Rawalpindi (Pakistan): In his quest for the truth about his country's most notorious guest, Shaukat Qadir started where it all ended: the room where Osama bin Laden was killed.
Last August, Mr. Qadir, a retired Pakistani Army brigadier, retraced the steps of the American commandos who stormed through the corridors of Bin Laden's hide-out on May 2.
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Mr. Qadir passed a body outline that marked the spot where Bin Laden's 22-year-old son, Khalid, was shot dead. Then he turned to a small room with a low ceiling, an empty wardrobe and a tight cluster of bullets holes in one wall, he said. Above that, on the ceiling, was a fading splash of blood that, his Pakistani intelligence escort told him, belonged to Bin Laden.
“As a former soldier, I was struck by how badly the house was defended,” Mr. Qadir said in an interview. “No proper security measures, nothing high-tech – in fact, nothing like you would expect.”
I am always amazed when people tell me IO doesn't work and then I see things such as this….I guess what they are really saying is incompetence doesn't work…..
A particularly savvy media campaign by a nonprofit group called Invisible Children has pushed a debate about Uganda and rebel leader Joseph Kony into a very bright spotlight.Without getting into the arguments about the political motivations of the nonprofit and the consequences of its campaign — check out coverage from The Washington Post’s Elizabeth Flock for more information on the situation and its history — it’s astonishing that the group’s members have been able to draw this much attention now to a conflict that’s been going on since the 1980s.
So how did they do it?
The group launched a campaign called “Kony 2012,” an effort to raise awareness about Kony and the small force the Obama administration sent to Uganda in October with the intent of killing or capturing him and combating his Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA).
To get the campaign off the ground quickly, the group had users send messages to 20 “culturemakers” and 12 “policymakers” with influential Twitter accounts urging them to support the effort. The list included names such as U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon, Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney and former President George W. Bush, as well as celebrities such as Angelina Jolie, George Clooney, Mark Zuckerberg and Lady Gaga.
The message that users could send to those people included a hashtag, #Kony2012, that gave the Twitter community something to galvanize around. It read: “Help us end #LRA violence. Visit kony2012.com to find out why and how. @rickwarren Join us for #KONY2012”
The group also made a well-produced short film that encouraged people to use social media to raise awareness about the movement, which spread quickly over Vimeo and YouTube, where it has garnered more than 57 million views.
The video boils down this complicated issue into a simple one, with a compelling narrative that tugs on the heartstrings and prompts outrage. And it gives users an easy way to take action: Share the video, share the story and don’t stop speaking up until they get the result they want.
The group was also able to tap into an already strong social media presence on Facebook and other sites to get the message out in a big, noticeable burst.
And it certainly has worked. The hashtags #stopkony and #kony2012 have been on the list of trending topics worldwide on Twitter ever since launched its campaign Tuesday. It’s been a fixture on Google’s list of trending topics, and even the debate over the group’s methods and message have kept its message afloat.
Phi Beta Iota: It helps to have a message that combines intelligence with integrity. US IO fails for multiple reasons: ideology, idiocy, incompetence, infinite money, no accountability, no strategy, not cultural awareness, poor leadership, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera.
Paul Zak, a pioneer in the field of neuroeconomics, talks about the genes that can make or break a Wall Street trader, and about the chemical that helps us all get along.
Eryn Brown
Los Angeles Times, March 2, 2012
Neuroscience might seem to have little to do with economics, but over the last decade researchers have begun combining these disparate fields, mining the latest advances in brain imaging and genetics to get a better understanding of the biological basis for human behavior.
Paul Zak is a pioneer in this nascent field of neuroeconomics. In a recent paper published in the journal PLoS One, he examined genes that may predict success among traders on Wall Street. His forthcoming book, “The Moral Molecule,” will explore how a chemical in the brain called oxytocin compels cooperation in society.
Zak, director of the Center for Neuroeconomic Studies at Claremont Graduate University, discussed this work with The Times.
Phi Beta Iota: Convergence is upon us. Most universities do not get this, but a couple are struggling to change recalcitrant faculty and force the break-down of silos and the reconstitution of unified knowledge. We are at the very beginning of most interesting times.
