The US government called it "the largest single drug cash seizure the world has ever seen."

When the law caught up with Ye Gon on Monday night, his weeks on the lam ended in an Asian restaurant on Veirs Mill Road in Wheaton, Maryland -- in P.J. Rice Bistro, in Westfield Wheaton mall, near a Ruby Tuesday and a JCPenney.

Not Your Average Drug Bust

A number of tactical and strategic considerations have led us to conclude that al Qaeda does not pose a strategic threat.

Al Qaeda and the Strategic Threat to the U.S. Homeland

Fifteen years after David Sedaris began baring his soul in magazines and on public radio, a new generation of writers has emerged, galvanized by the Internet. Much of their work is highly revealing, exploring relationships and other emotional material. But if this seems endemic to our voyeuristic culture, the larger question is why so many writers want (or need) to expose themselves.

Blogging: a crash course on introspection

Imagine a library that collected all the world's information about all the world's books and made it available for everyone to view and update. We're building that library.

The Open Library (Open Library)

If noir is the great urban style of the movies — and it is — then New York City is surely the noirest place on earth.

N.Y.C. Noir

Howard Bloom should be proud.

Read A Book!

The American benchmark of holding provincial elections would also require new elections in southern Iraq and Baghdad. If they were held, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim's Supreme Islamic Iraqi Council (SIIC, previously known as SCIRI), which now controls seven of the nine southern governorates, would certainly lose ground to Moqtada al-Sadr. His main base is in Baghdad and new elections would almost certainly leave his followers in control of Baghdad Governorate, with one quarter of Iraq's population. Iraq's decentralized constitution gives the governorates enormous powers and significant shares of the national budget, if they choose to exercise these powers. New local elections are not required until 2009 and it is hard to see how early elections strengthening al-Sadr, who is hostile to the US and appears to have close ties to Iran, serve American interests. But this is precisely what the Bush administration is pushing for and Congress seems to want.

But even if Iraq's politicians could agree to the benchmarks, this wouldn't end the insurgency or the civil war. ... The differences are fundamental and cannot be papered over by sharing oil revenues, reemploying ex-Baathists, or revising the constitution. The war is not about those things.

On June 25, Richard Lugar, the most respected Republican voice on foreign affairs in Congress, noted that agreements reached with Iraqi leaders are most often not implemented ... because Iraqi leaders have discovered that telling the Bush administration what it wants to hear is a fully acceptable substitute for action.

Iraq: The Way to Go

The pirate system was based on an important insight: leaders who are great in a battle or some other crisis are not necessarily great managers, and concentrating power in one pair of hands often leads to bad decision-making.

Pirate governance, peculiar as it may sound, offers an intriguing example of how limits on executive power can actually make an enterprise more successful and, because workers are convinced they’re being treated fairly, can deepen their commitment.

The Pirates’ Code

Stratfor dissects the story.

It was a week in which everyone focused on the war, but not one that made a whole lot of sense -- at least on the surface.

... The issue, as always, is how good the gut is.

... Precisely what do we mean when we say al Qaeda?

... When the US government speaks about thousands of al Qaeda fighters, the vision is that the camps are filled with these thousands of men with the skill level of the 9/11 attackers. It is a scary vision, which the administration has pushed since 9/11, but it isn't true.

Week out of Focus: Washington, Iraq and Al Qaeda

I found this essay in the latest issue of Harper's. It appeared first (though in slightly different form) in the March/April issue of Orion magazine. See also part two, The Ecology of Work, from the May/June issue. It is worth reading in full, but I will pull a few quotes to draw you in.

ENVIRONMENTAL DESTRUCTION proceeds apace in spite of all the warnings, the good science, the 501(c)3 organizations with their memberships in the millions, the poll results, and the martyrs perched high in the branches of sequoias or shot dead in the Amazon. This is so not because of a power, a strength out there that we must resist. It is because we are weak and fearful. Only a weak and fearful society could invest so much desperate energy in protecting activities that are the equivalent of suicide.

... The belief that corporate power is the unique source of our problems is not the only idol we are subject to. There is an idol even in the language we use to account for our problems. Our primary dependence on the scientific language of “environment,” “ecology,” “diversity,” “habitat,” and “ecosystem” is a way of acknowledging the superiority of the very kind of rationality that serves not only the Sierra Club but corporate capitalism as well.

... Perhaps the most powerful way in which we conspire against ourselves is the simple fact that we have jobs. We are willingly part of a world designed for the convenience of what Shakespeare called “the visible God”: money. When I say we have jobs, I mean that we find in them our home, our sense of being grounded in the world, grounded in a vast social and economic order. It is a spectacularly complex, even breathtaking, order, and it has two enormous and related problems. First, it seems to be largely responsible for the destruction of the natural world. Second, it has the strong tendency to reduce the human beings inhabiting it to two functions, working and consuming. It tends to hollow us out.

... I AM INEVITABLY ASKED AT THIS POINT in my argument just what exactly it is that I am proposing that people do. What would I put in capitalism’s place? In reply, I am always tempted to quote Voltaire’s response to the complaint that he had nothing to put in the place of the Christianity he criticized. “What!” he said, “A ferocious beast has sucked the blood of my family; I tell you to get rid of that beast, and you ask me, what shall we put in its place!” Unlike Voltaire, I would also suggest that what has the best chance of defeating the “beast” is spirit. In accepting science as our primary weapon against environmental destruction, we have also had to accept science’s contempt for religion and the spiritual. This is the unfortunate legacy of science’s two-century-old confrontation with what it has always called “religious dogma and superstition.” But this attitude is myopic; it is science at its most stupid.

The Idols of Environmentalism | Curtis White | Orion magazine