zenpundit.com

[ by Charles Cameron — often puzzled & shocked at the way some algorithms behave in public ]
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I was on Silobreaker this evening, looking at a page called Dead Terrorist Tamerlan Tsarnaev Channeled Islamic Videos, and what I found curious was this little network diagram, presumably algorithmically-generated from the Silobreaker database:

I have to tell you, I like network diagrams — but what are we supposed to infer from that?

Do you see the same diagram when you visit the site — or is this display just for me, knowing what books I buy, what movies I see, what friends I have — and tailored to sell me something, or get my vote?

[ by Charles Cameron — there were just too many dots for me to connect, I guess — plus Harry Potter, extra!! ]
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Okay, I’ve already explored the Mahdist end times video that Tamerlan Tsarnaev aka “muazseyfullah” liked on Youtube [1, 2, 2a, and 3] — and when I visited that site on April 19 it also included a link to the Vinnie Paz video, End of Days, which I discussed separately [4] — but what I didn’t know was that there was a third end times scenario, of interest to Tamerlan’s younger brother Dzhokhar — the “Zombie Apocalypse” believe it or not — about which he dreamed, well, often, and tweeted at least twice:

With all due respect to Dan Drezner and his Night of the Living Wonks, I just haven’t been following zombies too closely — and am only just coming to understand the Centers for Disease Control and their Zombie Preparedness campaign, the US Navy and its zombie deployment guide and the Department of Homeland Security with its zombie apocalypse simulation at a HALO Counter-Terrorism Summit in San Diego were all just portents and prophecies of an upcoming zombie jihad!

So long, fellas!

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The Vinnie Paz video has now been removed from Tamerlan’s YouTube page, although you can find it elsewhere — and so has the Harry Potter video that was there the first time I looked: someone has been tidying up.

Happily the Harry Potter video too is still available, although no longer linked at Tamerlan’s “muazseyfullah” YouTube site. It’s by Sheikh Feiz Mohammed — who clearly dislikes Magic and is proud to be a Muggle.

Here it is, for your further edification:

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DoubleQuote Sources:

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, December 2012

Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, July 2012

[ by Charles Cameron — not much else to say, really ]
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Sources:

Mila Johns

Blogs of War

[from Ellen Greer Rees, compiled by Helen Thackeray Rees Berger, modern day arrangement by Lynn C. Rees]

On September 22, 1859, Edmund Rees, wife Margaret, and their five children ages 12-18 months (the 12-year old was my great-great grandfather) arrived in Great Salt Lake City, twelve-year old capital of the nine-year old Utah Territory. Edmund and Margaret were natives of Monmouthshire, located in the southeastern corner of Wales. While they’d joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in the early 1850s, they didn’t gather to Zion until Edmund developed asthma after years spent cutting coal in the Monmouthshire mines that fueled the early Industrial Revolution.

The Rees family started their journey with $500, the results of selling their home. $100 got them from Wales to Iowa: they left the old country on April 11, 1859, sailed across the Atlantic on the William Tabscott, landed at New Orleans, and sailed up the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers to Council Bluffs, Iowa by steam boat. Another $100 got them two oxen, a covered wagon, a milk cow, and safely across the Great Plains to Utah.

Edmund was unfamiliar with handling livestock: the first time he put the yoke on the oxen, he put it on upside down.

Margaret took over.

Read the rest of this entry »

[ by Charles Cameron — always we need the rapid response, always we need the slow, thoughtful understanding ]
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It’s almost axiomatic, isn’t it, we need two brain speeds, two types of intelligence, two modes of analysis, to handle the moment and the times we live in. Both.

Chevra Hatzolah Israel has the immediacy of Twitter, Cheryl Rofer and Aaron Stein the longer view from the Globe and Mail. Both.

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Cheryl Rofer, a good friend of this blog, “supervised a team developing supercritical water oxidation for destruction of hazardous wastes, including chemical warfare agents, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory” — bio from the Globe and Mail article. I don’t want to pick and choose excerpts from her piece, I’m certainly no expert on her topic — but as things heat up in Syria, the considerations she describes offer us significant background.

Read her insights as posted two days ago in Syria’s chemical weapons pose a decade-long problem for the world.

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[ edited 45 mins later to add: ]

Blake Hounshell’s post a few minutes ago for FP, That awkward moment when … Israel launches airstrikes in Syria, begins to bring the two strands of thinking together — Israel attacks, but cautiously…

Syrian state TV is claiming that Israel hit a “research center,” while opposition Facebook pages are saying that several elite units on Mt. Qassioun, overlooking Damascus, were the targets.

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Because it’s so difficult, not to mention risky, to destroy chemical-weapons stocks from the air, the next-best thing is to take out Assad’s means of delivering them. And Mt. Qassioun is reportedly where many of the Syrian regime’s best missiles are kept.

That’s a lot less worrisome.

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As the “fog of war” slowly clears, the longer and slower insights will prove to be the more reliable and enduring.