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Saturday, July 24, 2004 |
 Halliburton's KBR deathtoll in Iraq reaches 42 people (out of 24,000 + employees). Today, the CEO (general director) of the state owned Al-Mansour construction was taken hostage. Global guerrillas are working on breaking (or distorting) the market for construction and transportation services (in addition to electricity and oil services/production). So far, I would rate the effort a ~5 out of 10 in effectiveness in this area (they are getting better quickly due to networked/stigmergic learning and market reinforcement -- I wouldn't be surprised if they are 8/10 by the end of the year since much of the damage is cumulative).
Formalizing disruption metrics for these markets would be useful. Of course, the DoD is focused on bodycounts (despite claims to the contrary), when metrics like this are much more useful as a means of measuring progress or failure.
10:00:40 AM 
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Mapping the geographic spread of e-mail petitions (powered by ForwardTrack). Interesting. ForwardTrack probably uses a single clear unique named GIF (unique in order to track vectors of e-mail forwarding) in an HTML e-mail and IP address geo-mapping to build this. It would be interesting to have a simple service (that is affordable) that does this for a combo of e-mail and weblog publishing. Where's the e-mail discussion group software that lets you build this? Yahoo Groups takes out the HTML. I would pay for a global map of my readers (e-mail, blog, rss) right now. Of course, hacking a Jihadi website to insert a GIF like this would be very useful.
8:32:49 AM
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Virginia continues to be optimistic about Iraq, which is her prerogative. This optimism is based on the belief that things are getting better generally over the long term (they are), due to the synergies of free markets and free minds. However, there is a force at work that is nearly as strong. It's composed of war, violence, belief, intolerance, power, and unbounded greed. It has found new forms (global guerrilla strategies/tactics) that will give it amazing dynamism in the short to medium term (the next 20-30 years). Given this, Iraq is likely already lost. We just don't know it yet.
8:07:07 AM
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Global guerrillas in Iraq's bazaar of violence swarm to take hostages. An Egyptian diplomat was taken hostage on Saturday by the new "The Lions of Allah Brigade." A hostage crisis is turning into a good way to announce the existence of a new group. It's a way of saying: we are here, we are actively producing results, we want funding...
6:33:50 AM
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Global guerrillas attacked the Baghdad spur pipeline near Samarra (a city that along with Ramadi wants to become the next Fallujah). Huge fire. This spur provides oil to the huge al-Dura powerplant.
6:13:56 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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