Earlier this week I had a go at Visualizing The Global Terror Database using Gephi. Three weeks ago I laid hands on a license for Sentinel Visualizer a law enforcement/intelligence grade link analysis and data visualization tool. Today I had some broken time and in between a stream of phone calls I managed to get a little of the Global Terrorism Database into SV, and I like the results.
I started with Egypt.
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Clicking the plus sign adds related links. I find it a bit puzzling that a database like this lumps Gaza and the West Bank into one category. They don’t share a geographic boundary. They don’t share a government. There is some overlap between the sources of trouble in each location, but Hamas and Fatah do not spoon very often. Looking at things from a geospatial perspective this is an incorrect aggregation.
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Now enter new reports surfacing from the Russian Defense Ministry on orders of Vladimir Putin that the largest military ‘state of full combat readiness’ drill is taking place with around 160,000 troops ordered to report from all corners of the military. Specifically, the translated reports detail how Putin is calling together not just Armed Forces of Russia troops, but all forms of long-range aircraft, 70 naval ships, bomber and fighter aircraft, and so on.
“On Friday, during a meeting with Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu Russian, Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an unexpected military drill, urging all forces to enter a state of full combat readiness on the night of July 13.”
From a relatively local yokel paper, among the best issue summaries I've seen. From my foxhole in the Pentagon, things are bad now and appear to be getting worse fast.
Fayetteville (NC) Observer July 19, 2013
Nation Needs Leadership, Not Gimmicks
At Fort Bragg, a name almost synonymous with “readiness,” Congress is idly flirting with unreadiness.
Says who? Said Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in a Monday visit appropriately set at the Green Ramp: “We have planes not flying, ships not sailing and soldiers not training. We are doing damage to our readiness, to our future readiness.”
Thus far, casual onlookers have found it easy to dismiss the blind, automatic budget cuts called the sequester as political theater. No Independence Day fireworks display this year; maybe something goes unpainted a while longer. Big deal.
That's ending.
For 8,500 civilian workers caught in a furlough (worldwide, the number is well over half a million) it has already ended. They'll lose about 20 percent of their pay for five months – a loss that will be hardest on them, but one that will also affect counties surrounding the fort.
4.0 out of 5 starsSickening at Two Levels — Superb Indictment of Periphery, Completely Avoids Two Party Tyranny Issue, July 19, 2013
This book makes me sick at two levels.
Level 1: It is the best treatment available of what I and many others have been saying for years. My own treatment was provided in a Preface, “Paradigms of Failure,” in the book under my signature below, that also had a preface by Thom Hartmann, another by Tom Atlee, and a third, reprinted, from Senator Bernie Sanders. The entire book is free online, so I am not pimping it.
Level 2: The book is at best naive and at worst deliberately misleading in suggesting that Congress somehow needs to be “empowered” to resist. This is absolute and utter bull. I ran for President in 2012, accepted by the Reform Party, listed at Politics1, interviewed for On The Issues, and I ran for two reasons: to get all of the best ideas in one place (We the People Reform Coalition) and to test the boundaries of the two-party tyranny as immortalized in Theresa Amato's outrageously superb Grand Illusion: The Myth of Voter Choice in a Two-Party Tyranny. I specifically ran to be able to contact every single other Presidential candidate from the small parties, and to learn — as I did — that not a single one of them could overcome their ego (as Occupy could not overcome its mob) to come together in a demand for Electoral Reform from 2011 in time for 2012. That report to Hackers on Planet Earth and also published in Reality Sandwich is easily found online by searching for “How I Tested the Boundaries of the Two-Party Tyranny.”
Here is what this book does NOT tell you, and the reason it gets only four stars from me (it is superb in what it does tell you, but misses the key point): NINE TIMES the US Congress has been asked to pass legislation that would mandate — for federal elections only — that the six small parties blocked from ballot access (Constitution, Green, Libertarian, Natural Law, Reform, and Socialist) — and Independent candidates — be guaranteed both ballot access and debate access. NINE TIMES, the last four sponsored by Ron Paul, the two-party tyranny has refused. They have a deal: they borrow one trillion a year in our name, one third of a federal budget that is documented to be 50% waste, and in return they share the right to loot the public treasury and pay off their voting blocks — corporate welfare and the banks for the Republicans, individual welfare for the Democrats. Obama is an anomaly — Wall Street bought the white half, the Progressives got the black half, and we all know how this turned out.
Recommended — but also misleading, in that democracy was lost the day JFK died, and no later than 1978 when the economy peaked against the middle class.
Amazon Book Description: Fresh from the first $10 billion election campaign, two award-winning authors show how unbridled campaign spending defines our politics and, failing a dramatic intervention, signals the end of our democracy. Blending vivid reporting from the 2012 campaign trail and deep perspective from decades covering American and international media and politics, political journalist John Nichols and media critic Robert W. McChesney explain how US elections are becoming controlled, predictable enterprises that are managed by a new class of consultants who wield millions of dollars and define our politics as never before.
