Here's looking back at a noteworthy 2005. (You can go back to 2004, too, if you'd like to look for trends.) We wake up thinking we know what we know, only to find that we have to think all over again. I would create, if not true bumper stickers, then the rumor of bumper stickers. I'm not signing anything until I read it, or someone gives me the gist of it. Oliver Wendell Holmes, William James, Charles S. Peirce, and John Dewey -- what these four thinkers had in common was not a group of ideas, but a single idea -- an idea about ideas -- that ideas are social ... like germs. When it needed cash, to pay employees or buy equipment or build camps, it dispatched someone from Chicago with a rucksack filled with bricks of hundred-dollar bills. "All the people in Iraq had to say is, 'We need a backpack,' Or, 'We need two backpacks.'" Each pack held half a million dollars. Al Qaeda is not an organization. It is a scene. Where Google looks at Web pages and links, Visible Path looks at people pathways. Ideas should never become ideologies. The Iranians insist the freeze is only temporary. Futurists always measure their batting average by counting how many things they have predicted that have come true. They never count how many important things come true that they did not predict. The entitlement we need to get rid of is our sense of entitlement. Is more what we really need?
In my opinion not.
But running spies is not the NSA's job. Listening is, and more listening is what the NSA knows how to organize, more is what Congress is ready to support and fund, more is what the President wants, and more is what we are going to get. "We're not going to rely on agency pissants." Too many people still mistake secrets for intelligence. Asked what's wrong with the department, he said, "It's difficult to figure out where to start." If you can't say it in 30 seconds, you have to move on. The Open Source Center will study obscure sources like T-shirt slogans in countries of interest. Just because Bill Gates is ready to pour millions of dollars into a big new idea doesn't make it a good one. Dubai, with its Disneyesque Arab souks in which you can purchase Arab handicrafts or a Cinnabon ... The critical question is not, "How can I achieve?" but "What can I contribute?" Perhaps humility, more than anything, is the mark of true genius. "It is it is our destiny," said ... [ Read More (0.4k in body) ] | 
