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It isn’t quite being “liveblogged” but DNI is putting up posts on The Adaptive Leadership Conference.

I had the pleasure of meeting Maj. Don Vandergriff at Boyd 2007 and his brief on adaptive thinking, while targeted at reforming military education, has a facilitated “free play” nucleus that would be applicable to a wide variety of secondary and postsecondary educational settings to develop creative thinking based problem solving skills in students. Many of Vandergriff’s ideas are laid out in his book,Raising the Bar: Creating and Nurturing Adaptability to Deal with the Changing Face of War.

Hopefully, DNI will soon be providing an analysis of some of the presentations.

Blogfriend Charles Cameron alerted me to a very interesting and important post by Dr. Tim Furnish, a professor of Islamic Studies and an expert in Mahdism in particular, who managed to contact and interview a spokesman of Ansar al-Mahdi, the shadowy, Shiite-based Mahdist movement in Iraq ( Jamestown Foundation report here).

Father Knows Best (Especially When He’s the Mahdi)

….3) Is al-Mahdi the same as the Twelfth Imam returned from ghaybah?
Yes, it is quite true to say that Imam al Mahdi is the twelfth Imam Mohammed bin Hassan (p) returned from ghaybah, and also true to say that his son Sayid al Yamani (Ahmad al Hassan) also can be named Mahdi.
4) Is al-Yamani’s group Jund al-Sama’ or Ansar al-Mahdi?
al Yamani group called Ansar al-Mahdi or Ansar Allah, supporters of Imam Mahdi (p) and supporters of Sayid Ahmed Hassan al Yamani; the messenger  and guardian and the Imam Mahdi (p).
We are unrelated to the so-called (Jund al-Sama’ ), and there is great difference between us. Ansar al-Mahdi say that Ahmed Hassan (p) is the promised Yamani, a branch of Imam Mahdi Mohammed bin Hassan (p) and his son , while the group Jund al-Sama’ deny the existence of Imam Mahdi Mohammed bin Hassan (p) in total.
5) Do al-Yamani and his group have any connection to Moqtada al-Sadr and the Jaysh al-Mahdi?
No relationship whatsoever between us and Moqtada al Sadr and his army Jaysh al-Mahdi, in a passage names as it is known.
6) What is al-Yamani’s opinion of the American-sponsored Iraq government in Baghdad?
The government has to be based on the principle of the Governorship of God and must derive its legitimacy from God and from Imam Mahdi Mohammed bin Hassan (p).
7) What is al-Yamani’s opinion of vilayet-i faqih in Iran?

Not valid as the answer became clear to you from the previous question.

8 ) What sort of state in Iraq does al-Yamani envision? A caliphate? A Mahdiyah?
Government, which al Yamani see it is the government based on the principle of Governorship of God. Whatever you want to call it as the term crossing, but the lesson in reality is substance and meaning.
9) What will be the Mahdi’s role once he is revealed?

Imam al Mahdi will reveal justice and installment and will be published uniformity across the globe, and re-link the right relationship of God with humans after regrettably interrupted by the ego.

Read the rest here.

Historically, the world has previously seen a Mahdist regime in the Sudan in the 19th century, a mystical and xenophobic movement that slaughtered an Anglo-Egyptian expedition led by General Charles “Chinese” Gordon and was later destroyed in retaliation by the British under the implacable Lord Kitchener ( with a young Winston Churchill on hand, watching Sudanese Mahdist cavalry charge suicidally straight into British cannon and machine gun fire, swords in one hand and Qurans in the other). The terrorist group led by Juhaiman Saif al Otaiba  that seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca in 1979 and that were killed to the last man by elite KSA troops ( RUMINT says a  hastily converted platoon of French special-ops – whatever, dead is still dead) were Sunni Mahdists.

As I understand Mahdism, the Mahdi would transcend the normal strictures of the Quran and have the power to set them aside or issue new ones and in this fashion, Mahdism would not be unlike the claims put forth by the leaders of apocalyptic Christian sects in the West, famously David Khoresh’s Branch Davidians or splinter groups among fundamentalist Mormons. The relatively eucumenical attitude of Ansar al-Mahdi reported by Furnish might be one example of “transcending” customary beliefs.

Best of the rest…..

Top Billing! Bruce Kesler eviscerates a major anti-war propaganda show and accompanying slipshod journalism of The Washington Post.  It probably helped that Bruce was there for the original performance thirty-odd years ago. No surprises in the remake.

Sic Semper Tyrannis -“Baram on the AQ/Saddam Relationship”

Interesting snippet.

Ideas – “Krugman Paper: A Serious Comment” and “Paul Krugman’s, Interstellar Trade, and Causality Violation”

Libertarian economist David Friedman on Paul Krugman, economics and interstellar trade.

Cognitive Daily – “Do unusual objects attract our attention faster?”

Novelty will be an important variable for anyone attempting to speculate in the “attention economy” for IO purposes.

Fabius Maximus -“A solution to 4GW – the introduction” and “How to get the study of 4GW in gear”

And it needs to get in gear if it is to move from the intellectual margin.

Complexity and Social Networking Blog -“The Machinery of Hope”

CSNB comments on Rolling Stone’s cover article on fellow Harvard alum Senator Obama’s ( or David Axelrod’s) farsighted leveraging of Web 2.0 built networks for the campaign. Interesting to me as some ppl in my own online social network are involved. Valdis Krebs has more.

That’s it!

Robert Paterson and Insurgency Research Group Blog, the latter put together by the kind British gents at Kings of War.  I have also fixed the links to the newest iterations of DNI and Chet Richard’s personal blog (Dr. Richards – please stand still -LOL!).

Which makes me realize that the static master blogroll page is still an unfinished symphony in terms of activating links and selecting blogs. Have to get that done.

There appears to be an emerging civil war in the Democratic Party flowing along generational, ideological, gender and racial lines that has just spilled onto one of the premier sites of the Left blogosphere, the DailyKOS:

On Friday, it got to be too much for Alegre, a diarist on the flagship liberal blog DailyKos, who frequently writes in support of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton.

“I’ve put up with the abuse and anger because I’ve always believed in what our online community has tried to accomplish in this world,” Alegre wrote Friday evening. “No more.”

Objecting to the tone of attacks against Mrs. Clinton and her supporters on the blog, the diarist called for a “writers strike.”

“This is a strike – a walkout over unfair writing conditions at DailyKos. It does not mean that if conditions get better I won’t ‘work” at DailyKos again,” Alegre wrote, promising to come back only “if we ever get to the point where we’re engaging each other in discussion rather than facing off in shouting matches.”

The blogosphere has never been known for its polite, gentle discourse, and while fiercely partisan, being a Democrat does not make one immune from attacks from the lefty blogs (see Lieberman, Joseph I.). But now, the major internal divisions within the Democratic Party seem to be splitting liberal bloggers. So what happens when the unity enforcement mechanism becomes disjointed?

….One user, Sentient, called for a “permanent succession”:

“Why should this site and Kos profit from the traffic we add to DailyKos, and the sense by outsiders that it represents the netroots as a whole?” the blogger asked, adding later, “But I just don’t see how people come back together on a daily basis after a falling out like this.”

If you heavily promote a kind of political discourse based upon demonizing opponents and venting bile it soon becomes a habitual frame of mind. All disagreement becomes intolerable and ad hominem invective rules. Couldn’t happen to a nicer bunch of zealots.