Graeme Wood, for The Atlantic:

The city has suffered a killing spree of prominent citizens this year, in what many observers think is the Taliban’s attempt to sow fear among influential Kandaharis.

Uneasy sleeps the mullah who keeps the cloak.

The cloak might cure disease, end hunger, and anoint kings. But bringing security to Kandahar may be beyond its powers.

From Wood's previous report:

“Is the boy a Talib?” I asked. “Future Talib,” he said.

From the scene of an easier problem:

"Mom, we killed women on the street today. We killed kids on bikes. We had no choice."

Security Blanket

Rewilding: the process of creating a lifestyle that is independent of the domestication of civilization.

From the archive, Freeman Dyson:

When children start to play with real genes, evolution as we know it will change forever.

Also:

Although the early West was not completely anarchistic, we believe that government as a legitimate agency of coercion was absent for a long enough period to provide insights into the operation and viability of property rights in the absence of a formal state.

Life:

I was in Africa last year and saw a lot of animals in the wild that I'd only seen in zoos before. It was remarkable how different they seemed. Particularly lions. Lions in the wild seem about ten times more alive. They're like different animals.

Jeremy Rifkin:

Scientists tell us that within the lifetime of today's children, the wild will disappear from the face of the earth.

Have you seen "Revolutionary Road"?

Hopeless emptiness. Now you've said it. Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Re-Wilding

Considering yourself a scientist is equivalent to putting a sign in a cupboard saying "this cupboard must be kept empty." Yes, strictly speaking, you're putting something in the cupboard, but not in the ordinary sense.

From the recent archive, Freeman Dyson:

... I came to Princeton and got to know Hermann Weyl. Weyl was a prototypical bird ... I wrote his obituary for Nature, which ended with a sketch of Weyl as a human being:

"Characteristic of Weyl was an aesthetic sense which dominated his thinking on all subjects. He once said to me, half joking, 'My work always tried to unite the true with the beautiful; but when I had to choose one or the other, I usually chose the beautiful'."

People who solve famous unsolved problems may win big prizes, but people who start new programs are the real pioneers.

Keep Your Identity Small

Peter Munro:

Why bother the brain with dross when technology can pick up the slack? But deeper thought, too, seems to be skipping away in a ready stream of information.

Neil Postman once asked if we had known the impact the motor vehicle would have on life, would we have embraced it so thoroughly. Robert Fitzgerald says it's time we asked the same question of computers.

Technology might lead us two ways. Children might become so accustomed to immediate, on-screen information they fail to probe for deeper levels of insight, imagination and knowledge. Or the need to multitask and prioritize vast pools of information could see them develop equally, if not more valuable, skills.

Fitzgerald: "We're really in the very early days in terms of the development of new internet technologies. While we have seen quite remarkable developments in the rates of blog use or wikis, I suspect five years down the track we will not recognize those technologies we're currently using — they'll be more intuitive, more integrated, more intelligent."

Will you consider yourself a Luddite if one day soon you find yourself Romantically recalling the clickety clack of the keyboard and the glow of the big screen?

From the archive, Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

Of course, Nick Carr:

I’m not thinking the way I used to think.

A final dose of Dyson:

Now, after three billion years, the Darwinian interlude is over.

Is technology eating our brains?

In view of the devastating dip, we've gone to great pains not to make light of our customers' gloom, even as we work to magnify our margins.

Wells Fargo canceled a four-day corporate event in Las Vegas as financial firms cut perks amid criticism from lawmakers. "We had scaled back the mortgage event, but in light of the current environment, we have now decided to cancel."

He starts scrambling, easily finds holds for his hands and feet, basks in the thin sunshine. Then the gully gets steeper, tougher and narrower; thunderclouds gather overhead. Soon our adventurer, perched on a ledge with nothing below but air, realizes he's stuck. At which point, this thought occurs: knowing precisely how he got into such a fix is an interesting question, one that he will enjoy discussing with fellow climbers at that nice bar in the valley. But the important thing right now is to get down. In one piece.

