She’s part of a circle of New York singers and songwriters who play one another’s songs and swap backup musicians. Sometimes she visits Lower East Side karaoke bars and belts out songs by Shakira or Guns N’ Roses. She’s also a member of various bands — the Sloppy Joannes, the Mazelles, the Little Willies — who show up as opening acts at no-cover-charge places like the Rodeo Bar. But she’s far better known by her own name: Norah Jones.

The new album, Not Too Late, is out next week.

I noticed that Amazon now has high-res photos, like this one, on the product pages.

Now in Her Own Words

In a competitive democracy, it is difficult to rescue a war built on distortions and illusions, because, to protect falsehoods proffered to voters in the past, a President and his advisers may find it tempting to manufacture more of them. It does not require a cynic to see that even an implausible escalation plan has the virtue of putting domestic political opponents back on their heels. This was the advice given by McGeorge Bundy to Lyndon Johnson in a memo dated February 7, 1965, concerning an escalation plan for Vietnam that Bundy thought might have as little as a twenty-five-per-cent chance of success:

Even if it fails, the policy will be worth it. At a minimum it will damp down the charge that we did not do all that we could have done, and this charge will be important in many countries, including our own.

The Bush Administration is now reworking this sad axiom, and, once again, American soldiers will be asked to give their lives for its assumptions. Under the Constitution, only Congress can prevent this from occurring, but its members have exhibited little evidence in the past that they possess the skill or the will to do so.

This seems like as good a time as any to drop in my belated comments on the Surge address:

To give every Iraqi citizen a stake in the country's economy, Iraq will pass legislation to share oil revenues among all Iraqis.

That way, no one needs to get a real job, which is rather quite convenient, because there really aren't any.

To show that it is committed to delivering a better life, the Iraqi government will spend $10 billion of its own money on reconstruction and infrastructure projects that will create new jobs.

The phrase "of its own money" sounds like the accumulated weekly allowance of a child.

This would bring al Qaeda closer to its goals of taking down Iraq's democracy, building a radical Islamic empire, and launching new attacks on the United States at home and abroad.

Al Qaeda doesn't want to base its empire on a Shia population.

America's men and women in uniform took away al Qaeda's safe haven in Afghanistan -- and we will not allow them to re-establish it in Iraq.

Fortunately for al Qaeda, Pakistan is working out just fine right now.

Succeeding in Iraq also requires defending its territorial integrity and stabilizing the region in the face of extremist challenges. This begins with addressing Iran and Syria.

This is not quite the dialogue the Study Group had in mind.

We will ... deploy Patriot air defense systems to reassure our friends and allies.

How is this relevant to the fight against sectarian violence in Baghdad? Oh, right; this is where the cats and dogs come in.

Countries like Saudi Arabia, Egypt, Jordan, and the Gulf States need to understand that an American defeat in Iraq would create a new sanctuary for extremists and a strategic threat to their survival.

Where is Pakistan?

It is the decisive ideological struggle of our time. On one side are those who believe in freedom and moderation. On the other side are extremists who kill the innocent, and have declared their intention to destroy our way of life.

Recall the Doonesbury cartoon ... false dichotomies.

The handy thing about this characterization is that it's fully reversible.

... millions of ordinary people are sick of the violence ...

This has a certain John Edwards sound to it.

Let me be clear: The terrorists and insurgents in Iraq are without conscience ...

Again, total lack of understanding of the adversary.

Comment: The Planner | Steve Coll | The New Yorker

On Tuesday, Mr. Hastings will begin to answer that question. Netflix is introducing a service to deliver (initially) about 350 movies and 650 television shows directly to users’ PCs, not as downloads but as streaming video, which is not retained in computer memory. The service, which is free to Netflix subscribers, is meant to give the company a toehold in the embryonic world of Internet movie distribution.

Mr. Hastings said he chose the instant delivery afforded by streaming technology over downloads, which can take a while, because it would encourage subscribers to use the system to browse the catalog and discover new movies. If they do not like a movie, they can stop it and will be charged only for the minutes they actually watched.

I like this justification for streaming. Now, if only the service were extended to include the more obscure titles in the inventory, this would be an interesting augmentation for browsing the catalog.

