What are you currently reading?

[maryslittlegarden]

Ooh, that looks good!

It is very good so far.  THere is a british tv version that is good, too

[red solo cup]

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

[Frank]

This looks interesting.

https://medium.com/@rjpmeridian/misinformation-and-the-prospect-of-catalytic-war-9a3b4ca70cd9

I've copied the text below in case the link is lost.

It's almost tempting to become paranoid and think
SD is being penetrated by the Vatican mafia.

Or even the Russians - after all Greg does have a
Russian wife. 😈

Misinformation and the Prospect of Catalytic War

In July 1870, France declared war on Prussia after learning the Prussian king had insulted the French envoy during a meeting concerning affairs in Spain. Unknown to the French, Prussian Chancellor Bismarck had fabricated the story about the insult to provoke them into war. Bismarck knew France was militarily inferior and that a declaration would push southern German states to finally unify with Prussia. The "Ems Dispatch" ruse worked and the war was a catastrophe for France, marking the end of the Second French Empire and the birth of the German Empire.
Battle of Sedan https://www.britannica.com/event/Battle-of-Sedan
In August 1964, the United States Navy alleged their ships had been unjustly attacked by North Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin in international waters. Some officers contended the reports were inaccurate but before the incident could be fully verified, the President ordered military retaliation. The President then requested and received near-unanimous congressional and public approval for virtually unlimited authority to wage war on North Vietnam. In 2005, declassified documents confirmed the president knew the reports were false. The war, however, quickly escalated out of the president's control, sparking years of protest and major political divisions throughout the country before ending in an ignominious withdrawal nine years later.
Gulf of Tonkin Resolution https://www.history.com/topics/vietnam-war/gulf-of-tonkin-resolution-1
These historical incidents demonstrate how war can result from misinformation and deceit as much as they can from accidents and miscalculation. All warfare may be based on deception but disinformation is poised to destabilize international affairs in an unprecedented way.
Thomas Rid is a political scientist who focuses on the nexus between technology and conflict. His latest book, Active Measures: The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare, provides an exceptional historical overview of misinformation operations and the challenges they present for national security.
Active Measures, The Secret History of Disinformation and Political Warfare by Thomas Rid https://us.macmillan.com/books/9780
Within the counterintelligence portfolio, active measures are unique in their embedding of disinformation within an ostensibly legitimate and mostly truthful medium, whether it is a document, report, periodical, book, audio or video recording, or a digital posting.
Rid describes how disinformation marked the origins of the Soviet Union and how its brand of misinformation came into its own in the early Sixties in the middle of the Cold War. Soviet leadership devoted considerable funding and manpower, elevated political warfare's organisational standing, and integrated its satellites' intelligence capabilities. The mission of the new KGB organisation, Service A, was to identify and analyze enemy fissures and failures, and then "to exploit the discovered vulnerabilities in a systematic, worldwide effort."
Psychological Warfare, Psychological Operations, and Information Operations https://www.psywar.org/
And the Soviets excelled — "anti-Western campaigns were aggressive, fast-paced, and used innovative methods that evolved quickly and in unexpected frightening ways."
The Soviets altered Army Field Manuals, leaked falsified nuclear plans for Europe, invented rumors of Nazi gold in a Czechoslovakian lake, co-opted the nuclear freeze movement, and, most notoriously, claimed AIDS was the invention of American scientists.
Operation "Denver": KGB and Stasi Disinformation regarding AIDS https://www.wilsoncenter.org/blog-post/operation-denver-kgb-a
After the Cold War ended, Russian intelligence services withered significantly. Misinformation, instead, became the weapon of choice in the competition for power during the Nineties — a virtual information civil war. The period ended when a former KGB agent ascended to the presidency in 2000 and conscripted this new generation of seasoned operators and their sophisticated media skills into a revitalized Russian national security apparatus.
Initially, Russian information operations took the form of cyber-disruption and were once limited to the country's "near abroad," such as Estonia in 2007 and Georgia in 2008.
When democratic upheaval finally breached Russia's near abroad in the form of the 2014 Maidan Revolution in the Ukraine, it began targeting the West.
Russian efforts culminated in 2016 and 2017, when it undertook election interference operations directly against the United States and the United Kingdom (Brexit), France (presidency), and Germany (federal offices).
Image for post
