"Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are."

If Schnabel is a surfer in the sense of knowing how to skim existence for its wonders, he is also a surfer in the more challenging sense of wanting to see where something bigger than himself, or the unknown, will take him, even with the knowledge that he might not come back from the trip.

Have you seen "The Diving Bell and the Butterfly"?

The Nerve and the Will

US President George W Bush has given his first interview to the BBC in almost seven years.

Here is the full transcript of his conversation with BBC World News America presenter Matt Frei.

An excerpt:

Frei: The Senate yesterday passed a bill outlawing water-boarding. You, I believe, have said that you will veto that bill.

Mr Bush: That's not -

Frei: Does that not send the wrong signal ...

Mr Bush: No, look... that's not the reason I'm vetoing the bill. The reason I'm vetoing the bill - first of all, we have said that whatever we do... will be legal. Secondly, they are imposing a set of standards on our intelligence communities in terms of interrogating prisoners that our people will think will be ineffective. And, you know, to the critics, I ask them this: when we, within the law, interrogate and get information that protects ourselves and possibly others in other nations to prevent attacks, which attack would they have hoped that we wouldn't have prevented? And so, the United States will act within the law. We'll make sure professionals have the tools necessary to do their job within the law. Now, I recognise some say that these - terrorists - really aren't that big a threat to the United States anymore. I fully disagree. And I think the president must give his professionals within the law the necessary tools to protect us. So, we're not having a debate not only how you interrogate people. We're having a debate in America on whether or not we ought to be listening' to terrorists making' phone calls in the United States. And the answer is darn right we ought to be.

Have you seen Taxi to the Dark Side?

George W Bush's BBC interview

The outcome in the Senate amounted, in effect, to a broader proxy vote in support of Mr. Bush’s wiretapping program. The wide-ranging debate before the final vote presaged discussion that will play out this year in the presidential and Congressional elections on other issues testing the president’s wartime authority, including secret detentions, torture and Iraq war financing.

Have you seen Taxi to the Dark Side?

Republicans hailed the reworking of the surveillance law as essential to protecting national security, but some Democrats and many liberal advocacy groups saw the outcome as another example of the Democrats’ fears of being branded weak on terrorism.

“Unfortunately, those who are advocating this notion that you have to give up liberties to be more secure are apparently prevailing. They’re convincing people that we’re at risk either politically, or at risk as a nation.”

... the White House has agreed to give House lawmakers access to internal documents on the wiretapping program.

From the archive:

About the failure everyone now agrees. But what was the problem? And what should be done to make us safe?

It wasn't respect for the Constitution that kept the NSA from reading the "Tomorrow is zero hour" message until the day after the disaster. It was lack of translators. To meet that kind of problem, the Comint professionals have a default solution: more. Not just more Arab linguists but more of everything -- more analysts, more polygraph examiners and security guards, more freedom to listen in on more people, more listening posts, more coverage, more secrecy.

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.

Get it? Got it. Not so good.

Attendant: More anything?
Jerry: More everything!

Senate Votes for Expansion of Executive Power

No other book covers this vital subject in such a comprehensive and understandable fashion.

Lameness

Most American academics start their careers re­searching something small and obscure, and ­then—­if they’re ­lucky—­work their way up to topics of larger import and scope. Only at the pinnacle of their profession are they permitted to muse on sweeping themes.

The midwife kept a record of a regular life filled with such “women’s work” as delivering babies, bartering goods, and doing laundry. But women who “made history” in the standard sense were different: To attain anything recognizable to historians as status or influence, women have had to “mis­behave.” And misbehavior brought danger and, frequently, oblivion. We remember only those who successfully “negotiated the boundary between invisibility and scandal.”

Well-­Behaved Women Seldom Make History

An interview with Drew Gilpin Faust, author of "This Republic of Suffering: Death and the American Civil War."

There are a number of things that make Drew Gilpin Faust different from those who've come before her as head honcho of America's flagship university.

