a combination cafe/bookstore and it is always empty. One would think, since she's the only one who works there, every single guy in the town would be in the place drinking coffee and feigning an interest in literature. 

Regardless, if you haven't seen it, aside from Ms Hayek it features completely over-the-top violence, with one gun fight actually featuring members of a mariachi band firing rockets out of their guitar cases. Quite the guilty pleasure to watch.

The Stratfor article is much more somber, since it deals with the alarming drug gang violence of Mexico. By the way, if you haven't noticed, I've added Borderland Beat, which covers the situation in Mexico extensively, to the sidebar. It's grim reading, but I think it's an important topic.


MEXICO AND THE CARTEL WARS IN 2010

Editor's Note: This week's Security Weekly is a heavily abridged version of STRATFOR's annual report on Mexico's drug cartels. The full report, which includes far more detail and diagrams depicting the leadership of each cartel along with our updated cartel map, will be available to our members on Dec. 20.

By Scott Stewart, December 16, 2010

In our 2010 annual report on Mexico's drug cartels, we assess the most significant developments of the past year and provide an updated description of the dynamics among the country's powerful drug-trafficking organizations, along with an account of the government's effort to combat the cartels and a forecast of the battle in 2011. The annual cartel report is a product of the coverage STRATFOR maintains on a weekly basis through our Mexico Security Memo as well as other analyses we produce throughout the year. In response to customer requests for more and deeper coverage of Mexico, STRATFOR will also introduce a new product in 2011 designed to provide an enhanced level of reporting and analysis.

In 2010, the cartel wars in Mexico have produced unprecedented levels of violence throughout the country. No longer concentrated in just a few states, the violence has spread all across the northern tier of border states and along much of both the east and west coasts of Mexico. This year's drug-related homicides have surpassed 11,000, an increase of more than 4,400 deaths from 2009 and more than double the death toll in 2008.

Cartel Dynamics

The high levels of violence seen in 2010 have been caused not only by long-term struggles such as the fight between the Sinaloa Federation and the Vicente Carrillo Fuentes Organization (also known as the Juarez cartel) for control of the Juarez smuggling corridor but also from the outbreak of new conflicts among various players in the cartel landscape. For example, simmering tensions between Los Zetas and their former partners in the Gulf cartel finally boiled over and quickly escalated into a bloody turf war along the U.S.-Tamaulipas state border. The conflict has even spread to states like Nuevo Leon, Hidalgo and Tabasco and has given birth to an alliance between the Sinaloa Federation, the Gulf cartel and La Familia Michoacana (LFM) called the New Federation.

RIP Captain Beefheart.

Crank the volume and shed a tear. Captain Beefheart has passed away at the age of 69.

Ohh-ohh, fleas on rats, fleas on rats

Above is a rather odd song about the Black Death. I'll warn you, the "fleas on rats" chorus is liable to get stuck in your head, I know it drove me nuts as I merrily hummed it for a day or two.

It's from a series of educational songs produced to introduce various subjects in high school (at least that's what I gather from the comments). I don't know how well they work, but I imagine they are pretty good for kicking off a lecture on a given topic. People younger then me fondly remember Schoolhouse Rock from Saturday mornings, I suspect the generation now in high school will have fond memories of these.

It is from a YouTube channel called historyteachers (History for Music Lovers). If you go there you can find more of their video efforts.

Along with the Black Death one, I quite liked Copernicus ("Because" by the Beatles).

Revenge is a dish best served cold.

There was to be no press coverage allowed of Obama's meeting with Clinton. No photos, no questions, not even a written statement about what happened.

That changed when Obama and Clinton wrapped up their private meeting in the Oval Office. Clinton wanted to publicly endorse the tax package. Obama is welcoming all the help he can get.

So the two presidents headed straight for the famous briefing room with no warning.

emphasis mine - source

As good as a politician as Clinton is he had to have known how ridiculous that press conference would paint Obama.

From the item quoted above it looks like Clinton may have pushed the idea to appear publically with Obama. Once at the podium he monopolized the microphone and started fielding questions. As entertaining as the part is where Obama says he has to leave, watch the part before that and pay attention to Obama's body language. The further it goes, the less happy he looks.

The screen grab above is from just after Obama said he had to leave and Clinton chuckled, gave a little wave of his hand and joked about it. Contrast their expressions as Obama turns to hurry off the stage and Clinton turns his attention back to the press. One angry, one delighted.

The rest of the press conference was just salt in the wounds. After Obama's two disastrous appearances earlier in the week, Clinton demonstrates how a pro does it. No running off for cookies on his part, instead he delivers a far more effective and gracious defense of the compromise. I wonder if he and Hilary had a good laugh about it afterwards?

