I read:

Anthony James Joes's Urban Guerrilla Warfare
The US Marine Corps's Guerrilla and how to fight him
Carlos Marighella's Manual of the Urban Guerrilla

The latter 2 books are from the 1960s and I read them as background. Joes is a counterinsurgency theorist who analyzes a wide range of urban insurgencies and comes to several interesting conclusions:

1. Urban insurgencies almost always fail militarily because they lack any safe areas and because they attack their enemy where it is strongest.

Published on ZNet

Ha-Joon Chang is a development economist with a special interest in economic history. His most recent book, “23 Things They Don't Tell You About Capitalism”, as well as previous books, have critiqued neoliberalism and laissez-faire economics. I interviewed him by telephone on August 9.

Between economic austerity and riot stories, my reading is out of sync with the headlines. I've been reading more about African conflicts, especially very recent and ongoing ones. Specifically:

-Allen and Vlassenroot's book on the Lord's Resistance Army in Uganda.

-Jason Stearns's book on the Congo war, "Dancing in the Glory of Monsters".

-My friend Lansana Gberie's "A Dirty War in West Africa" on Sierra Leone, and a book he critiques, Paul Richards's "Fighting for the Rainforest".

-Assis Malaquias's "Rebels and Robbers" on Angola's civil war.

I read Metro Today on the subway today. There was a story blaming City of Toronto staff for squandering - wait for it - up to $1 MILLION dollars in sole-sourced contracts.

So, Rob Ford is right, and there is waste to be cut, eh?

Except that $1 million is, for example, 1/3 of what the KPMG report that suggested closing libraries and taking fluoride out of the water cost.

Or 1/64 of the vehicle registration tax whose disappearance is now contributing to the supposed $700 million deficit.

And oh yes, it's 1/700 of the deficit.

Sorry for the hiatus. Partly I've been busy with work and life and been unable to spend as much time doing articles. Partly I am trying to train myself to not relate to the world through 2000 word articles but to have a little more variety, including longer things (ie., books), one of which I am actually going to publish after having it sit on my hard disk for a few years. Related, I have been trying to stop and think, to be less in a reactive mode, which is what the twitter and blogging and surfing seem to encourage me to do.

This is a video that should be watched widely. These are Harper voters.

Francis Fox Piven (who has had her own experiences recently with Harper's US mentors) and Richard Cloward wrote a very interesting book called "Why Americans Don't Vote", which showed how a key electoral strategy in the US has always been demobilizing opposing voters, a strategy just as important as mobilizing supporters. If you look at the way Harper has worked over the past few years, you can see that demobilizing strategies are a part of the package here too.

Today's election thoughts, and a couple of photos.

Jon Elmer sent me this amusing Vintage Voter site.

Vincent Pang sent me this photo album of protests against Harper's second proroguing back in 2010.

The daily polling is suspicious. Every day the media publishes what the electoral outcome is going to be. And every day it changes. They keep saying there's going to be a Harper majority. Saying it won't make it so, but it might contribute to it.

Earlier today I saw an article on CityTV.ca through Google News headlined: "Majority of Canadians want Harper majority." I looked at the story and it said 36% wanted a Harper majority. That's no majority I have ever heard of.

Pollsters now get people to press buttons about how they are feeling as they watch debates, and have discovered that Canadians are annoyed. This then feeds back to politicians, who try to, presumably, be less annoying, or, perhaps, try to blame other politicians for the annoyance.