Faust is, for example, the only president of Harvard known to have produced an academic paper titled "Equine Relics of the Civil War," the research for which included attending a solemn burial ceremony for the cremated bones of Stonewall Jackson's horse.

She is, it seems almost certain, the only one among the anointed to talk about what inspires her by calling herself "an archive rat."

...

In the 21st century, we "shy away from death," she says, and we tend to think of a good death as a sudden one. Not so in the 19th century. Dying well meant having time to assess your spiritual state and say goodbye -- which is difficult to do if you're killed in battle.

What's more, there were so many dying: some 620,000 soldiers in four years. As a percentage of population, Faust says, that's "the equivalent of 6 million Americans today."

How could the culture not be changed?

... Her early work centered on the intellectual arguments of slavery's prewar defenders. She wanted to understand how whole classes of people can get caught up in a shared worldview, to the point that they simply can't see.

Challenging History

Abstract:

Deep changes in the ways that people create ideas, goods, and wealth are reshaping the global economy. These changes make innovation—the creation of new goods and services—the center of economic activity. This new report explores the critical role of intellectual property protection (IPR) in a global information economy and argues that the extent to which countries protect intellectual property will determine how well they perform in the new economic environment.

An excerpt:

Some argue that strong IPR is no longer important as there are alternatives that will create equal or greater amounts of innovation. The problem with these alternatives is that they tend not to work.

Intellectual Property Protection | Center for Strategic and International Studies

Gregory Mankiw:

Some years ago, I read on a birthday card that you know you are old when you spend more time thinking about money than sex. If so, we economists must age prematurely.

It is hard not be worried about the economy. No, I am not talking about the subprime meltdown and the possible recession that looms on the horizon.

My parents’ recession is not my problem, and our next recession will not concern our children when they reach adulthood.

What worry me are the problems that we will bequeath to our children ... an issue that no presidential candidate has taken up in earnest.

Democratic candidates like to talk about expanding the social safety net with universal health insurance. But they blithely ignore the fact that the safety net we already have was bought on credit and that the bill is almost due.

My Birthday Wish: Not Burdening Our Children

WSJ:

George W. Bush took office in 2001 with budget surpluses projected to stretch years into the future. But it's almost certain that when he returns to Texas next year, the president will leave behind a trail of deficits and debt that will sharply constrain his successor.

In the 2009 budget, the White House ants to cut about $200 billion from the government's medical programs for seniors and the poor. The longer-term picture is darker.

The next president, if he or she serves two terms, could find the U.S. government so deeply in hock that it would face losing its Triple-A credit rating, something that has never happened since Moody's Investors Service began grading U.S. securities in 1917.

As a result, the ambitions of Mr. Bush's successor to cut taxes, institute universal health care or aid troubled homeowners might have to give way to the reality of soaring costs for Social Security, the Medicare program for the elderly and the Medicaid program for the poor.

"We kicked this can down the road about as long as it can be," Senate Budget Committee Chairman Kent Conrad, a North Dakota Democrat, said at a hearing this week. "It will absolutely bedevil the next administration."

Legacy of Deficits Will Constrain Bush's Successor

In the Great Depression, Roosevelt saw a third of a nation ill-housed. Here you are, in an alternate reality, in the Second Great Depression, ill-housed yourself.

Your favorite neighbors will hit the road in search of work or an upbeat sense of spiritual self-determinism. Pretty soon you'll pack up and leave too.

It is one thing for Cormac McCarthy to win a Pulitzer last year for a deeply depressing novel ("The Road") about nuclear winter. It's another thing entirely -- bad juju -- to envision or talk about the ruin of our economy.

Yet isn't that the point of fretting -- imagining the worst?

Even in the darkest times, 75 million Americans a week were finding a way to go to the movies. (A 15-cent movie ticket in 1933, adjusted for inflation, should cost only $2.40 now. Tell us again how everything's okay?)

"There's this hunger in this generation for discussing collective purpose," he says. "There's a spiritual hunger for something larger to be a part of. They remember 9/11 and being urged to continue shopping."

Wasn't It Great?