Want to know what the future of digital activism looks like? Then follow the developments in Russia. I argued a few years back that the fields of digital activism and civil resistance were converging to a point I referred to as “digital resistance.” The pace of tactical innovation and counter-innovation in the Russia digital battlefield is stunning and rapidly converging to this notion of digital resistance.
“Crisis can be a fruitful time for innovation,” writes Gregory Asmolov. Contested elections are also ripe for innovation, which is why my dissertation case studies focused on elections. “In most cases,” says Asmolov, “innovations are created by the oppressed (the opposition, in Russia’s case), who try to challenge the existing balance of power by using new tools and technologies. But the state can also adapt and adopt some of these technologies to protect the status quo.” These innovations stem not only from the new technologies themselves but are embodied in the creative ways they are used. In other words, tactical innovation (and counter-innovation) is taking place alongside technological innovation. Indeed, “innovation can be seen not only in the new tools, but also in the new forms of protest enabled by the technology.”
All national, state, and local elections must immediately begin, and by Election Day 2014 complete, the process of phasing out plurality voting and adopting a better voting system. An improved voting system should collect more information from voters using improved ballot design, and use that information to accomplish at least two of the following three goals:
Ballot access requirements shall be the same for every candidate, irrespective of party affiliation. Equal access includes access to debates. This shall also apply to initiatives and referenda, and to primary elections. No state shall be eligible to receive federal funding in any amount or form absent its implementation of this provision in time for 2012 and thereafter.
While I normally don’t discuss two speakers at All School Meeting (ASM) within one month, the reality is that last week’s speaker was equally as provocative and exciting as the one two weeks before, so I will make this an “exception to the rule.”
Professor Loren J. Samons Jr. is the chair of BU’s Classics Department, a highly decorated teacher (both at BU and nationally), and a widely published scholar (his list of publications is several pages long). Perhaps most important for his impact at ASM, he has a drop-dead hilarious deadpan comic style (think “Saturday Night Life”), and he is able to bring ancient Greek topics vividly to life in terms of our own contemporary issues.
This week at ASM Professor Samons spoke to us about the ancient Greek definitions of “democracy” and “citizenship,” demonstrating how dramatically they differed from our own modern definitions. “Democracy” is the conjoined Greek words for “people power” – he joked that English speakers prefer to borrow prestigious sounding words from other languages, rather than using our own. But while we Americans tend to think of democracy as providing certain citizen “rights” by birth (voting, trial by jury), these were not at all what distinguished ancient Athens as the first city state in Greece to practice democracy; for instance, other city states allowed the vote, even if a king ruled. Rather, ancient Athenians assumed that being a citizen was a group-given privilege (not a natural right) that involved other group-expected duties. Privileges included being chosen by lottery to serve in the legislature (just think of the savings in campaign spending if that’s how Congress were selected!), and duties included serving in the army almost yearly from age 18 to 59, for instance. If you think about these two examples, you’ll notice that the very people voting to go to war were the ones having to serve in it. And since you served next to your friends and family (often a father, brother, and grandfather at your side), the realities of battle were both more personal and more demanding – flight was either not an option during battle (observed by those you loved), or once Uncle Georgios fled, you were right behind him.
While Professor Samons went on to detail the Hoplite army model of ancient Athens, his main points focused on citizenship, especially how our culture has lost its understanding of privileges combined with duties, and replaced that understanding with a sense of entitlement based on natural individual rights. Our “political will” as a society reflects this, as we see presidential debates from both parties pander to what each voter wants, rather than to the spirit of individual sacrifice for the common good. Ancient Athens might have had many troubling qualities, such as an annual draft, but its spirit of democracy is a virtue we would do well to revive. At the Academy, learning about the classics helps to do just that!
Climbing the stairs to the second floor, Mr. Qadir passed a body outline that marked the spot where Bin Laden's 22-year-old son, Khalid, was shot dead. Then he turned to a small room with a low ceiling, an empty wardrobe and a tight cluster of bullets holes in one wall, he said. Above that, on the ceiling, was a fading splash of blood that, his Pakistani intelligence escort told him, belonged to Bin Laden.