Regarding the 2016 American presidential election, many observers have speculated why. At the personal level, many allege Russia acted to deny Hillary Clinton the presidency in revenge for her comments during anti-government protests in 2011. In terms of geopolitics, others suggested various reasons. Interference was retribution for democracy promotion in Russia's sphere of influence or a warning to refrain from seeking regime change in Moscow or simply a reminder to treat Russia as a great power.
Whatever the reason, a few high-profile email leaks and a provocative Facebook campaign resurrected Russia as a great power competitor (despite half the population, half the economy, and half the defence budget of the United States).
In Rid's analysis, the email hacks and fake social media accounts were entirely ineffective.
However, the power of misinformation lies in its indirect consequences.
In the main, Rid describes how the media indefensibly exaggerated the impact of the Russian Facebook campaign. Journalistic standards collapsed as reporters failed to scrutinize questionable evidence, published unverified conclusions, circulated unsubstantiated accusations, and adopted an overtly partisan tone. Misinformation had succeeded in inverting reality — what was balanced was derided as biased and what was suspect was declared plausible.
Image for post
Rid's conclusions are twofold — neither comforting.
First, misinformation succeeds because its melding of fact and fiction prompts not contemplation but consternation. Misinformation is essentially anti-information — a weapon marked by reassuring facts but concealing an emotionally inflammatory payload.
Second, the Internet accelerates, augments, and amplifies misinformation. Deposited in the obscure corners of cyberspace, seemingly dormant misinformation is instantly animated when it's discovered. Whether the mark ratifies or refutes it, misinformation's very acknowledgment unknowingly legitimizes it and initiates its dissemination. Inexorably, journalists will elevate its visibility, analysts will debate its validity, pundits will argue over its significance, and everyone will share it on social media.
Image for post
While Cold War forgeries could be exposed and refuted, the Internet endlessly recycles misinformation from objective to subjective and back again. The antagonist then feeds the media scrum another fabrication, which has been designed to exacerbate the original confusion by "validating" one side's interpretation. The result is a proliferation of heated emotional fissures across the body politic and the inability to separate fact from fiction.
Traditionally, active measures are the product of a state bureaucracy staffed by professionals and allocated substantial budgets, but, as with many enterprises, misinformation is being privatised and decentralised.
More ominously, anyone with Internet access can obtain and use the world's most sophisticated cyber-weapons and undertake their own misinformation campaign.
Rid closes his history by recounting how a mysterious cadre of hackers calling themselves the Shadow Brokers penetrated the National Security Agency in 2016 and stole the country's arsenal of cutting-edge cyber tools.
Image for post
The intrusion constituted a monumental security breach and jeopardized wide-ranging signals intelligence operations around the world. Furthermore, the penetration distracted national security agencies at a critical time, namely defending the nation's electoral system from cyber-attack.
Hackers eventually gained access to NSA's tools and rapidly overwhelmed IT systems around the world. Ukraine's national infrastructure, Britain's health system, a Danish shipping giant, and an American multinational food distributor were among the theft's many collateral victims.
And no one has figured out who the Shadow Brokers were.
Episodes such as this feed theorists' speculation that in the future America will suffer a "cyber Pearl Harbour" or a "cyber 9/11." Plausible fears but, at a minimum, decision-makers could take comfort knowing that in each of these precedents, the identity of the aggressor was immediately obvious and the fate visited upon the Japanese and the Taliban (at least at the outset) would deter any imitators.
However, the potential combination of cyber-weapons promising anonymity and anti-information introduces the prospect of manufactured security crises.
The greater threat is a "cyber Ems Dispatch" or a "cyber Gulf of Tonkin" whereby a third party anonymously introduces misinformation to purposely instigate or aggravate existing tensions in a volatile region (e.g. Western Pacific, Persian Gulf). The active measure sabotages decision-makers' ability to objectively assess the situation and enrages their respective publics. The result is an armed conflict arising from circumstances falsified by a third party — a catalytic war.
Like American national security after a cyber-catastrophe, international security would never be the same after a misinformation-instigated catalytic war.
Prussian theorist Carl von Clausewitz's simple but enduring maxim asserts war is nothing but a duel on a larger scale. If the Prussian theorist were alive today, he might concede the duellists may not know the truth behind their post-haste rush to the duelling grounds.

