As regular readers of my blog know, I lost my voice about 18 months ago. Permanently. It’s something exotic called Spasmodic Dysphonia. Essentially a part of the brain that controls speech just shuts down in some people, usually after you strain your voice during a bout with allergies (in my case) or some other sort of normal laryngitis. It happens to people in my age bracket.

An incredible story from Scott Adams...

The Dilbert Blog: Good News Day

So numerous are the recruits that a tribal leader in southern Afghanistan, who did not want to be named because of the threat of suicide bombers, relayed an account of how one would-be suicide bomber was sent home and told to wait his turn because there were many in line ahead of him.

It's like seniority in a union.

Javed Iqbal, the newly appointed Pakistani secretary of the tribal areas, defended the North Waziristan accord:

"We have tried the coercive tactic, we did not achieve much. So what do you do? Engage."

I am reminded of this quote:

"It has become clear that Internet access in itself is a vulnerability that we cannot mitigate. We have tried incremental steps and they have proven insufficient."
        -- Undersecretary of Commerce Mark Foulon

Taliban and Allies Tighten Grip in North of Pakistan

Rangel is making an important point, even if his argument for the draft does not work. War is a special activity of society. It is one of the few in which the citizen is expected -- at least in principle -- to fight and, if necessary, die for his country. It is more than a career. It is an existential commitment, a willingness to place oneself at risk for one's country. The fact that children of the upper classes, on the whole, do not make that existential commitment represents a tremendous weakness in American society. When those who benefit most from a society feel no obligation to defend it, there is a deep and significant malaise in that society.

Perhaps. Certainly the nature of political discourse has evolved (for the worse, most would agree) since World War II.

I might argue that the apparent absence of obligation can be easily explained. "Those who benefit most" are not compelled to defend because they do not really feel threatened and do not feel that running around Ramadi in a HMMWV is really protecting Americans. If the mood of the general public reflected the sense that America faces an existential threat, I think plenty of people would be ready to make an existential commitment.

So when "those who benefit most" display no feeling of obligation, they are reflecting a general disregard not for the fundamental existence of America, but for the chronic plight of the rest of the world. This disregard is quite widespread and does not split along class lines. Why should Americans feel more obligated to prevent civil war in Iraq than in Sudan? That's easy; because Americans actively established the conditions for civil war in Iraq, but merely failed to act in Sudan.

The reasons given by enlisted volunteers are as various as the volunteers themselves, but broadly, the Army is seen as both an opportunity and (perhaps ironically) as a (financial) "safe harbor". As evidenced by the "who's Rumsfeld?" comment, the motivations of volunteers are not necessarily political. If you polled new Army recruits about their reasons for joining up, I think you'd find very few who refer to the prevention of African genocide or to the encouragement of women's literacy.

There is room among the arguments against leaving Iraq for something about not creating a "haven" for anti-American terrorists. But this does not translate into an argument for going to Iraq. By staying in Iraq to suppress civil war, we accomplish very little toward eliminating the existential threat to America, to the extent it is even real. There is little reason to expect successful businessmen to join the Army when the threat is sufficiently abstract that the most accessible means to understanding it is a RAND monograph.

If, as the RAND monograph suggests, "deny[ing] sanctuaries to terrorists" is a pillar of the war on terror, and if civil war zones are assumed to create such sanctuaries, then the war strategy now obligates the US to intervene in all future civil wars. Clearly our (in)actions indicate that we do not believe in our own strategy -- neither in its merits nor in its practicality.

This is amusing:

If you can play tennis as well as you claim to for as long as you say, you can patrol a village in the Sunni Triangle.

As for Friedman's claim that

There is no inherent reason why enlistment -- or conscription -- should be targeted toward those in late adolescence.

I wonder about the futility of trying to train a 50-year-old bankruptcy attorney how to hunt terrorists in the caves of Afghanistan. Something about old dogs ...

Stratfor (and Rangel) on the Draft

The head of al Qaeda's Iraq operations yesterday ... praised US voters ...

