Technical Writer

White Hat Nak Muay

The world is full of highly skilled and focused cybersecurity geeks, and not all are on our side. Most of them live in countries (and states) where the national sport appears to be hacking into our corporate and government systems, and while these systems are usually electronic, the target systems may be the biochemical configurations of individuals or even societies formed by human relationships.  If an entity is programmed, whether the code is genetic, social, or electronic, the hacker finds work to do. 

Hackers' World

He told me years ago that the programmers had whipped up a little something that enabled them to view the Internet traffic of some bad guys in Columbia and elsewhere in South America. What did you see? I asked. It turns out there is a reason why all the great scandals of history devolve to either money or sex.  When you track the dopes who run cartels you are fogging for the cyber prints of vicious and narrowly focused creeps whose ideas of winning or getting ahead have to do with subjugation of bodies, literally or financially.  The Web traffic? It's mostly about their personal peccadilloes of the coarsest nature. 

When was the last time you read about a scandal concerning aesthetic judgment?  If Christie's and Sotheby's are in the news, it is because there is collusion in the art world, or someone sent a fake to market.  Where is news of art that influences perception?  Where is the philosophy that bends of the curve of conventional thinking?  I do look for it.

I would enjoy reading an above-the-fold article in The New York Times about Nicholas Kiersey's and Doug Stokes's new book coming in September, Foucault and International Relations: New Critical Engagements (Interventions), from Routledge.  At $113 through Amazon, it looks promising, if you are searching for the application of biopolitics in the War on Terror.  I will quote Amazon on the book. http://www.amazon.com/Foucault-International-Relations-Engagements-Interventions/dp/041557983X

    "The recent debate about biopolitics in International Relations (IR) theory may well prove to be one of  the most provocative and rewarding engagements with the concept of power in the history of the discipline. Building on Foucault's arguments concerning the role played by the concept of security in 19th-century liberal government, numerous IR scholars are now arguing for the relevance of his theories of biopolitics and governmentality for understanding the Global War on Terror (GWOT) and broader issues of security and governance in the post 9/11 world.

    "Conversely, others have criticized this idea. Marxist and Communitarian scholars have challenged the notion that the category of biopolitics can be 'scaled' up to the level of international relations with any analytical precision. This edited volume covers these debates in IR with a series of critical engagements with Foucault's own thought and its increasing relevance for understanding international relations in the post 9/11 world."

Go boys!

I plan to order ahead because I want to understand the framework of a better concept of security than we have now.  The framework our thought leaders are developing will enable our other lights to fashion the tools we need to remain a free and expansive society.  One result of failure to think ahead for the good of all is further polarization of our country. The second and concomitant failure is the increased actualization of risks so seemingly far-fetched that even a responsible business or government decides it can not mitigate without overwhelming the cost of running the joint.

If we do not think ahead and act for the good of the whole, our ability to act collectively for the good of all becomes overwhelmed by persistent degradations. It's circular, and true, and the dopes only think they win. They lose, as do we all.

Term Papers Are Coming Due, Students Beware

When I was a stupid kid, I wrote papers for the jocks at Frederick Community College who needed to pass their classes to stay on their teams.  I grew up, turned 18, discerned the error of my ways after being nabbed, nearly, taking someone else's final exam at the University of Maryland. The teaching assistant was too blinded by my flashing smile to gleam that I wasn't his student until the exam was lost in the pile in front of him. I high-tailed it out of Ellicott Hall and halted that line of business, but that foolish (at best) period in my life has left me with a skill.  I am able to discern when words not their own have been put on paper by the students of the Professor who married me (despite my confession to him of that bad monkey enterprise).

It's not always the text itself that gives them away.  I'll not forget the paper (such a delight to read) that turned out to have been a piece unchanged by a single word of a several years-old issue of The Economist, complete with poached footnotes. I downloaded the article and stapled it to the term paper, and the Professor returned it with neither grade nor comment to Missy, for such was her name. What gave Missy away?  Her signature on the cover sheet was crowned with hearts over the i's of her name.  The text?  Clear and concise, well organized, and probably peer reviewed, which I suspected was beyond the ken of the young student. The Professor gave the kid another chance. I married a good man.

Process Improvements for Those in the Knot Know

Alexander the Great got it right when he took the sharp edge of his blade to the Gordian Knot.  Sometimes it takes a fresh eye to solve an intractable tangle. Recognize that Alexander's strong arm could have been any extension of his will and intellect, but also that he was a warrior trained to succeed.

I thought of Alexander as I admired on the front page of The New York Times this morning an image of a PowerPoint slide that purports to represent the complexity of the path to peace in Afghanistan.
Now this is a knot worthy of vanquishing.  Here is the article link, 

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/27/world/27powerpoint.html?hp

and it is worth reading if you are a technical writer, although it was written not for us, but instead as an examination of how the limits of a software application impede free thinking and decisive action.  The article is about warfare, and the dull-headed representation of it in military briefings these days.  I write not really knowing this, but I can look at this slide and wonder what the heck, too.  Out there is a bright young Ender just waiting for her moment in the game, and she knows all about cutting the Gordian Knot.

Warcraft and Unrestricted War

Should I download a 10-day trial of World of Warcraft?  I am surrounded daily by mages and sorcerers going at it against the Hoard.  It is likely that I would join the Hoard, judging from the comments over the cubicle walls--my colleagues respect its cooperative work.

Yesterday afternoon I took a break from my studies and began reading the now 11-year-old publication "Unrestricted Warfare," written by two Peoples Liberation Army colonels from "the younger generation of Chinese military officers," as notes the editor at the CIA's Foreign Broadcast Information Service, which posted extensive parts of the piece at http://www.cryptome.org/cuw.htm . (FBIS also offers a downloadable, full PDF of the text at the site.) This is a gripping paper, so interesting and challenging that apparently it is used as a text in our military colleges. 

The premise of the thinking is that victory in war is never formulaic, yet victories have common elements that can support artful, intuitive strategy based on fields of endeavor that in the present transcend what we commoners understand as military operations.  We learn when a direct assault is effective, and when to take a position to evade yet neutralize the opposition's assault, as would a martial arts master.  We learn that the moment of decisive action may be positioned.

The authors proposed 11 years ago what is becoming part of the general understanding of the fronts of operations against an enemy.   The authors lay out historic examples and the affects of combining these elements. "We need only shake the kaleidoscope of addition to be able to combine into an inexhaustible variety of methods of operation," they write.  Here they are. 

Military	Trans-military	Non-military
Atomic warfare Conventional warfare Bio-chemical warfare Ecological warfare Space warfare Electronic warfare Guerrilla warfare Terrorist warfare	Diplomatic warfare Network warfare Intelligence warfare Psychological warfare Tactical warfare Smuggling warfare Drug warfare Virtual warfare (deterrence)	Financial warfare Trade warfare Resources warfare Economic aid warfare Regulatory warfare Sanction warfare Media warfare Ideological warfare

I can add that war can not be mastered but only directed because war becomes as living a horror as is raging fire poised to consume the force that unleashes it.  We use fire, but we are not its masters.  The same should be said for war.