Enjoy the wit and wisdom from the House of Britney.

It is best not to wear a denim miniskirt so short that when seated it practically disappears beneath the protuberance of one's pregnant belly, producing an image that is more gynecological than fashionable.

One came close to forgetting that she had encouraged the attention with her ... second husband known for displaying the tawdry, laconic demeanor of a pimp on weed.

Focus, focus, focus! A young woman was weeping. She was being pulled down by the pop culture undertow. She was begging for mercy. All the while, the gum continued to smack and crackle in her mouth. Her tears were dislodging her false eyelashes.

Why would Spears, with money and style professionals at her disposal, greet a television crew looking so terribly two-bit?

These were schoolgirl clothes turned discomforting and grotesque because their seams were being tested by a pregnant woman who seemed bewildered.

The interview has been removed from YouTube, but you can still find it on Buzznet. NBC also offers a transcript of the broadcast.

"I make good tea okay?"

Lauer: How far along are you?
Spears: I don’t know. I think six to seven months.

Spears: That driving incident, I did it with my dad. I’d sit on his lap and I drive. We’re country.

Hee haw!

Spears: To be good music it’s gotta be timeless. You know?

Spears: I just love funny people. Funny people are great. You know?

Speaking of funny people, let's detour for a moment:

The inventory of official gifts from 2004, published this week by the state department reads like the wish list of the sort of paranoid survivalist who holes up in his log cabin to await Armageddon, having long ago severed all ties with the rest of the world.

The president received a startling array of weapons, including assorted daggers, and a machete from Gabon. He got the braided whip with a wooden handle from the Hungarian prime minister. The "Worst-Case Scenario Survival Handbook", a gift from the Sultan of Brunei, has some tips on how to use some of these implements in a tight spot.

From Jordan: a small arsenal of guns, including a $10,000 sniper rifle; six jars of fertile volcanic soils found around the country; an aromatherapy gift set; scented candles and a pottery incense burner.

Now that's funny.

Oops, Again And Again

On the surface, this article is ostensibly about al-Z, but it's really about Egypt.

The extremist is never alone; the terrorist on the fringe of political life always works with the winks and nods of the society that gives him cover.

The Egyptian regime, merciless in the way it deals with challenges to its power at home, has never owned up to the darkness of Egyptian terrorists operating the world over. No one in Egypt has accepted responsibility for Mohammed Atta; nothing has been said in official life about the culture that shaped Ayman al-Zawahiri, who took out on other lands the wrath bred in him by the violent struggle between the Egyptian Islamists and the military autocracy.

Egypt has been reduced to a terrible standoff between a plundering autocracy and a vengeful Islamist opposition. The regime in Cairo has nothing to offer the young. Embittered Islamists take to the road bereft of mercy, for none has been shown to them on their own soil. A cynical ruler winks at the chaos, and in his silence about his country's breed of radicals, he speaks volumes about the terrible bargain America has struck with his regime. He picks our pockets and sends our way -- and the way of the Iraqis -- the angry outcasts of his domain.

We should be under no illusions about Iraq's Arab neighbors: They are content to see America bleed, and they see this great struggle as a contest between American power and the region's laws of gravity.

The Extremist Is Never Alone | WSJ

Continuing advancement in the life sciences is essential to thwarting bioterrorism, the report says; vaccine development, for example, depends on cutting-edge biomedical research. The open exchange of scientific data and concepts is the linchpin of these advances, and the results of fundamental research should remain unrestricted except when national security requires classification of the information. U.S. policymakers also should promote international scientific exchange and the training of foreign scientists in the United States. Both measures have contributed to the productivity of America's scientific enterprise.

Promoting a shared sense of responsibility as well as ethical behavior throughout the world's scientific enterprise is important. S&T leaders and practitioners should develop explicit national and international codes of ethics and conduct for life scientists, the committee said. Additionally, decentralized groups of scientists, government leaders, and other authorities are needed around the world to collaboratively monitor the potential misuse of biomedical tools and technologies -- and intervene if necessary.

This report came out in January, but I hadn't noticed it at the time.

