Stream of Consciousness Link Purge

I check a bunch of news sites most days. Sometimes, I see stuff that doesn't interest me so much, but might interest some of my former Strategic Studies coursemates. I find other stuff that I find pretty interesting, or which connects to some other source for one reason or another. So, in lieu of posting twenty different things to Facebook, I figured I'd wrap them up into a blog post instead. That way, blog readers may run across something they'll appreciate, and I can post it to a wider Facebook audience as well.

One of my favorite podcasts is the War Studies Podcast from the Department of War Studies at King's College London. The KCL WSD was sort of considered the gold standard while I was at Aberdeen, but for my money, Aberdeen was a much better investment. At any rate, they did a podcast back in October with open source intelligence (OSINT) guru Brown Moses on OSINT. I ended up listening to it on the way back from work one day, and it carried over into a discussion of the Pakistani army by Dr. Christine Fair that I ended up finding very interesting, although it got interrupted by my arrival back at my place, so as I'm writing this, I haven't listened to the end of it yet.

The Brown Moses interview reminded me of two things I'd read recently: War is Boring published an article entitled Be Very Skeptical—A Lot of Your Open-Source Intel Is Fake. For what it's worth, I linked to Brown Moses' most famous piece, Seymour Hersh's Volcano Problem, back in April.

The interview with Dr. Christine Fair reminded me of an article I read earlier this week over at War on the Rocks: Explaining Pakistan's Confidence. The War Studies Podcast did another episode last week entitled Pakistani perspectives on Afghanistan, which I haven't been able to listen to yet.

War Studies' most recent podcast - which I also haven't had a chance to listen to yet - is titled Franklin expedition: myths, archeology & Canadian identity. This, of course, reminded me of CN Slapshot, my Canadian coursemate. (For anyone who missed the memo, Canada announced in September that it had located one of Franklin's ships in September; in October, the Canadian government confirmed that the ship in question is HMS Erebus. (Franklin's lost expedition also had an Orcadian connection, though my friend Rock Sniffer may not have realized it a year ago when she was photographed with Dr. Rae's statue just a few minutes after getting off the ferry in Stromness harbo(u)r.) CN Slapshot may take some interest in that podcast, but I'm sure he'll take interest in an AFP story: No edge for F-35 on most missions: report.

Another of my cousemates was a jovial, gregarious lad from near Inverness, whom I code-named CN Ness. In 2012 and 2013, CN Ness was a rabid North Korea addict - mainly because of the wide variety of weird stories that came out of the Hermit Kingdom, but also just because of North Korea in general. I presume he's still as interested in North Korea as he was then, so, I've been saving some links for him, and now I'm purging them by posting them.

North Korea responds to UN with nuclear test threat

Signs N.Korea preparing bomb material amid nuclear test threats

N.Korea warns of 'catastrophic consequences' over UN rights ruling

North Korean military conducting intensive exercises

No sign of imminent N. Korea nuclear test: US think-tank

OSINT, to Pakistan, to Canada, to North Korea. Not bad for a stream of consciousness post to cull my saved news links, huh?