Netflix to Deliver Movies to the PC

Q: In the past few years, poetry sales have reportedly been climbing, perhaps because a poem appeals to shortened attention spans.

A: That’s true. It doesn’t take so long to read a poem, and if you need a quick fix or consolation, you can get it.

For a while now I've been considering Assassin's Gate, George Packer's book about his time in occupied Iraq. Yesterday I noticed the following quote at the beginning of the prologue:

Dive into the sea, or stay away.
- Nizar Qabbani

I almost bought the book on that alone.

Andrew Bacevich also found this noteworthy:

As the epigraph for his new book on the politics of America's intervention in Iraq, George Packer has chosen a verse by the Arab nationalist poet Nizar Qabbani: "Dive into the sea, or stay away." The poet's charge aptly captures the thesis of The Assassins' Gate: a great enterprise requires unequivocal commitment; to act halfheartedly is worse than not acting at all.

I am reminded of Rita Katz:

Rita Katz has a very specific vision of the counterterrorism problem, which she shares with most of the other contractors and consultants who do what she does. They believe that the government has failed to appreciate the threat of Islamic extremism, and that its feel for counterterrorism is all wrong. As they see it, the best way to fight terrorists is to go at it not like G-men, with two-year assignments and query letters to the staff attorneys, but the way the terrorists do, with fury and the conviction that history will turn on the decisions you make -- as an obsession and as a life style. Worrying about overestimating the threat is beside the point, because underestimating the threat is so much worse.

Bacevich concludes his review on a dour note:

Sometimes the effect of diving into the sea is anything but cleansing.

Well Versed: Questions for John Ashbery

Jeff may be in jail, and Lay may rest (in peace?), but Enron is partly your fault, too.

The national-security expert Gregory Treverton has famously made a distinction between puzzles and mysteries. Osama bin Laden’s whereabouts are a puzzle. We can’t find him because we don’t have enough information. The key to the puzzle will probably come from someone close to bin Laden, and until we can find that source bin Laden will remain at large.

The problem of what would happen in Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein was, by contrast, a mystery. It wasn’t a question that had a simple, factual answer. Mysteries require judgments and the assessment of uncertainty, and the hard part is not that we have too little information but that we have too much. The CIA had a position on what a post-invasion Iraq would look like, and so did the Pentagon and the State Department and Colin Powell and Dick Cheney and any number of political scientists and journalists and think-tank fellows. For that matter, so did every cabdriver in Baghdad.

The distinction is not trivial. If you consider the motivation and methods behind the attacks of September 11th to be mainly a puzzle, for instance, then the logical response is to increase the collection of intelligence, recruit more spies, add to the volume of information we have about Al Qaeda. If you consider September 11th a mystery, though, you’d have to wonder whether adding to the volume of information will only make things worse. You’d want to improve the analysis within the intelligence community; you’d want more thoughtful and skeptical people with the skills to look more closely at what we already know about Al Qaeda. You’d want to send the counterterrorism team from the CIA on a golfing trip twice a month with the counterterrorism teams from the FBI and the NSA and the Defense Department, so they could get to know one another and compare notes.

If things go wrong with a puzzle, identifying the culprit is easy: it’s the person who withheld information. Mysteries, though, are a lot murkier: sometimes the information we’ve been given is inadequate, and sometimes we aren’t very smart about making sense of what we’ve been given, and sometimes the question itself cannot be answered. Puzzles come to satisfying conclusions. Mysteries often don’t.

Update: Joe Nocera says Gladwell is flat wrong:

A central defense argument — that Enron didn’t really do anything illegal — has been given new life by Malcolm Gladwell. And it isn’t remotely true.

Open Secrets | Malcolm Gladwell | The New Yorker

Nanochick wrote:
I think its about time that the Memestreams Community and the people who work hard coding Memestreams in their free time get the recognition they deserve. Therefore, I have nominated memestreams for a "Weblog Award", and I hope others in the community will do the same.

Thanks Nano! I don't think anyone has nominated us for a Bloggie before. Frankly, if everyone who regularly reads this site nominates us, we stand a reasonable chance to get past the first round. That would certainly be fun. Apparently you can nominate a blog to multiple categories. I think "Best Community Blog" and "Best Kept Secret" are probably the best two for us, but I won't discourage other nominations. :) Just do it quick. Voting closes on January 10th.