Globalization, Biosecurity, and the Future of the Life Sciences

By: Steven Bellovin, Columbia University; Matt Blaze, University of Pennsylvania; Ernest Brickell, Intel Corporation; Clinton Brooks, NSA (retired); Vinton Cerf, Google; Whitfield Diffie, Sun Microsystems; Susan Landau, Sun Microsystems; Jon Peterson, NeuStar; John Treichler, Applied Signal Technology

June 13, 2006

For many people, Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) looks like a nimble way of using a computer to make phone calls. Download the software, pick an identifier and then wherever there is an Internet connection, you can make a phone call. From this perspective, it makes perfect sense that anything that can be done with the telephone system -- such as E9111 and the graceful accommodation of wiretapping -- should be able to be done readily with VoIP as well.

This simplified view of VoIP misses the point of the new technology. The network architectures of the Internet and the Public Switched Telephone Network (PSTN) are substantially different. Lack of understanding of the implications of the differences has led to some difficult -- and potentially dangerous -- policy decisions. One of these is the recent FBI request to apply the Communications Assistance for Law Enforcement Act (CALEA) to VoIP. The FCC has issued an order for all "interconnected" and all broadband access VoIP services to comply with CALEA (without issuing specific regulations on what that would mean). The FBI has suggested that CALEA should apply to all forms of VoIP, regardless of the technology involved in its implementation[17].

Some cases -- intercept against a VoIP call made from a fixed location with a fixed Internet address2 connecting directly to a big Internet provider’s access router -- are the equivalent to a normal phone call, and such interceptions are relatively easy to do. But if any of these conditions is not met, then the problem of assuring interception is enormously harder. In order to extend authorized interception much beyond the easy scenario outlined above, it is necessary either to eliminate the flexibility that Internet communications allow -- thus making VoIP essentially a copy of the PSTN -- or else introduce serious security risks to domestic VoIP implementations. The former would have significant negative effects on U.S. ability to innovate, while the latter is simply dangerous. The current FBI and FCC direction on CALEA applied to VoIP carries great risks. In this paper, we amplify and expand upon these issues.

Security Implications of Applying the Communications Assistance to Law Enforcement Act to Voice over IP

Both men, of course, remain innocent until proven guilty. But one can only imagine that these digital breadcrumbs — meaningless as personal debris, but more damning when they suddenly draw public attention — became a source of some anxiety for them, particularly as their computer equipment was seized and the ability to delete accounts, remove images and otherwise erase online legacies was cut off.

It's something to keep in mind not just for those who plan on doing a little hacking here and there, but for an entire booty-shaking, blog-bleating, MySpace generation that might one day have reason to worry or wonder, years from now, whether some faraway cache or archive holds backups of their cyber-indiscretions.

"Our tracks through the digital sand are eternal."

Lest We Regret Our Digital Bread Crumbs

Of course, the neoconservatives retain well-known figures like Charles Krauthammer. But when it comes to true depth or originality of thought, Krauthammer and other neoconservatives like Richard Perle might also be described as straw hyenas -- prominent and strikingly vicious features of the American foreign policy ecology, but hardly intellectual lions.

Fukuyama's strongest claim to have pursued for many years a trajectory quite different from the neoconservatives is provided by his best book, Trust: The Social Virtues and the Creation of Prosperity, published in 1996. This work is distinguished not just by its scholarship and sophistication, but by the breadth of its sympathy and understanding for a range of very different cultural, social and economic traditions.

As was said here years ago, and even now, Trust remains his best book.

Truly deep and radical thought in the foreign-policy-oriented sections of US academia and think tanks is deadened both by the hegemony of American civic-nationalist ideology and by the interlacing of these institutions with the organs of government. As a result, too many formally independent American experts in fact tailor their every statement so that it can never be held against them by a possible political patron or at a Senate confirmation hearing.

The training in self-censorship starts, sensibly enough, with risque pictures on MySpace. It produces, decades later, the kind of silence that leads to violent insurgency halfway around the world.

If Fukuyama wants to emerge as the great public figure that his intellect and learning qualify him to be, he needs to gamble: to risk short-term unpopularity and abuse in the belief that events ill eventually vindicate his stance.

Breaking with the neoconservatives is controversial but "safe"; challenging the basic assumptions of the US foreign policy elite on Russia and other key issues is not safe at all.