In light of the current environment, Goldman decided to reschedule the hedge-fund managers' conference.

Georgia is well positioned to weather the financial crisis thanks to billions of dollars in aid ...

They said it is in consideration of the current dip in the housing industry.

Move the Texas governor into the Speaker's Apartment, and that's a savings to the state of $108,000 a year. That may seem like small potatoes, but that's probably as much as the governor spends annually on Dippity-do.

TLC liked the idea of creating a program that focuses on new good ideas out there for real estate, said Dustin Smith, TLC's director of publicity. "Of course, we take great pains not to make light of the situation," he said.

People are often at great pains to keep the bulimia outwardly hidden.

As usual, the game that's played around Washington is find something little that you can complain about and see if you can magnify it.

We should probably tell you that the full title of this game is Zombies! Apocalypse - Massive Multiplayer Online Zombies Massacre, even tho... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Alec Dubro wrote:

The personal automobile must be abandoned, and quickly.

Bucy responded:

What's the point in writing an article like this? Your base is going to applaud and everyone else is going to ignore you because this is not remotely constructive.

By way of reply, I'll quote Orwell on Dickens:

Whatever else Dickens may have been, he was not a hole-and-corner soul-saver, the kind of well-meaning idiot who thinks that the world will be perfect if you amend a few bylaws and abolish a few anomalies. It is worth comparing him with Charles Reade, for instance. Reade was a much better-informed man than Dickens, and in some ways more public-spirited. He really hated the abuses he could understand, he showed them up in a series of novels which for all their absurdity are extremely readable, and he probably helped to alter public opinion on a few minor but important points. But it was quite beyond him to grasp that, given the existing form of society, certain evils cannot be remedied. Fasten upon this or that minor abuse, expose it, drag it into the open, bring it before a British jury, and all will be well that is how he sees it. Dickens at any rate never imagined that you can cure pimples by cutting them off. In every page of his work one can see a consciousness that society is wrong somewhere at the root. It is when one asks "Which root?" that one begins to grasp his position.

The truth is that Dickens's criticism of society is almost exclusively moral. Hence the utter lack of any constructive suggestion anywhere in his work. He attacks the law, parliamentary government, the educational system and so forth, without ever clearly suggesting what he would put in their places. Of course it is not necessarily the business of a novelist, or a satirist, to make constructive suggestions, but the point is that Dickens's attitude is at bottom not even destructive. There is no clear sign that he wants the existing order to be overthrown, or that he believes it would make very much difference if it were overthrown. For in reality his target is not so much society as "human nature". It would be difficult to point anywhere in his books to a passage suggesting that the economic system is wrong as a system. Nowhere, for instance, does he make any attack on private enterprise or private property. Even in a book like Our Mutual Friend, which turns on the power of corpses to interfere with living people by means of idiotic wills, it does not occur to him to suggest that individuals ought not to have this irresponsible power. Of course one can draw this inference for oneself, and one can draw it again from the remarks about Bounderby's will at the end of Hard Times, and indeed from the whole of Dickens's work one can infer the evil of laissez-faire capitalism; but Dick... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

RE: The Myth of the Efficient Car

From an Australian news outlet:

It has been described as the world's largest rubbish dump, or the Pacific plastic soup, and it is starting to alarm scientists.

It is a vast area of plastic debris and other flotsam drifting in the northern Pacific Ocean, held there by swirling ocean currents.

From Decius:

One must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-911 mentality.

From the National Plan to Achieve Maritime Domain Awareness:

Maritime domain awareness is the effective understanding of anything associated with the global maritime domain that could impact the United States’ security, safety, economy, or environment.

Maritime domain awareness will be achieved by improving our ability to collect, fuse, analyze, display, and disseminate actionable information and intelligence to operational commanders and decision makers.

