Last year, New Scientist revealed that the US Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to detect "hostile thoughts" in people walking through border posts, airports and public places ...

... Oh, and also, south of Houston Street.

The DHS says recent tests prove it works.

Have you shown that proof to your high school math teacher?

From the archive:

Pre-Crime chief John Anderton buys the motto "That which keeps us safe also keeps us free," until he becomes a fugitive himself. Accused of a crime predicted for the future, he is soon on the run.

Our Behavior Detection teams routinely -- and quietly -- identify problem people just through observable behavior cues.

"We target peeling bears."

To become a behavior-detection officer, screeners undergo four days of classroom training and three days of supervised on-the-job work.

'Pre-crime' detector shows promise

The SEC issued a temporary ban on short sales of 799 financial stocks on Friday, a move against traders who have sought to profit from the financial crisis by betting against bank shares.

"The commission is committed to using every weapon in its arsenal to combat market manipulation that threatens investors and capital markets," said the S.E.C.’s chairman, Christopher Cox.

Those damned bears ...

Like sea lions snacking on Columbia River salmon, it's not the entire bear species causing problems. Bark-peeling is a learned behavior.

"One bear will teach another bear, and then that bear will do it. There are bears that peel and bears that don't peel. We target peeling bears."

Fortunately we've solved that little problem ...

Homer: Not a bear in sight. The "Bear Patrol" is working like a charm!
Lisa: That's specious reasoning, Dad.
Homer: [uncomprehendingly] Thanks, honey.
Lisa: By your logic, I could claim that this rock keeps tigers away.
Homer: Hmm. How does it work?
Lisa: It doesn't work; it's just a stupid rock!
Homer: Uh-huh.
Lisa: But I don't see any tigers around, do you?
Homer: (pause) Lisa, I want to buy your rock.

SEC Temporarily Blocks Short Sales of Financial Stocks

As Decius writes today of "the excesses of recent years", and points out that the Fed has suspended the rules prohibiting banks from using deposits to fund their investment banking subsidiaries, I think of three things:

The mindset of corporate America:

The evidence suggests that from an executive perspective, the most desirable employees may no longer necessarily be those with proven ability and judgment, but those who can be counted on to follow orders and be good "team players."

The mindset of the American public:

The dot-com crash of the early 2000s should have been followed by decades of soul-searching; instead, even before the old bubble had fully deflated, a new mania began to take hold on the foundation of our long-standing American faith that the wide expansion of home ownership can produce social harmony and national economic well-being. Spurred by the actions of the Federal Reserve, financed by exotic credit derivatives and debt securitization, an already massive real estate sales-and-marketing program expanded to include the desperate issuance of mortgages to the poor and feckless, compounding their troubles and ours.

That the Internet and housing hyperinflations transpired within a period of ten years, each creating trillions of dollars in fake wealth, is, I believe, only the beginning. There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.

The mindset of the market:

"Soy! Soy! Soy! Soy! Soy!"

What would Peter Drucker do?

Managers have to learn to ask every few years of every process, every product, every procedure, every policy: "If we did not do this already, would we go into it now knowing what we now know?" If the answer is no, the organization has to ask, "So what do we do now?" And it has to do something, and not say, "Let's make another study."

Neal Stephenson's latest is now available.

Anathem is a magnificent creation: a work of great scope, intelligence, and imagination that ushers readers into a recognizable—yet strangely inverted—world.

This time, Stephenson has given himself the broadest stage yet: a world of his own creation, including a new language. Though he's been consistently ambitious in his work, this latest effort marks a high point in his risk-taking, daring to blend the elements of a barn-burner space opera with heavy dollops of philosophical dialog. It's got elements of Dune, The Name of the Rose, and Michael Frayn's quantum-physics talkathon, Copenhagen. Befitting a novel written by a founding member of the History Book Club, its leitmotif is time—and its message couldn't be more timely.

See also:

For a while I was trying to impose a policy of having a harpoon-throwing character in every single one of my books. But it's difficult to maintain that kind of restraint.

And:

"I had the idea that there would be people who voluntarily stay inside those walls," said Stephenson, a fit 48-year-old who looks like he should carry a broadsword, "as a way of getting away from the distractions of everyday life, of doing something in a serious way that took a long time. And one of their jobs would be to care for the clock."

Anathem, by Neal Stephenson

David Brooks:

The narrow question is this: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be vice president?

This argument also is over what qualities the country needs in a leader and what are the ultimate sources of wisdom.

In the current Weekly Standard, Steven Hayward argues that the nation’s founders wanted uncertified citizens to hold the highest offices in the land. They did not believe in a separate class of professional executives. I would have more sympathy for this view if I hadn’t just lived through the last eight years.

It turns out that governance, the creation and execution of policy, is hard. It requires acquired skills. Most of all, it requires prudence.

What is prudence? It is the ability to grasp the unique pattern of a specific situation. It is the ability to absorb the vast flow of information and still discern the essential current of events — the things that go together and the things that will never go together. It is the ability to engage in complex deliberations and feel which arguments have the most weight.

Democracy is not average people selecting average leaders. It is average people with the wisdom to select the best prepared.

Why Experience Matters

At the convention, Sarah Palin quipped:

"Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and [Obama]'s worried that someone won't read them their rights."