[Greg]

So the Russians were simultaneously brilliant at super secret and super effective global plots, whilst being absolutely crap at making safe nuclear reactors and putting sausages on the shelf?

Their cars were shit, but the guy who went to university with the apparachik who ran the car factory was able to infiltrate western institutions?

That super clever master plotter had to drive a crap car and live in an apartment where the lift smelled of an alcoholic's puke and drive a car like a Volga, (which drives like a hillbilly's Volvo), was not bothered by that?  He never drove to work thinking, "if I undermine the west I may never own a Mercedes or Lexus"

Does not compute.  Russians laugh at the idea that they are competent enough to do any of this stuff.  They have some good computer hackers and are good at fraud, ballet and synchronised swimming.  But the KGB simply are nothing like that clever.  You are describing a super-human level of organisation, secrecy and determination that exists perhaps at Google or Goldman Sachs, where they have the cleverest people, the best tools and unlimited budgets, but you are not describing Russia.

[Maximilian]

So the Russians were simultaneously brilliant at super secret and super effective global plots, whilst being absolutely crap at making safe nuclear reactors and putting sausages on the shelf?

Their cars were shit, but the guy who went to university with the apparachik who ran the car factory was able to infiltrate western institutions?

That super clever master plotter had to drive a crap car and live in an apartment where the lift smelled of an alcoholic's puke and drive a car like a Volga, (which drives like a hillbilly's Volvo), was not bothered by that?  He never drove to work thinking, "if I undermine the west I may never own a Mercedes or Lexus"

Does not compute. 

Yes it does, if you consider "What do they want? What do they care about?"

The driven idealogues who were often very brilliant cared about destroying the West more than they cared about consumer goods. So that's what they focused on.

Soap in the stores was not a priority for them. Nuclear bombs and undermining the West was.

Just yesterday the Daily Mail had an article about a woman who spent years living a normal life in England on the surface, but all the time she was passing nuclear secrets to the Russians. She was a brilliant Jew from Berlin, and this is how she chose to spend her life.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-8744865/Cotswolds-mother-renowned-perfect-scones-Soviet-spy-Colonel-Ursula-Kuczynski.html

Village housewife, first-rate baker... and top Soviet spy: Mrs Len Burton was a Cotswolds mother of three renowned for her perfect scones - but was also a colonel in Russian intelligence who sent Britain's atomic secrets from her privy

- Ben Macintyre's book Agent Sonya tells story of  Colonel Ursula Kuczynski
- She lived in Oxfordshire hamlet Great Rollright and was known as Mrs Burton
- The spy was on active duty and had radio transmitter tuned to Soviet intelligence
- She fled to East Berlin in 1950 and retired as a spy before dying in 2000 aged 93

Her scones were the envy of the Oxfordshire hamlet of Great Rollright, where the friendly woman known as Mrs Burton lived in a stone farmhouse.

In her late 30s, she moved there with her three children and husband Len just after the end of World War II.

She had a faint foreign accent but the locals took no notice and she soon became a stalwart of village life.

They were unaware of the massive secret she was hiding — one that even now, 75 years later, had me reeling in amazement at the audacity and ingenuity it involved on her part.

And the unforgivable treachery.

Because, beneath the mask of respectability, Mrs Burton was really Colonel Ursula Kuczynski of the Red Army — aka Agent Sonya, a dedicated communist, decorated Soviet intelligence officer and highly trained spy who had conducted espionage operations in China, Poland and Switzerland before coming to Britain on Moscow's orders.

In Oxfordshire, she was very much on active duty.

In the privy was a radio transmitter tuned to Soviet intelligence headquarters.

Growing up in a family of Left-wing Jewish intellectuals in Berlin, Ursula committed herself to communism as a teenager, joining the party (whose paramilitary wing taught her to shoot) and being clubbed to the ground by police at a banned May Day demonstration.

Effortlessly she switched between her two identities. As Mrs Burton, she had a settled home, contented children and friendly neighbours.

As Agent Sonya, she had a camera for producing microdots, a network of sub-agents and a radio transmitter in her bedroom cupboard.

Three times a week, while the children slept, she would transmit reports to Moscow, often about Britain's atomic bomb research.

Her source was the nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs, a leading member of the so-called 'Tubes Alloy' project, Britain's equivalent of America's Manhattan Project.

She would meet him in the Oxfordshire countryside where he would hand over technical documents, drawings and blueprints, for her to copy and transmit.

Those she couldn't put into code she would leave in a hollow tree root for 'Sergei' from the Russian Embassy to pick up.

Fuchs, a German communist fugitive, believed it wrong for Britain and the U.S. not to share this world-changing nuclear knowledge with the Soviet Union, a supposed ally: passing over secrets was redressing an unfairness.

[Kaesekopf]

I'm currently reading this lovely little biography sort of thing on Pier Giorgio Frassati.  It is translated and adapted from the Italian of Antonio Cojazzi by H.L. Hughes.  It's essentially a series of stories/vignettes by people who knew Frassati, and tells his life that way.  It gets a shoutout on the Frassati USA page on the different bios on him.  So far, I'm a big fan, although it tends towards "wow look at this obvious saint", which is somewhat annoying - I doubt he was as perfect as the snippets imply. 

It's out of print, though.  Thanks, library!   

[red solo cup]

Undaunted Courage: Meriwether Lewis, Thomas Jefferson and the Opening of the American West by Stephen Ambrose

[paul14]

I just started reading the dead-tree version of this.  It looks good.

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Politically-Incorrect-English-American-Literature/dp/1596980117

About 40% through it.  It is an excellent book.

[Heinrich]

So the Russians were simultaneously brilliant at super secret and super effective global plots, whilst being absolutely crap at making safe nuclear reactors and putting sausages on the shelf?