These capabilities must be fused in a common operating picture that is available to maritime operational commanders and accessible as appropriate throughout the US government. This dynamic, scalable, common operating picture will provide the appropriate types and level of information to the various agencies in a near-real time, customizable, network-centric virtual information grid.

I remember a time - not so long ago - when a lot of people used to make fun of Japanese tourists, who'd get out of their tour buses and spend just enough time at any given place to take a photo. After all, what kind of experience was that if all you did was to take a photo? Fast forward to today, and there we are, with our digital cameras and/or cell phone cameras.

From last year's best-of:

So many things these days are made to look at later. Why not just have the experience and remember it?

From the 2006 Year in Ideas:

The reverse panopticon is now Sousveillance ...

A Bill:

Beginning 1 year after the date of enactment of this Act, any mobile phone containing a digital camera that is manufactured for sale in the United States shall sound a tone or other sound audible within a reasonable radius of the phone whenever a photograph is taken with the camera in such phone. A mobile phone manufactured after such date shall not be equipped with a means of disabling or silencing such tone or sound.

The Air Is Full of Sound:

... the kind of music people would pay good money to be able to silence, if only there were a switch.

A guru said this?

To minimize the risk, the government technology gurus have made it impossible to forward e-mail messages from the president or to send him attachments, people informed about the precautions say. His address is likely to be changed regularly as well. And the president’s friends and staff members are being lectured about security.

Security first:

The man "made the off-hand comment, 'Hey everybody. It's Richard Simmons. Let's drop our bags and rock to the '50s,"' said Phoenix police Sgt. Tom Osborne. "Mr. Simmons took exception to it and walked over to the other passenger and apparently slapped him in the face.

At all times:

* Control all bags and personal items.
* Do not accept any items to carry onboard a flight from anyone unknown to you.
* Report any unattended items in the airport or on an aircraft to the nearest airport airline or security personnel.

(Cell Phone) Cameras Forever

George Friedman:

The Taliban didn’t wait long to test Barack Obama.

What we need in Afghanistan is intelligence, and special operations forces and air power that can take advantage of that intelligence. Fighting terrorists requires identifying and destroying small, dispersed targets. We would need far fewer forces for such a mission than the number that are now deployed.

Winding down the conventional war while increasing the covert one will demand a cultural change in Washington. The Obama administration seems to prefer the conventional route of putting more troops on the ground. That would be a feasible strategy if supply lines to Afghanistan were secure. The loss of that bridge yesterday demonstrates very clearly that they are not.

Afghan Supplies, Russian Demands

Joe Nocera:

Wall Street traders are extremely reluctant to give up the "eat what you kill" mentality that has dominated their profession these past two decades. There is no sense of shared enterprise at most firms, and no belief among the rank and file that they should have to pay a price if the firm is drowning in losses and needs government support. That is why they are so blind to how they appear to the rest of us. They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Paul Graham:

It will always suck to work for large organizations, and the larger the organization, the more it will suck.

Jose Saramago:

If only all life's deceptions were like this one, and all they had to do was to come to some agreement, Number two is mine, yours is number three, let that be understood once and for all, Were it not for the fact that we're blind this mix-up would never have happened, You're right, our problem is that we're blind.

Nathan Myhrvold:

At one point we saw a lone bull that was trying to get back to the herd, which was about a half mile away. In between him and the herd were four lionesses, sacked out asleep. This looked like the perfect opportunity for a kill, but the buffalo surprised both us and the lions. He crept up on the sleeping lions, then when he got close he lowered his horns and charged. The lions awoke, panicked and scattered into the bushes. The buffalo then trotted victorious back to the pride.

Niall Ferguson:

What about the rest of us?

Well, we shall now have to question some of our most deeply rooted assumptions—not only about the benefits of paper money but also about the rationale of the property-owning democracy itself.

Bob the Banker says:

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Back in Baltimore, Burrell barks:

Anyone who can't bring the numbers we need will be replaced by someone who can.

It’s Not the Money, It’s the Principle