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The point about yesterday’s piece was not so much about radiation and bombs, but the fragility of our society.

In the interconnectedness of our world, people and places have become specialized. Transportation and manufacturing and finance have their centers and are concentrated at places like Rotterdam and Shanghai and New York. Even more, the world has developed a ‘hand to mouth’ strategy for success.

Instead of building slowly and developing clients and products over the course of years, companies compete with each other in how fast they can dominate new markets and new client populations. They buy companies and spend heavily on advertising. Subsequently, they take on massive amounts of debt to finance business strategies that are marginal, at best.

The point about yesterday’s piece was not so much about radiation and bombs, but the fragility of our society.

In the interconnectedness of our world, people and places have become specialized. Transportation and manufacturing and finance have their centers and are concentrated at places like Rotterdam and Shanghai and New York. Even more, the world has developed a ‘hand to mouth’ strategy for success.

Instead of building slowly and developing clients and products over the course of years, companies compete with each other in how fast they can dominate new markets and new client populations. They buy companies and spend heavily on advertising. Subsequently, they take on massive amounts of debt to finance business strategies that are marginal, at best.

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I tend to be the collector of obscure facts.

Such as the five percent rule for drug smuggling. The rule is that you only catch five percent of all the drugs smuggled across your border. Sometimes you get more. Sometimes you get less, but generally you only get five percent.

In other countries, like Russia, it’s actually worse.

What prompted this Little stream of consciousness is a bit of BBC reporting on the IAEA’s (International Atomic Energy Agency) attempts to secure radioactive materials and suppress the smuggling of those materials.

I tend to be the collector of obscure facts.

Such as the five percent rule for drug smuggling. The rule is that you only catch five percent of all the drugs smuggled across your border. Sometimes you get more. Sometimes you get less, but generally you only get five percent.

In other countries, like Russia, it’s actually worse.

What prompted this Little stream of consciousness is a bit of BBC reporting on the IAEA’s (International Atomic Energy Agency) attempts to secure radioactive materials and suppress the smuggling of those materials.

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I’m working my way through an embarrassingly large collection of unwatched DVDs – a stack about chest high*, if you must really know. (They’re just so cheap over here, and when I get back to Israel…)

Anyway, there I sat, watching an Israeli film, when there was reference to a suicide bombing in Israel. One of the characters turns to the other and says something like, ‘think of how desperate the suicide bomber must have been to blow himself up.’

(Please don’t be shocked. Israelis are some of the most self-critical people on the planet.)

I’m working my way through an embarrassingly large collection of unwatched DVDs – a stack about chest high*, if you must really know. (They’re just so cheap over here, and when I get back to Israel…)

Anyway, there I sat, watching an Israeli film, when there was reference to a suicide bombing in Israel. One of the characters turns to the other and says something like, ‘think of how desperate the suicide bomber must have been to blow himself up.’

(Please don’t be shocked. Israelis are some of the most self-critical people on the planet.)

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I raised a bit of a ruckus a few days ago.

In my article, Always Shoot the Looters, I illustrated one of the most important mistakes made by coalition forces in Iraq. By not acting to stop the looting, they signaled to the population as a whole that the rule of law was no longer in effect.

That signal was the single most destructive message anyone could have made, and it is a message that still plagues Iraq today.

I raised a bit of a ruckus a few days ago.

In my article, Always Shoot the Looters, I illustrated one of the most important mistakes made by coalition forces in Iraq. By not acting to stop the looting, they signaled to the population as a whole that the rule of law was no longer in effect.

That signal was the single most destructive message anyone could have made, and it is a message that still plagues Iraq today.

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A friend of a friend is a military police investigator (MPI) in Iraq. He helps run one of the military prisons in southern Iraq – supposedly one of the ‘nicer’ areas.

Let’s call him Bill. It’s a nice name, and he’s a nice guy.

He says something interesting. He says that the nicest prisons in Iraq are the ones run by the US military. And, as an MPI, he never needed to resort to harsh methods to obtain information.

Never.

A friend of a friend is a military police investigator (MPI) in Iraq. He helps run one of the military prisons in southern Iraq – supposedly one of the ‘nicer’ areas.

Let’s call him Bill. It’s a nice name, and he’s a nice guy.

He says something interesting. He says that the nicest prisons in Iraq are the ones run by the US military. And, as an MPI, he never needed to resort to harsh methods to obtain information.

Never.

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