I guess the name of this MemeStreams topic needs to be changed ...

"What we really want now is a strategic approach to defeat violent extremism. GWOT is catchy, but there may be a better way to describe it, and those are things that ought to be incumbent on us to look at."

A key aspect is likely to be the addition of public diplomacy efforts aimed at winning over Arab public sentiment, and State Department official Paul Simons said at a congressional hearing earlier this month that the "internal deliberative process" was broadly conceived to encompass everything from further crackdowns on terrorist financing networks to policies aimed at curbing the teaching of holy war against the West and other "tools with respect to the global war on terrorism."

MemeStreams, you tool! Use MemeStreams!

"They recognize there's been a vacuum of leadership. There has been a dearth of senior leadership directing this day to day. No one knows who's running this on a day-to-day basis."

Is he talking about Us or Them? Too close to call?

Does this help to clarify?

"No doubt they been destroyed. No doubt they are no longer capable to launch the kind of attacks that they did on all of us a few years ago."

Probably not ...

Review May Shift Terror Policies

Asked what carrots the Europeans had offered as incentives, a European negotiator replied, "There were no carrots."

Hmm ... none? Surely there's at least one, I think.

Flaming Carrot is a very calculatedly surreal character. I'm kind of curious when you got into surrealism and some of its many offshoots.

Flaming Carrot

FRONTLINE/World and BBC reporter Paul Kenyon travels deep into Iran to investigate charges that Iran is secretly developing a nuclear bomb. With exclusive access to a U.N. inspection team, Kenyon visits Iran's most sensitive nuclear sites and reports on the escalating diplomatic tensions surrounding the discovery of the facilities.

Frontline shows what great reporting can be. If only there were more of it on television (and in the media, generally) today. Unfortunately, the commercial networks suffer from different motivations.

Iran, Going Nuclear | PBS Frontline/World

Oh! I feel it. I feel the cosmos!

Katamari Damacy

This is funny.

Open a Kensington Laptop Lock with a roll of toilet paper.... [WMV]

The Long Tail is about the shift from hits to niches. Several readers have asked what this means for the future of mass (hit-driven, mainstream) culture in America. The short answer is that it will not only get less mass, but that this is a trend that's already well underway.

This Long Tail Blog could be a big hit! Stay tuned!

The Long Tail Blog

Fat people hate music.

The average amount of time that Americans spend listening to recorded music annually has dropped significantly over the past 7 years.

... not to mention the appalling decline in the quality of said popular music. I wish I could see the breakdown by artist, across the population. To think of the cumulative lifetimes spent listening to Britney Spears, Hilary Duff, Lindsay Lohan, Ashlee Simpson, and the rest ...

However, I disagree with the assertion that the quality of "recorded music" has decreased in any meaningful way. The fact that lots of crap is being generated is distinct from the ongoing (but proportionally much smaller) production of excellent music. The disparity should not require explanation; it should be obvious even to the casual observer that it is far easier to churn out crap than to produce great art, regardless of the medium.

Honestly I am surprised by the average figure of 13 hours for "box office." If you go to the PDF source file from the Census Bureau -- which I highly recommend, by the way -- it's quite clear that this refers to "movies in theaters." So this means that the "average American" (NOT to be confused with the "ordinary American") goes to the movie theater only six times a year. How does Hollywood generate the numbers they do? With 55 billion in revenues for 2001, there must be a really long tail on that distribution ...

You'd think that, in addition to all of the gloriously lazy prolonged sitting that's involved, the fat people would be drawn to the super-sized jug of soda and barrel of low-grade popcorn with the "movie theater butter." But the available data seem to show them dining at McDonald's far more often than at the movie theater.

Of course, in a few years, McDonald's will buy Sony, and all will be well again in this world. Just wait for the synergy! The value propositions are outstanding! Why hasn't this happened already? It's crazy!

Recall that total revenues for the entire motion picture industry were at 55 billion. Compare that to these figures, courtesy of supersizeme.com:

* Americans spend more than 110 billion a year on fast food.
* McDonald's represents 43% of the total US fast food market.

So McDonald's alone has annual revenues that rival those of the entire motion picture industry.

Americans tuning out recorded music

He itched to wiretap her, to read her email or listen in on her phone conversations. He could have done that when they were still together, but he never had. If he had, he would have found out what she was planning. He could have talked her out of it.

Cory Doctorow | I, Robot

A few weeks after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, an FBI agent called the Whitney Museum of American Art and asked to see a drawing on exhibit there. The piece was by Mark Lombardi, an artist who had committed suicide the year before. Using just a pencil and a huge sheet of paper, Lombardi had created an intricate pattern of curves and arcs to illustrate the links between global finance and international terrorism.

Something to listen to while you look through the year in graphs.

NPR : The 'Conspiracy' Art of Mark Lombardi

The new year is often time for reflection on where we have been and where we are going. Sometimes that reflection happens over a beer. Sometimes that reflection happens with a gun to your head. In fact, both occurred here at Industrial Memetics when Decius and Rattle forced us, their loyal employees, to look back on 2004 and consider the events that have shaped our lives.

MemeStreams - Year in Graphs 2004