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Ok – who among this heavily GenX audience can name these relatively obscure characters?:

A pleasant downstream effect of having blogged for a while is that readers will send you interesting things from time to time. Like the following…

Check out: The Complex Terrain Laboratory

Snippets:

This is muddled and confusing. Human Terrain is “an emerging area of study”? No it’s not. Human “terrain” is a label, a metaphor, for guess what? History, geography, anthropology, sociology, psychology, communications, etc., etc. It’s “major goal is to create operational technologies”? No it’s not. That’s what mathematicians and engineers can deliver on multimillion dollar DoD contracts. Human terrain is, just in case anyone hasn’t read a newspaper or wireclip over the last few years, about people, what they think, their perceptions, their loyalties, the consequences they bear in wartime, the support they may or may not provide to insurgents, the physical, cultural, and informational spaces they create and occupy in  times of conflict and crisis. 

Freaking mad scientists. They’re everywhere. Technology is a tool, not the answer

and

What is really meant by ‘fragile’ states is ones that have acquired legal sovereignty but that have lost, or more probably never acquired, the effective powers attached to that status. There are more and more such states. How many depends on one’s definition of fragility. The United Kingdom’s government development agency, the Department for International Development (DFID), one of the smartest outfits in the business, estimates that 46 states, over one quarter of the world’s total, fall within its definition of ‘fragile states’. The population of these 46 states is over 870 million. DFID bases its definition of fragility on a state’s record in combating poverty. Others define fragility not by reference to poverty, but to security. Referring to the slightly different concept of ‘failure’, in the United States’ 2002 National Security Strategy, President Bush stated that America ‘is now more threatened by weak and failing states than…by conquering ones’.

“Human Terrain Mapping” is one of those relatively new concepts I’ve been meaning to investigate and CTLab – run by a distinguished trio of scholars and authors Stephen D.K. Ellis, Michael A. Innes and Brian Glyn Williams – fits the bill. Definitely a “blogroll-worthy” site for all of the Intel/COIN/IO/DIME/Foreign Policy bloggers and of interest to the history blogosphere as well since two of the three gentlemen are professional historians.

I look forward to many enjoyable and profitable visits.

UPDATE:

Mike Innes has written in to explain that CTLabs is still expanding their team of SME’s as well as the working on the aesthetic and functionality aspects of the site itself, which will be formally “rolled out” with a higher level of interactivity and collaboration.

I noticed this morning that last month I hit the five year mark as a blogger. Last week, at some point, I went over 250,000 hits. The interesting thing is that it took me almost five years to accumulate 200,000 hits but only five months to rack up the next 50,000+ .  A good trend in my view, for which I would like to thank my readers and commenters – it is your interest and stimulating feedback that makes Zenpundit worth doing.

In honor of this anniversary, I’m taking the day off and will return to blogging Sunday night. Have a great weekend everyone and thanks!

Theofanis D. Lekkas, a longtime Zenpundit reader who comments here occasionally under the handle “TDL“, is in the process of launching a fantastic Web 2.0 start-up, RealScoop.com, currently in Beta. In a nutshell, it’s a mediacentric Youtube mashed up with a voice-stress analyzer lie detector. Any celebrities or politicians you love, hate or love to hate ?  See what topics send them off the Richter Scale.  A few examples:

Senator Barack Obama

Vice President Dick Cheney

Former Governor Eliot Spitzer

And on a lighter note, Tom Cruise on a deranged rant about psychiatry

This is all in good fun and I wish Theo every success with RealScoop.com but there are interesting implications if this platform were to become as ubiquitous as is youtube or yahoo. Imagine, being a politician or public spokesman and knowing that your every word simply isn’t going to be parsed but run through a voice stress analyzer and transformed into a virally formatted visual clip. How would that change your media strategy ? Your deposition strategy? Being a laconic, strong, silent type might actually come back into style.

TDL may have hit on something here. Feel free to send him any comments when you peruse RealScoop or leave some here – he’s interested in your feedback.

Briefly, as this issue has arisen, I will clarify as I expect that if one asks, ten wonder.

I am not in the habit of censoring commentary and certainly not because of the commenter’s political/religious/methodological/disciplinary/etc. POV or because they criticize my posts. Dissenting views are welcome here. That being said, I prefer that commenters try to maintain the same sort of civility and assumption of goodwill they would if they were talking with another person with whom they disagreed across a table. In my years of blogging, I have only deleted spam, a couple of guys who were repeatedly blogwhoring off-topic and one anonymous comment that I considered to be libelous as well as outrageously unfair.

In terms of functionality, if you put in a lot of links ( or goof up your homemade HTML coding), your comment will automatically be held for moderation by the spam filter. I will typically approve it,  ASAP, usually within a few hours. Otherwise, your comment should appear on the site immediately. I’m sorry for the delay but I’m not keen on spam messsages appearing in the sidebar, given that they usually involve enlarging one’s manhood with secret herbal formulas or winning the Nigerian lottery. Sort of detracts from the “new look” I’m going for here. ;o)

That’s it.