Category: Journal ISSN 1078-1935

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Berto Jongman: Ha’aretz on Who Will Decide on War with Iran?

05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, Corruption, Ethics, Government, Military
Berto Jongman

The Iran War: Who will decide?

By Amir Oren

Ha'aretz, 5 February 2012

The War of Independence, the Six-Day War, the Yom Kippur War, the Iran War. That's the sequence Defense Minister Ehud Barak laid out at the Herzliya Conference on Thursday in a speech on Israel's fateful decision.

All for the better, it has been suggested, that behind the wheel as successor to David Ben-Gurion in 1948, Levi Eshkol in 1967 and Golda Meir and Moshe Dayan in 1973 is military leader Barak and his assistant on prime ministerial matters, Benjamin Netanyahu. Barak has been quoted as saying, ignoring the law and the cabinet, that “at the end of the day, when the military command looks up, it sees us – the minister of defense and the prime minister. When we look up, we see nothing but the sky above us.”

The immunity zone that Iran is constantly moving closer towards is meant to limit the possibility of a strike against its fortified and dispersed nuclear infrastructure. The Israeli argument is a global innovation in the theoretical justification for preemptive wars. The intended victim usually strikes preemptively when hostile preparations to act are discovered.

The precedents of Iraq in 1981 and Syria in 2007 teach us that the desire for wider security margins made Israel attack while a nuclear capability was still being acquired. Barak's comments suggest an argument for acting even earlier, at the phase of developing a capability to acquire a capability.

Continue reading “Berto Jongman: Ha'aretz on Who Will Decide on War with Iran?”

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Berto Jongman: Seth Jones in Foreign Affairs on Al Qaeda in Iran

04 Inter-State Conflict, 05 Iran, 08 Wild Cards, 09 Terrorism, 10 Security, IO Impotency
Berto Jongman

Al Qaeda in Iran

Why Tehran is Accommodating the Terrorist Group
Foreign Affairs, January 29, 2012

Article Summary and Author Biography

Phi Beta Iota:  There are two competing narratives, neither of which is properly researched and documented.  Narrative A (our tentative preference) has all of these Al Qaeda stories as part of a contrived joint Israeli-led but US supported disinformation campaign to justify armed force against Iran.  Narrative B (equally plausible, but the point is we do not actually know) has Iran — these are Persians, not ragheads — well-prepared to do asymmetric attacks via multiple channels including the remnants of Al Qaeda or Al Qaeda posers.  This would including exploding apartments in Tel Aviv.  We really don't know, and it is a rather important question.

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Venessa Miemis: Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems

Autonomous Internet
Venessa Miemis

Am reviving the Autonomous Internet Roadmap at the P2P Foundation. Found this in passing.

Infrastructure for Resilient Internet Systems (IRIS) at MIT

Directly Related Projects

Chord: Scalable Peer-to-Peer Lookup
Open DHT: A Publicly Accessible DHT Service
Kademlia: XOR metric-based routing
Coral: The NYU Distribution Network
Ocean Store: Providing Global-Scale Persistent Data
Pastry: An infrastructure for peer-to-peer applications
The paper for CAN: Content Addressable Networks.
Home Page for PIER: P2P Information Exchange & Retrieval

Related Conferences

International Workshop on Agents and Peer-to-Peer Computing (AP2PC 2002)
1st International Peer-to-Peer Systems Workshop
Collaborative Computing in Higher Education: Peer-to-Peer and Beyond
2nd International Workshop on Peer-to-Peer Systems (IPTPS '03) 20-21 February 2003 – Berkeley, CA, USA.

Related Projects

There has been a veritable explosion of peer-to-peer projects. A complete and current listing is essentially impossible. This list is a best-effort attempt at high-profile projects and some pointers to some decent meta-sites that contain links to lesser known projects.

Some meta-sites listing many projects

A good academically-oriented meta-site is the IEEE distributed systems site.
A good commercially/politically-oriented site is O'Reilly's Open Peer-to-Peer News/Article Site. In particular check out their extensive project directory.
Another meta-site is The Peertal.

