Mind-controlled sharks?

"The shark attacks have the potential to do some real damage to Egypt, where tourism is pillar of the economy and an important provider of jobs. But the idea that Israel is behind the attacks is pretty farfetched."

That's Max Strasser writing for FP

Is it really pretty far-fetched? Just last week someone from the US Naval Post-graduate School suggested that DARPA should finance a robotic submarine system that would intelligently control teams of dolphins to detect underwater mines and protect ships in harbors.......

Ok, yeah it is still pretty far-fetched, but a guy can fantasize can't he?

Dracula vs the Ottoman Empire

Mideastpost has a brilliant article on the origins of Dracula (Vlad the Impaler) and the very first vampire hunters, Dracula's own brother Radu the Handsome and Mehmet, Sultan of the Ottoman Empire).

"[Dracula] scorched the earth and slaughtered all the living in his path leaving a wake of desolation and writhing impaled bodies. He would not give up his homeland to the Muslims that easily. He began a beleaguering campaign of guerilla warfare that the elite Ottoman Sipahis could not endure. It is said he slaughtered 15,000 of the Ottoman soldiers in one single night. Still, as the mightiest of the Ottomans fled, Radu was undeterred seemingly driven by what can only be interpreted as an austere piety, to end the bloody reign of his haplessly misguided brother. None remained to fight Dracula save Radu and his fellow Romanian Muslim Janissaries."

This is the first time that I have heard this story and I have no idea how accurate it is......any Islamic history scholars out there are welcome to comment...*cough* Harith Ramli *cough*. Nonetheless, this is still an absolutely beautiful tragedy where one can sympathise with Dracula, while at the same time feel the heroic inspiration of Radu. There is also a nice little undercurrent narrative of the complexities of military alliances for personal survival. I could go on for days......
Instead.....

Rest in peace Leslie Nielsen

Best official reaction to the Wikileaks so far

[Admiral Mike] Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said that the exposed conversations showed that the United States was "a global power with relationships all over the world."
"I don't mean this arrogantly, but I've lived in Europe, I've been a part of NATO, I've lived in the Pacific. I understand what United States leadership means and brings," Mullen said at the Center for American Progress think-tank.
"That doesn't mean we always have it right, that doesn't mean that we don't make mistakes - because we do," he said.
"But we as a country choose to engage because we think that in engaging and focusing on and trying to solve the problems, it leaves a region, a relationship and a world potentially in a better place," he said.
DefenseNews reports

Stained by the shit and urine of raped women's leaking fistulas?

I had to look up the word fistulas.........I then vomited a little bit in my mouth.

"AppIe is known for the clean lines of their products, the alluring simplicity of their designs. Dare I....go so far....as to suggest...this signature cleanness is stained by the shit and urine of raped women's leaking fistulas?"


"I dream of the day when North Americans recoil in horror at the introduction of an otherwise revolutionary and exciting electronic product that lacks TAC....when the queues are expressions of solidarity for 11-year-old mine slaves, women whose vaginas have been perforated by object insertion rape, and families forced to eat one another in each other's presence."

The full article

......Errr, I don't really want to say anything more because I am now absolutely terrified of Ashley Judd.

(She has a surprisingly large collection of scary photos......
No idea what the caption is about though)
Photo credit

Dolphin-Mind Controlling Robots

From the NYT:

"...a computer scientist at the Naval Postgraduate School has proposed that the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency finance a robotic submarine system that would intelligently control teams of dolphins to detect underwater mines and protect ships in harbors. “If we run into a conflict with Iran, the likelihood of them trying to do something in the Strait of Hormuz is quite high,” said Raymond Buettner, deputy director of the Information Operations Center at the Naval Postgraduate School."

And my favourite part (financial justification for the project):

“One land mine blowing up one ship and choking the world’s oil supply pays for the entire Navy marine mammal program and its robotics program for a long time.”

Brilliant...
One zombie outbreak causing a collapse of the global financial system pays for the research into the Necronomicon to bring Ash Williams back into the present time

Do guns make more violence likely?

From Barking Up the Wrong Tree:

The weapon instrumentality hypothesis suggests that guns contribute to the escalation and lethality of violence. But the relationship between guns and violence might be spurious if the aggressor's violent tendencies or the aggressor's situation-specific intent to harm is the common cause of the presence/use of a gun and the violent outcome. To examine such rival explanations, we draw on interviews with 100 men imprisoned for an aggravated assault or homicide that stemmed from an interpersonal conflict. Each respondent described a matched pair of conflicts: the violent conflict that led to incarceration and a similar nonviolent conflict from the same time period. The matched pair design allows us to control for both potential sources of spuriousness: violent tendencies and situation-specific intent to harm. The results suggest that guns contribute to the violent escalation of conflict, but the impact of guns attenuates substantially after accounting for situation-specific intent to harm.

Source: "Have Gun Will Shoot? Weapon Instrumentality, Intent, and the Violent Escalation of Conflict" from Homicide Studies

So I was wrong.....(updated - again) - Khartoum attacks the South

Remember how I told Roving Bandit to chill out?

Well, maybe that has changed as reports are coming in that the Northern military has just bombed an SPLA base in Northern Bahr El Ghazal.......
Stay tuned, I will hopefully have more on this later.....well, no....hopefully this all gets resolved and we never hear about it.

Update: The story has now made it to the news, though in a couple of versions:
While most reports (more)I have heard claimed that the two helicopters bombed an SPLA base, Voice of America reports that the bombings were targeting a referendum registration centre. What it is agreeable is that the attack was conducted in Northern Bahr el Ghazal by helicopters and that the North outright denies the event.

What I don't get is SAF's intentions. If they had in fact bombed a registration centre, then it could be that their intention was to scare people from going to the registration centres with the idea that they may just get bombed by helicopters. It is heavily dependent on 'availability heuristics' but is a common terror tactic.

However, if they had bombed the SPLA base for 2 hours (between 10 am and 12pm), injured 6 people and then simply went home, then I am very confused and very worried as to what piece of information is being left out of the story from either sides. The North outright denies any attack taking place and the South has yet to kick up a massive storm about the whole incident (as would typically be expected if the North openly attacked a Southern military base).

I'm not quite worried yet, just very confused and suspicious of everyone. Especially the Reuters reporter who covered the story......McDoom (she must get that all the time).

Update 2: I just got another one.....Maybe, everything happened as ST and Reuters reported, but the South has not produce such a great reaction because they are fully aware that the North is simply trying to provoke and so the South has decided to be the big man. Now the fact that I didn't interpret the event this way the first time indicates how little faith I have in either side to act maturely......either that, or being bored in post-conflict is pushing my mind to want to create conspiracy theories.

Update 3: I should really just wait until incidences are fully over before I post things.....
So it turns out the VOA story holds some truth as the 2 civilians that were injured were on their way to the registration post when they were attacked. Furthermore, the President of the South has released a statement that the South will not conduct any reprisal attacks. This is a real strong sign of hope for peace. Clearly Khartoum is aware of the international backlash that will come from an all out offensive on the South. And the South is not falling for any provocation to drag it back into a very messy war. There is somewhat of an element of the mutually assured destruction doctrine at play and hopefully it will stay in play throughout the process.

Panic averted, carry on.....