Their cars were shit, but the guy who went to university with the apparachik who ran the car factory was able to infiltrate western institutions?

That super clever master plotter had to drive a crap car and live in an apartment where the lift smelled of an alcoholic's puke and drive a car like a Volga, (which drives like a hillbilly's Volvo), was not bothered by that?  He never drove to work thinking, "if I undermine the west I may never own a Mercedes or Lexus"

Does not compute. 

Yes it does, if you consider "What do they want? What do they care about?"

The driven idealogues who were often very brilliant cared about destroying the West more than they cared about consumer goods. So that's what they focused on.

Soap in the stores was not a priority for them. Nuclear bombs and undermining the West was.

Just yesterday the Daily Mail had an article about a woman who spent years living a normal life in England on the surface, but all the time she was passing nuclear secrets to the Russians. She was a brilliant Jew from Berlin, and this is how she chose to spend her life.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/article-8744865/Cotswolds-mother-renowned-perfect-scones-Soviet-spy-Colonel-Ursula-Kuczynski.html

Village housewife, first-rate baker... and top Soviet spy: Mrs Len Burton was a Cotswolds mother of three renowned for her perfect scones - but was also a colonel in Russian intelligence who sent Britain's atomic secrets from her privy

- Ben Macintyre's book Agent Sonya tells story of  Colonel Ursula Kuczynski
- She lived in Oxfordshire hamlet Great Rollright and was known as Mrs Burton
- The spy was on active duty and had radio transmitter tuned to Soviet intelligence
- She fled to East Berlin in 1950 and retired as a spy before dying in 2000 aged 93

Her scones were the envy of the Oxfordshire hamlet of Great Rollright, where the friendly woman known as Mrs Burton lived in a stone farmhouse.

In her late 30s, she moved there with her three children and husband Len just after the end of World War II.

She had a faint foreign accent but the locals took no notice and she soon became a stalwart of village life.

They were unaware of the massive secret she was hiding — one that even now, 75 years later, had me reeling in amazement at the audacity and ingenuity it involved on her part.

And the unforgivable treachery.

Because, beneath the mask of respectability, Mrs Burton was really Colonel Ursula Kuczynski of the Red Army — aka Agent Sonya, a dedicated communist, decorated Soviet intelligence officer and highly trained spy who had conducted espionage operations in China, Poland and Switzerland before coming to Britain on Moscow's orders.

In Oxfordshire, she was very much on active duty.

In the privy was a radio transmitter tuned to Soviet intelligence headquarters.

Growing up in a family of Left-wing Jewish intellectuals in Berlin, Ursula committed herself to communism as a teenager, joining the party (whose paramilitary wing taught her to shoot) and being clubbed to the ground by police at a banned May Day demonstration.

Effortlessly she switched between her two identities. As Mrs Burton, she had a settled home, contented children and friendly neighbours.

As Agent Sonya, she had a camera for producing microdots, a network of sub-agents and a radio transmitter in her bedroom cupboard.

Three times a week, while the children slept, she would transmit reports to Moscow, often about Britain's atomic bomb research.

Her source was the nuclear physicist Klaus Fuchs, a leading member of the so-called 'Tubes Alloy' project, Britain's equivalent of America's Manhattan Project.

She would meet him in the Oxfordshire countryside where he would hand over technical documents, drawings and blueprints, for her to copy and transmit.

Those she couldn't put into code she would leave in a hollow tree root for 'Sergei' from the Russian Embassy to pick up.

Fuchs, a German communist fugitive, believed it wrong for Britain and the U.S. not to share this world-changing nuclear knowledge with the Soviet Union, a supposed ally: passing over secrets was redressing an unfairness.

A holocaust survivor to boot!

[Christina_S]

Talking Hands. It's about the emergence of Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (and sign languages in general). It's very fascinating to see how the grammar of these languages emerges and evolves!

[Bernadette]

Getting ready to start A Prayer for Owen Meany. Sounds oddly similar to the movie Simon Birch.

[Maximilian]

Getting ready to start A Prayer for Owen Meany.

I really liked this book with the theme of preparing one's whole life for a final destiny. However, be forewarned that the author, John Irving, is a really evil person. Other books by him glamorize incest and abortion.

Sounds oddly similar to the movie Simon Birch.

Wikipedia says that the movie was based on the book, but the title of the movie was changed at the request of the author since they had changed so much of the story.

[Bernadette]

I don't plan on reading his other books. I got this one because it reminded me of the movie (and it was free. Lol).

[red solo cup]

Bloody Falls of the Coppermine: Madness, Murder and the Collision of Cultures in the Arctic, 1913 by McKay Jenkins

[maryslittlegarden]

American Heritage history of the American Revolution