Western intellectuals and journalists instinctively turn to such liberal intellectuals, rather than either officials or ordinary people, for analysis of their societies. At best, this produces a copulation of illusions, with Westerners and their local interlocutors passionately misconceiving together. At worst, it lays us open to deliberate misinformation and manipulation by a range of would-be Chalabis.

This Anatol Lieven guy has a knack for phrases.

I am compelled here to reference Alan Kay:

If the children are being instructed in the pink plane, can we teach them to think in the blue plane and live in a pink-plane society?

The Two Fukuyamas | The National Interest

He was fastidious about his appearance in prison—his beard and moustache were always cosmetically groomed—and he wore only Afghan dress: the shalwar kameez and a rolled-brim, woolen Pashtun cap. One former inmate who served time with him told me that al-Zarqawi sauntered through the prison ward like a "peacock." Islamists flocked to him. He attracted recruits; some joined him out of fascination, others out of curiosity, and still others out of fear. In a short time, he had organized prison life at Swaqa like a gang leader.

"He decided who would cook, who would do the laundry, who would lead the readings of the Koran."

During my time in Jordan, I asked a number of officials what they considered to be the most curious aspect of the relationship between the US and al-Zarqawi, other than the fact that the Bush administration had inflated him.

One of them said, "The six times you could have killed Zarqawi, and you didn't."

"Osama bin Laden is like Karl Marx. Both created an ideology. Marxism still flourished well after Marx’s death. And whether bin Laden is killed, or simply dies of natural causes, al-Qaedaism will survive him."

The Short, Violent Life of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi

The Scene Meme hits the mainstream.

Zarqawi had grown into a strategic headache for al-Qaeda's founders by demonstrating an independent streak ...

"It was quite clear with Zarqawi that as far as the al-Qaeda core leadership goes, they couldn't control the way in which their network affiliates operated."

Whoever succeeds him will be hard-pressed to ... unite the foreign fighters in Iraq under a single command.

"It's very decentralized. He was the only person in Iraq who could provide the glue."

More and more, Islamic radical groups are becoming splintered and are only loosely affiliated.

"[Units led by Egyptian, Saudi and Algerian commanders] are completely autonomous organizations. They're more powerful than Zarqawi was and have more weaponry and money at their disposal. They all have their own networks, their own fundraising abilities and their own way of bringing in fighters."

In the long term, does al-Z's death help them more than it helps us? It sounds like his Ego was keeping the other crews down. In al-Z's absence, there may be a scramble for power. But this is not the Mafia; the scramble will not cause them to kill each other. Instead, the competition could manifest itself as jihadist peacocking, with each crew trying to outdo the others through a show of force in which their constituents (including prospective recruits) are the primary audience.

Do you think there is a military/intelligence version of killer's remorse?

He also describes the killer's remorse between killings and his frequent promises that this would be the last one.

If killing one thing you know produces three things you don't, are you really making progress?

It also must be remembered that, controversial ideologies aside, many of these people are highly intelligent and well educated. Some are bound to study and learn from the mistakes made by their predecessors -- and evolve into smarter fish.

But what is the alternative? Over the long term, the scene must be co-opted such that it ceases to be an attractive proposition.

Death Could Shake Al-Qaeda In Iraq and Around the World

Earlier this month, the Council re-established for six months the mandate of the Monitoring Group on Somalia, set up to investigate any embargo violations. A report to the Council from the Monitoring Group said then, in part: “Arms, military materiel and financial support continue to flow like a river to various actors.”

UN Security Council condemns renewed fighting in Somalia

According to the letter, all six main actors are heavily armed, organized and aggressively keen to protect and ensure the survival of their respective vested interests, be they fundamentally economic, as in the case of the local administrations run by warlords and the huge and powerful cartels of the business elite, or ideological as in the case of the militants. In the Monitoring Group’s view, economic vested interests, and now the ideological interests of the militants, are driving the opposition to the establishment of a central government. In addition, the pirate groups and the feuding sub-clans operate on the margins of the main contest between the Transitional Federal Government and the other principal antagonists, adding immeasurably to the lawless trauma and widespread instability in Somalia.

Re-Establishment of UN Security Council Monitoring Group on Somalia