Update on 2007-01-25: The nominations have been announced. MemeStreams is not on the lists.

Seventh Annual Weblog Awards

When I saw this headline, I just had to recommend this article.

For those familiar only with Ms. Heaton’s light comedy or political profile, her gale-force performance and her gleeful way with the obscenity-packed dialogue may come as a surprise. This is, after all, the same woman who walked out of the 2003 American Music Awards telecast, before her scheduled appearance, in disgust over the language and behavior of some presenters.

Not Everybody Loves Patricia Heaton

In a recent LA Times op-ed, various executives and pundits are polled for tech sector stock tips. Steve Ballmer suspiciously boasts:

Many technologies have the potential to catch fire, including Internet television, mobile video devices and even robots.

Perhaps "robots" seemed like a random comment at the time.

Well, the long form of the story is told by Bill Gates in the December issue of Scientific American. Apparently, robots are a lot like personal computers, and they're finally poised for takeoff.

With childlike naïvety, Gates characterizes DARPA's sponsorship of both packet networking and autonomous vehicles as "intriguing."

Gates and Paul Allen wrote the first BASIC interpreter for the IBM PC, Commodore 64, and many other systems. He wants Microsoft to "provide the same kind of common, low-level foundation for integrating hardware and software into robot designs."

I mentioned before that everyone in the LA Times piece was selling something. So, what is Gates pushing?

Microsoft Robotics Studio -- "Our goal for this release is to create an affordable, open platform that allows robot developers to readily integrate hardware and software into their designs."

In clever contrast to his comment about DARPA, Gates wraps up his futurist essay on "robots" by explaining that these robots won't look like those of science fiction -- so much so that you won't even call them robots. This is a nice way of insulating himself from being 'wrong' about the future.

Bill Gates: A Robot in Every Home | Scientific American

Stratfor looks back at major events of the year, touching on Russia, Hamas, Israel, cartoons, Iraq, immigration, China, Somalia, Mexico, Kashmir, Cuba, Lebanon, Thailand, Korea, Venezuela, Britain, and more.

This is a short two-page summary time-line.

STRATFOR's Year in Review for 2006 [PDF]

The op-ed page of the LA Times solicited commentary from a full slate of futurist technology pundits who, as it turns out, have nothing but good things to say about the year ahead. The future is so bright, I've got to go buy some tech stocks! Most of them are plugging specific products or services; either that, or analysis has devolved into the old tired/wired dichotomy. Aside from the one-phrase bylines, there are no financial interest disclosures here. I thought those had become de rigueur in the business and financial press, but apparently not so for editorials.

Aside from Ballmer, none featured here are in the hardware business. None are in the infrastructure business. Is this a signal? Are we done there? What of Intel, AMD, Motorola, Broadcom, etc.?

I am especially struck by the pundits' more-of-the-same ideas; perhaps this is partly due to the too-near horizon established by the paper. Ballmer is spun up about policy-based ring-tones; what is that, like, a few hundred lines of code? Sherman is touting Second Life. Several are enamored of YouTube and the slow collapse of broadcast. Barry sees nothing but upside -- freedom! -- in having your entire life's "state" on a memory stick; not content to simply ignore the question of risk, he concludes that the lowest risk option is to carry your digital medical records, tax returns, and a lifetime of recorded communications (voice, video, text, other) in something that could drop from your pocket onto the city sidewalk without notice.

Where are the new applications, the new ideas? The "personal genomics kit" is tantalizing, but Brockman offers no explanation. You can find more here and here. I think people might be as much or more interested in a kit of the variety described by Freeman Dyson -- more of a "toy with consequences", along the lines of a high school chemistry set. (I note that there are as yet zero Google hits for that phrase.)

A few thoughts:

The Internet may start to experience some major growing pains in 2007. IPv6 has been stillborn, known routing problems remain unresolved, and the IPv4 address space is nearing its limits. From the consumer perspective, we are nearly at the end of end to end; by the end of 2007, we may see the start of a trend in which residential broadband Internet service ceases to include a public IP address. 2008 could bring the era of double- and triple-NATted networks.

Vista enhancements notwithstanding, and the industry alarmists put aside, Internet security is in a rather dismal state.

What will they think of next?