Decius wrote:

This is the road to despotism. This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

Initially I thought Palin just hadn't been paying attention [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8] and didn't know what she was saying. But as her comment continues to reverberate, her intention becomes increasingly clear: this was not just an offhand or ignorant remark, but rather a big Fuck You to the Supreme Court and its decisions over the last four years. And in this she stands in league with McCain [and Yoo and Addington et al], echoing his disdain for the foundation of democracy.

Anthony Lewis writes:

Three times in the last four years the Supreme Court has rejected the Bush administration's legal defenses of its program for detention of alleged "enemy combatants."

Each of these decisions brought an outcry from the political right. Senator John McCain, a survivor of torture as a prisoner in North Vietnam who was once a critic of the Bush detention practices, called Boumediene "one of the worst decisions in the history of the country."

Opening the federal courts to habeas corpus applications from the detainees hardly promises them a swift ticket to freedom. But it marks at least a first step toward accountability—a forum where the treatment of a detainee and the asserted reasons for his imprisonment can be examined. As George Will wrote in a column blasting Senator McCain for the ignorance of his comments on habeas corpus, "the Supreme Court's ruling only begins marking a boundary against government's otherwise boundless power to detain people indefinitely."

A striking example of the importance of having courts check official decisions that someone is an "enemy combatant" is the case of Huzaifa Parhat, one of a number of Uighur Muslims from China who are in Guantánamo. Parhat, who the US military claimed was at a Uighur training camp in Afghanistan in 2001, was captured in Pakistan in the fall of 2001. A three-judge panel of the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit found in June that there was no persuasive evidence to support the government's labeling of him as an enemy combatant. The panel included the court's chief judge, David Sentelle, one of the most conservative federal judges in the country. Its opinion ridiculed the government argument, comparing it to the statement of a Lewis Carroll character: "I have said it thrice: What I tell you three times is true."

Official American Sadism

It was in St. Paul last week that Palin drew raucous cheers when she delivered this put-down of Obama: "Al-Qaeda terrorists still plot to inflict catastrophic harm on America and he's worried that someone won't read them their rights."

But Obama, who taught constitutional law at the University of Chicago for more than a decade, said captured suspects deserve to file writs of habeus corpus.

Calling it "the foundation of Anglo-American law," he said the principle "says very simply: If the government grabs you, then you have the right to at least ask, 'Why was I grabbed?' And say, 'Maybe you've got the wrong person.'"

"The reason that you have this principle is not to be soft on terrorism. It's because that's who we are. That's what we're protecting."

Palin's quip was troubling; I'm pleased to see Obama call her on it, but I don't expect her to seriously engage the subject. It was a throwaway line for her.

Here are two threads on the subject from earlier this year:

Benjamin Wittes’ Law and the Long War is required reading for anyone interested in the legal challenges posed by the war on terror.

Six years after the September 11 attacks, America is losing a crucial front in the ongoing war on terror. It is losing not to Al Qaeda but to its own failure to construct a set of laws that will protect the American people—its military and executive branch, as well as its citizens—in the midst of a conflict unlike any it has faced in the past.

Obama to Palin: 'Don't Mock the Constitution'

Dexter Filkins:

That American and Pakistani soldiers are fighting one another along what was meant to be a border between allies highlights the extraordinarily chaotic situation unfolding inside the Pakistani tribal areas, where hundreds, perhaps thousands, of Taliban, along with Al Qaeda and other foreign fighters, enjoy freedom from American attacks.

But the incident also raises one of the more fundamental questions of the long war against Islamic militancy, and one that looms larger as the American position inside Afghanistan deteriorates: Whose side is Pakistan really on?

... What happens when the militants you have been encouraging grow too strong and set their sights on Pakistan itself? What happens when the bluff no longer works?

... The more Pakistanis I talked to, the more I came to believe that the most reasonable explanations were not necessarily the most plausible ones.

...

What’s going on? I asked the warlord. Why aren’t they coming for you?

“I cannot lie to you,” Namdar said, smiling at last. “The army comes in, and they fire at empty buildings. It is a drama — it is just to entertain.”

Entertain whom? I asked.

“America,” he said.

Right at the Edge

Steve Coll:

David Petraeus is a professional briefer, and with a PowerPoint slide before him he will slip into a salesman’s rapid-fire patter. He illustrates his remarks with a laser pointer; he will swirl a bright dot of emerald light around a particular sentence fragment until a listener risks succumbing to hypnosis. Petraeus and his staff will discuss at length the shading of colors on a slide, or the direction of arrows depicting causality. When I asked, in a skeptical tone, about this passionate use of PowerPoint, the General responded in the staccato of the medium: “It’s how you communicate big ideas—to communicate them effectively.”

In counter-insurgency operations, Petraeus has written, the critical issue for military commanders is “how to think, rather than what to think.” In part because insurgencies and civil conflicts involve political and perceptual contests as well as military ones, “tactics—both those of the enemy and our own—constantly change, and the winning side is generally that which learns faster.”

“What works in Iraq definitely won’t work in Pakistan in the same way,” Petraeus said. “I mean, you cannot envision large numbers of Americans on the ground in any scenario, at least not in the way that they are here.”

The General’s Dilemma

John Nagl:

There are two things we must do and one thing we must not do. First, we must adopt a policy of strategic conditionality at the presidential level. Second, we must exploit our still-significant leverage over Iraq’s security forces. Last, it is vital that the next president not send a signal that he hopes to establish an enduring Korea-style presence in Iraq.

How to Exit Iraq