Thursday, November 18, 2004

Wow.  It looks like Bush is going to lead a Red State raid on Blue State incomes (again).  Bush is now pushing the elimination of the deduction of state and local income taxes from your federal return.  Who do you think that is going to hit? Here are the states (thanks Greg) that pay the most in state and local income taxes on a per capita basis (in decending order).  See a pattern here?  It's time to cut welfare payments to red states not increase them. Connecticut New York New Jersey Massachusetts Minnesota Alaska California Wisconsin Maryland Hawaii Maine Delaware Rhode Island Illinois Washington Michigan Vermont 5:12:22 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

Attacks on Sudanese oil pipelines.  The explosion was the fourth on Sudan's 1,600-kilometer pipeline, which transports about 250,000 barrels of crude oil daily to the Red Sea. In 2002, Sudanese rebels sought to target the nation's oil fields in the south and west in an attempt to press Khartoum to end the civil war. 3:41:19 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

Phil Jones has an extraordinary idea.  He suggests that we take the US Army's new counter-insurgency manual, which is the product of an informal distributed team, and place it on the Web as a Wiki (like Wikipedia).  The combined input of a distributed group of thousands of intelligent authors may be able to provide some substantial improvements.  It would also allow the manual to extend itself into the huge amount of counter-insurgency source material out there.  I would be more than happy to help manage this effort. Also, there are tens of the thousands of US military personnel (many of them are in Iraq) that could provide an amazing amount of insight on this.  This would be a way for them to contribute. 2:14:27 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

DefenseTech talks with Jan Horvath, the author of the Army's new counter-insurgency manual. Did we miss anything? Of course, we only had five months to research and write it. What are we adding? An operational and theater strategic focus and guidelines, near state-of-the-art intelligence analysis, [and] principles for training indigenous security forces. Tactically, [we missed] the "swarm" attack, urban operations (going through walls rather than down the street); logistics, Intel[ligence] analysis, and the media and communications. After all, if counterinsurgency is a war of ideas, we better win the formulation and communication of those ideas. 1:23:56 PM    Comment_ Trackback []

New Post to Global Guerrillas  Epidemic Insurgency (Part 1)  Some thinking on how models of epidemics apply to the spread of tactical innovation in Iraq's guerrilla insurgency.  The next part will be to use similar techniques in analyzing the spread of the insurgency to unaffiliated groups. 12:13:14 PM    Comment_ Trackback []