Overtaken By Events

Happens to the best of us ...

The world has chosen the month of October to go stark raving mad. This isn’t going to be a typical Bulletin, it’s just a heartbeat so you know I haven’t permanently wandered away. Specific things going off include …

Israel:

I spent 2013-2014 digging into food and water security in a geographic area that was more or less bounded by the Ottoman Empire at its peak. You can start with the stuff tagged Gaza on my old Wordpress if you want to know more.

The Caucasus, Transnistria & Ukraine:

I got familiar with the Caucasus region starting right after the 2012 presidential election. Abkhazia, Nakhchivan, Nagorno-Karabakh, and South Ossetia are places I could point to on a globe without borders. The Tranistria region of Moldova was also part of my reading, and I was a bit wrong about Ukraine, but not terribly so, given the scope of the problem and the dynamic nature of the “global billiards table”.

Speaker of the House:

There are four former House members who went out the door with my footprint on their behinds. I would like to do four more, say the ones in this LA Times political cartoon, but there are lots of people who can do that, and I’m trying to stick to my currently unpopulated niche.

R&D:

I’ve finished and reviewed The Insurgent’s Dilemma and The Weaponisation of Everything. Both of them are important reads that would help you understand where we would apply The Online Operations Kill Chain. I bought Optimal thinking it would be some J.M. Berger analytical tradecraft, but it turns out to be a marvelous bit of technodystopia. This one has a spot on my Cyberpunk shelf.

The Zed Attack Proxy Cookbook is work related. Right now if I have something online, it’s there in one of two ways. I’m using Substack, Tumblr, and Wordpress for various things - the security is someone else problem. The integration work I do with tools like Elasticsearch and Open Semantic Search are not meant to face the public internet, so they’re behind Cloudflare’s Zero Trust Network Access. If some outsider just really HAD to personally experience my document hoarding, they’d just need to figure out who is an approved user and subvert whatever two factor authentication we’re using.

So with ZAP I’ve got some things in my world that don’t fit either of the two cases I just described. This tool is a “man in the middle” attack system. It sits between one’s browser and a target web site, capturing all the traffic and permitting breakpoints and the use of various canned methods and scripts to attack the web application or API. I have been using integrated development environments since the 1980s and my serious network sniffer use started in the early 1990s. ZAP is sort of a combination of a sniffer like Wireshark and a set of tools akin to the Jetbrains Toolbox, which I use primarily for Python programming with PyCharm.

Conclusion:

I had expected the #1 issue between launching this Substack and January 20th of 2025 would be the U.S. domestic insurgency. Given the rate that Putin’s meddling is paying off in the Caucasus and the Mideast, with the Balkans just a step behind, it would appear that if China decides now is the time to conquer Taiwan, the U.S. troubles won’t even qualify for a top five slot … unless our cold civil war turns hot.

I’ve been saying “we’re gonna fight” since 2017. Nothing I see gives me the slightest idea that we’re backing away from that terrible outcome. When the historians get to this period I think they’ll mark the start of our second civil war as January 6th of 2021. We have this terrible national birth defect in the form of our first civil war. There were defined nation states, uniformed armies, an obvious beginning, and a fairly clean ending. Right now the U.S. has multiple aggrieved ethnosectarian groups and a weakened, discredited central power. Everybody else sees where we’re headed, while we’re confused by the lack of cavalry wearing blue or gray.

So maybe if we focus we can start tossing spanners into the gears of influence operations that are pushing us that way. I’m awarding myself a gold star for staying on task instead of running off to wallow in the geopolitical happenings. I can understand if you’re unable to help yourself, and I’ll be here when you get back.