Some specific Peer-to-Peer projects

Witold Litwin's Home Page details Scalable Distributed Data Structures (SDDSs) and derivatives of LH*.
The Gnutella File Sharing Network
The Freenet project.
The Free Haven project.
The KaZaA File Sharing Network
The AudioGalaxy Music Sharing Network
The Circle: Independent Python Chord Implementation w/Applications
A Microsoft entry is Farsite.
The Publius publishing system.
The Tangler censorship resistant publishing system.
The Anthill protocol framework.
The CoopNet content lookup system.
The PlanetP middleware storage system.
The WinMX project.
JXTA

Other Related Projects

The Planet Lab project.
RON: Resilient Overlay Networks
SUNDR: The Secure Untrusted Data Repository

Miscellaneous Links

Intel's Philanthropic Peer-to-Peer Program

See Also:

Autonomous Internet (127)

Advanced Cyber/IO (725)

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Worth a Look: David Winberger on Too Big to Know and Howard Rheingold on Net Smart

Advanced Cyber/IO, Worth A Look
Amazon Page

Too Big to Know: Rethinking Knowledge Now That the Facts Aren't the Facts, Experts Are Everywhere, and the Smartest Person in the Room Is the Room

David Weinberger

Released 3 January 2012

Clay Shirky, author of Here Comes Everybody and Cognitive Surplus

“Too Big To Know is Weinberger's brilliant synthesis of myriad little debates—information overload, echo chambers, the wisdom of crowds—into a single vision of life and work in an era of networked knowledge.”

His earlier books include The Cluetrain Manifesto, Everything Loose Joined: A Unified Theory of the Web, and Everything is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder.

 

Amazon Page

NET SMART: How to Thrive Online

Howard Rheingold

Available for Pre-Order Release Date 16 March 2012

Rheingold outlines five fundamental digital literacies, online skills that will help us do this: attention, participation, collaboration, critical consumption of information (or “crap detection”), and network smarts. He explains how attention works, and how we can use our attention to focus on the tiny relevant portion of the incoming tsunami of information. He describes the quality of participation that empowers the best of the bloggers, netizens, tweeters, and other online community participants; he examines how successful online collaborative enterprises contribute new knowledge to the world in new ways; and he teaches us a lesson on networks and network building.

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NIGHTWATCH: Iran a New Cuba? Worse, a Pakistan?

05 Iran

Iran: Supreme Leader Khamenei made a significant statement of defiance against sanctions and Israel during a rare Friday prayer lecture at Tehran University. “‘From now onward, we will support and help any nations, any groups fighting against the Zionist regime across the world, and we are not afraid of declaring this,' Khamenei said.

Comment: This threat looks serious. Iran's retaliation for sanctions will be unconventional. The hostility of its leaders to Israel looks implacable. Long before Iran executes the threat, the Ayatollah Khamenei must deal with the consequences of losing Syria as an ally and a bridge to its proxies, Lebanese Hezbollah and Hamas. The threat rings increasingly hollow, plus Iran is undergoing a monetary meltdown which provides a motive for the Ayatollah to appeal to the external threat to shore up national unity.

NIGHTWATCH KGS Home

Phi Beta Iota:  Between the Israelis, the US, and Saudi Arabia, Iran can be put in a very tight box.  One can only marvel at the hubris of these governments, and recollect how the same treatment of Cuba produced Che Guevara, how the arrogance of the British in thinking they new best produced a divided India, with Pakistan the rogue and Bangladesh the cesspool, both suffering for going against Gandhi's wisdom.  Governments stink at geo-politics.  In fact they stink at pretty much everything.  It's time for a mass non-violent uprising of collective intelligence.

See Also:

The Health of Nations: Society and Law beyond the State

The full force of the author's thinking comes into full stride in the concluding portions of the book as he integrates new concepts of international law, history, social relations, and new forms of intergovernmental relations truly representative of the species as a whole and the people as a moral force. He laments the manner in which an extraordinarily global elite has been able to “separate” people from morality and from one another, leading to a common acceptance of five intolerable things: 1) unequal social development; 2) war and armaments; 3) governmental oppression; 4) physical degradation; and 5) spiritual degradation.

THE OPEN SOURCE EVERYTHING MANIFESTO: Transparency, Truth, & Trust

noble gold