Asymmetrical Warfare

I've been reading Free Range International for awhile now, a blog by Tim Lynch - a private security contractor in Afghanistan - and one of the recurring themes of his blog is that the Taliban really, really suck at fighting:

There was an attack on the HQ of one of the security firms in Kabul last week involving two suicide bombers.  They popped up well inside the new Kabul “Ring of Steel” checkpoint system which seems to be designed to harass internationals and opened up on the exterior guards as they walked down the street housing Hart Security.  The Hart guards returned fire for a second or two and locked themselves inside the compound as did the exterior guards outside the gates of every other compound on that street which means about 25 men jumped inside their compounds when the two attackers unmasked.  The attackers reached the gate and, according to eye witnesses, one said he’ll take the gate down and the other moved back about 20 feet. When bad guy one blew down the gate, bad guy two also perished because 20 feet of stand off is inadequate for powerful suicide vests.

FRI points out, this is despite years and years of experience planning such operations. Granted the participants are always noobs - but you wouldn't be out of line expecting the people who orchestrate these attacks to learn from failure. And there is plenty of failure - trouble is, when a bomb goes off in a city - very few people know what the original plan was. It is very easy to assume that a detonation is a success - and reporters love an easy story.

Which is precisely why I like to read FRI and articles like the one in The Atlantic he's posting about - The Case for Calling Them Nitwits. Not just because it heaps abuse on those who are attempting to kill our soldiers and pretty much anyone they dislike - but because it presents a deeper analysis of what truly happened when a bomb goes off.

It is depressing to learn that an almost random assortment of tactics, executed by impressionable and gullible novices can simultaneously threaten two nations - and be thought to be a cohesive, organized enemy.

Which is not to dismiss them - they are not losing because they do not give up. The fact that any success in Afghanistan hinges on getting them to do something other than kill people is even less encouraging.

But still - the perspective is useful.

For the Good of the Public

ProPublica knocks two out of the park:

1) Bank's Self Dealing Super-Charged Financial Crisis -
Over the last two years of the housing bubble, Wall Street bankers perpetrated one of the greatest episodes of self-dealing in financial history.

Faced with increasing difficulty in selling the mortgage-backed securities that had been among their most lucrative products, the banks hit on a solution that preserved their quarterly earnings and huge bonuses:

They created fake demand.

2) Take It With a Grain of (Sea) Salt: Gulf Microbe Study Was Funded by BP 

Earlier this week, major news outlets ran with headlines about how a new microbe [4] has been found eating up BP’s oil  and how microbes have degraded the hydrocarbons so efficiently that the vast plumes of oil in the Gulf are now undetectable. No joke.

A bit skeptical of all the oil-is-mostly-gone claims, the day that microbe study was released we chose instead to focus on the Gulf’s thousands of dead fish. Lucky for us.

MIT’s Science Tracker, in a post published yesterday, noted that the microbe study was conducted by U.C. Berkeley scientists through a grant with the Energy Biosciences Institute, and that the Energy Biosciences Institute is funded by none other than BP, through a $500 million, 10-year grant. (To the researchers' credit, they also mentioned the funding in their press release — you just had to read about three-quarters of the way through.)

Stewart on Heston on the Bill of Rights

I just love this:


(H/t TPM)

Hallowed, My Butt

(via Felix Salmon)

The brilliantly named History Eraser Button blog shows you some of the sights and sounds surrounding our most hallowed ground zero.

Short version: It's only hallowed if strip clubs and bars are now holy.

But see for yourself

Oh... you meant THIS torture tape???

You gotta be sh!tting me.

Gitmo in Brief

(Via ProPublica)

So far, only 24 of the 779 men held at Guantánamo at some point have been charged with a crime to be heard by a military commission. Four of them have been convicted. Only one detainee, Ahmed Khalfan Ghailani, has been moved from Guantánamo to face charges in a civilian court; that case is currently unfolding in federal court in New York.

For those of you keeping score at home, that would be 3% of those ever held at Gitmo end up getting charged - and 17% of those charged so far have been convicted.

Google-Verizon: C|net's Telling Me It's Nothing To Worry About

This year, I'd love something to not be as bad as I thought.

'spose this is it?

Here's C|net's Marguerite Reardon:

...most of the [Google-Verizon] proposal sounded a lot like a plan FCC Chairman Julius Genachowski offered nearly a year ago, which many Net neutrality proponents seemed to support.

In short, Google and Verizon say they agree to a set of rules for the Internet that would prohibit broadband providers from blocking or degrading lawful content on the Internet. Broadband providers would also not be allowed to take action to impede competition.

This is pretty much what Genachowski has proposed.

The CRA: Weaker Than Weak

Felix Salmon catches a nice one: National People's Action released a report showing how the nation's top banks have managed to end run the Community Reinvestment Act.

Banks beating a particular regulation is not exactly an earth shattering revelation - but you'll remember that the CRA is the law Wall Street apologists were blaming for causing the financial crisis.

The argument went - the CRA "forced" banks to lend money to poor people, so bad loans got made and the crisis followed.

Which is total crap for all sorts of reasons:

1. the CRA was passed almost a quarter century ago and the subprime bubble didn't swell until after 2000 (and oh-by-the-way the CRA is still in effect, yet banks have somehow managed to stop making subprime loans now that they cannot be securitized for profit).
2. The CRA explicitly (and repeatedly) states that community lending should not be at odds with sound business practices
3. There are no mandatory punitive measures for being out of compliance with the CRA.

National People's Action adds another item to this list:

4. The banks were using subsidiaries to lend to the low income market - so the parent bank's CRA evaluation would be unaffected

Here's Felix

...if you get a mortgage from Citimortgage or Citifinancial rather than from Citibank, you’re not going to get noticed in Citi’s CRA exam. And at Wells Fargo, the list of affiliate mortgage lenders [in NPA's report] goes on for the best part of three pages.

Nice.

A Bar In Amsterdam

Back from my trip. Short version - it rocked.

I'll post pics when I have my act together. In the spirit of my Norwegian interlude (and at the suggestion of Penguin) - here's a video from an offbeat Norwegian band called Katzenjammer.

Good fun.