I've never seen anything quite like it. Well, we all remember how Obama's campaign treated Bill Clinton. Pay backs a bitch, aint it Barry?

Stratfor and Angelina Jolie

Hah, I never figured one of these Stratfor articles would give me an excuse to post an Angelina Jolie picture. 

It has occurred to me that if I mentioned Angelina Jolie several times in this post, that all of the people searching for Angelina Jolie in Google would get the Angelina Jolie search results page, which might draw traffic to my post that mentions Angelina Jolie if my mentioning Angelina Jolie enough times gives me a high enough ranking in Angelina Jolie searches.

[Knucklehead pointed out in the comments that I spelled her name wrong. I've corrected the error]

Of course I would never stoop that low.

At any rate, my excuse for posting her picture is that it is from the movie Hackers, a silly piece of nonsense that was her first theatrical release. It features roller skating, high school attending, Elite Hackers who use Macs to pull juvenile hacking pranks and yell "hack the world" now and again. However, they're soon battling an Eeevil Hacker Dude, who also roller skates a lot, and has a nefarious plan to to blackmail the world by sinking oil tankers. It's so goofy it is actually entertaining.

The movie came to mind because Stutnex, Wikileaks and the 4chan group Anonymous (the first of whom just got arrested) and their Wikileaks revenge attacks, hacking and other computer-based tomfoolery have been recently all over the news. 

Of course, China has long stood at the nexus of government sponsored hacking, but they all face their own issues with dissidents challenging their network security.  The latest Stratfor article, which discusses China's situation follows.


CHINA AND ITS DOUBLE-EDGED CYBER-SWORD
By Sean Noonan,  December 9, 2010

A recent batch of WikiLeaks cables led Der Spiegel and The New York Times to print front-page stories on China's cyber-espionage capabilities Dec. 4 and 5. While China's offensive capabilities on the Internet are widely recognized, the country is discovering the other edge of the sword.

China is no doubt facing a paradox as it tries to manipulate and confront the growing capabilities of Internet users. Recent arrests of Chinese hackers and People's Liberation Army (PLA) pronouncements suggest that China fears that its own computer experts, nationalist hackers and social media could turn against the government. While the exact cause of Beijing's new focus on network security is unclear, it comes at a time when other countries are developing their own defenses against cyber attacks and hot topics like Stuxnet and WikiLeaks are generating new concerns about Internet security.

One of the U.S. State Department cables released by WikiLeaks focuses on the Chinese-based cyber attack on Google's servers that became public in January 2010. According to a State Department source mentioned in one of the cables, Li Changchun, the fifth highest-ranking member of the Communist Party of China (CPC) and head of the Party's Propaganda Department, was concerned about the information he could find on himself through Google's search engine. He also reportedly ordered the attack on Google. This is single-source information, and since the cables WikiLeaks released do not include the U.S. intelligence community's actual analysis of the source, we cannot vouch for its accuracy. What it does appear to verify, however, is that Beijing is regularly debating the opportunities and threats presented by the Internet.

A Shift from Offensive Capabilities

On Nov. 2, the People's Liberation Army Daily, the official paper for the PLA and the primary medium for announcing top-down policy, recommended the PLA better prepare itself for cyber threats, calling for new strategies to reduce Internet threats that are developing "at an unprecedented rate." While the report did not detail any strategies, it quoted a PLA order issued for computer experts to focus on the issue.

Pandas with strange parents

No, the above picture doesn't show that pandas have turned to a life of crime and taken up kidnapping, or cubnapping, or whatever you would call it. 

What's pictured is a Chinese conservationist dressed in a panda costume to tend to a captive-born cub to prepare it for eventual release in the wild. Rather than hand-raising panda cubs, as they have done in the past with mixed success, they decided to shield the cubs from human contact as much as possible. Hence the panda suits.

An article and more pictures at: My mum swears she's a panda, but I'm not sure: Why scientists are dressing up to fool bear cubs.

It's steam! It's punk! It's steampunk!

Yes, it’s a steam powered record player. Playing a punk LP. The Sex Pistols – God save the Queen (Victoria obviously).

You can’t really get more steam, or punk, than that!

And yes, I know it sounds terrible.
....

Now steampunk is an odd thing. It’s not really my cup of tea and I got somewhat annoyed after I posted details of my Google Maps Brass Wristlet Navigator that people called it steampunk. That wasn’t the intention! It just happens to be made from brass. But I thought well, if people want steampunk then let’s do something that’s really steampunk. Hence the steam powered gramophone.

Yea, it sounds terrible, but is still a wonder to behold. More details and pictures at Asciimation, the website of fellow who made the steam powered, punk rock playing turntable (via Retro Thing).