It's worth noting that this statement is coming from al-Masri. We still have not heard from Zawahiri since the madrasa attack. The clock is ticking ...

In neighboring Iran, Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei also expressed satisfaction with the Democratic gains in the US vote, calling them a boon for Tehran.

"This defeat [the thumpin'] is actually an obvious victory for the Iranian nation."

A vote against Christian conservatives is a vote for militant Islam? Were you thinking about that when you decided to punish them for Brownie's ineptitude?

On Tuesday, you were mujahideen, and your Diebold was your Kalashnikov.

Al Qaeda gloats over US election

The reality is that, despite fears that our children are "pumped full of chemicals" everything is made of chemicals, down to the proteins, hormones and genetic materials in our cells.

And although some fret about the "cocktails" of chemicals we are exposed to, a potent brew of complex chemicals is present in a humble cup of tea — which contains healthy polyphenols, for example.

This is even better than the last story about politicians winning the mid term election, because it's not supposed to be a joke!

Telegraph | News | 'The reality is that everything is made of chemicals'

An interesting way of watching the focus of history change.

US Presidential Speeches Tag Cloud

This work was previously reported on Memestreams back in November 2005, when Markoff wrote about in NYT. There must be some reason why it is being revisited now, but it may not be publicly obvious. One presumes that it came up during the Here's Looking at You... session at Phreaknic. (Is there a slide presentation for that?)

This paper examines the problem of surreptitious Internet interception from the eavesdropper’s point of view. We introduce the notion of ‘fidelity” in digital eavesdropping. In particular, we formalize several kinds of “network noise” that might degrade fidelity, most notably “confusion,” and show that reliable network interception may not be as simple as previously thought or even always possible. Finally, we suggest requirements for “high fidelity” network interception, and show how systems that do not meet these requirements can be vulnerable to countermeasures, which in some cases can be performed entirely by a third party without the cooperation or even knowledge of the communicating parties.

For practical results in real-world systems, see the authors' IEEE article, Signaling Vulnerabilities in Wiretapping Systems, in which this paper is reference #11.

In a separate work [11], we formalized the concepts of evasion and confusion as eavesdropping countermeasures and identified the “eavesdropper’s dilemma” as a fundamental trade-off in certain interception architectures.

The Eavesdropper's Dilemma - Matt Blaze et al... [PDF]

Nearly every night here for the past month, Iraqis weary of the tumult around them have been turning on the television to watch a wacky-looking man with a giant Afro wig and star-shaped glasses deliver the grim news of the day.

Mr. Sudani, the writer, said he has lost hope for his country. Iraq’s leaders are incompetent, he said. He fears that services will never be restored. The American experiment in democracy, he said, was born dead.

All anyone can do, he said, is laugh.

A TV Comedy Turns an Unconventional Weapon on Iraq’s High and Mighty: Fake News

In a notice dated Wednesday, the Justice Department listed 196 pending habeas cases, some of which cover groups of detainees. The new Military Commissions Act (MCA), it said, provides that "no court, justice, or judge" can consider those petitions or other actions related to treatment or imprisonment filed by anyone designated as an enemy combatant, now or in the future.

The relevant section from Section 9 of Article 1 of the Constitution:

The privilege of the Writ of Habeas Corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in Cases of Rebellion or Invasion the public Safety may require it.

Court Told It Lacks Power in Detainee Cases

In the days since the killings in a schoolhouse in Nickel Mines, Pa., the tone from the grieving Amish community has been not of despair or revenge, but of forgiveness.

A relative of 13-year-old Marian Fisher, one of the children shot by Charles Carl Roberts, 32, extended an invitation to Roberts' widow to attend the girl's funeral. The Amish woman told a reporter, "It's our Christian love to show to her we have not any grudges against her."

...

Still, anyone who has ever set out on the winding road to forgiveness knows it is easier to talk the talk than to walk the walk. This week the Amish have offered all of us a superb lesson on how to make the talk and the walk intersect.

Compare and contrast.

Forgiving the unforgivable | Chicago Tribune