The "better idea" consists of separating the struggle against radical Islamism from promoting democracy in the Middle East, focusing on the first struggle, and dramatically changing our tone and tactics on the democracy promotion front, at least for now.

Rapid modernization is likely to produce more short-term radicalism, not less.

This is not a trivial point.

Read that again.

Rapid modernization is likely to produce more short-term radicalism, not less.

This is not a trivial point.

Right.

The United States and its Western allies should be helping genuine, traditional and pious Muslims to reassert their dominance over a beautiful and capacious religious civilization in the face of a well-financed assault by extremist thugs.

The new NSS keeps referring to Islam as "proud", which I find incredibly galling. Hasn't the President seen Se7en?

The last thing that democracy activists need right now is more American fingerprints on outside funding.

Democracy promotion should remain an integral part of American foreign policy, but it should not be seen as a principal means of fighting terrorism. We should stigmatize and fight radical Islamism as if the social and political dysfunction of the Arab world did not exist, and we should shrewdly, quietly, patiently and with as many allies as possible promote the amelioration of that dysfunction as if the terrorist problem did not exist. It is when we mix these two issues together that we muddle our understanding of both, with the result that we neither defeat terrorism nor promote democracy but rather the reverse.

A Better Idea, By Francis Fukuyama and Adam Garfinkle

We have fomented civil war in Iraq. We have probably fomented internecine war in the Muslim world between the Shias and the Sunnis, and I think Bush may well have started the third world war, all for their own personal policies.

Somebody's gonna have to clear up the aftermath ... It may be two or three generations in repairing.

Did you catch that?

... masters of diverting attention away from real issues and debating the silly ...

This last point is true, but he could be talking about almost anything in government.

Delta Force founder - 'our credibility is utterly zero'

In an internal memo last October, Ray Ozzie, chief technical officer, who joined Microsoft last year, wrote, "Complexity kills. It sucks the life out of developers, it makes products difficult to plan, build and test, it introduces security challenges and it causes end-user and administrator frustration."

The trouble with Microsoft.

Windows Is So Slow, but Why? - New York Times

There is undeniably a Blade Runner–like feel to this city. The violence is so pervasive and unfathomable that you wonder what people think they are dying for.

"We no longer know what is going on, but we are pretending we do."

"It's a little like being in third grade, where everybody has to be home before dark," someone says. Everyone laughs.

That Western journalists now find being embedded a kind of liberation from imprisonment in their bureaus is something of an irony.

The Green Zone now looks something like one of the United Arab Emirates, where Asian contract workers often far outnumber actual citizens.

While official language is relentlessly upbeat, the already nightmarish reality has been getting worse with each passing day.

You might also want to read Jeffrey Gettelman's report from Baghdad.

Baghdad: The Besieged Press

This essay earns at least a silver star.

Exactly why we would strive so hard to distance ourselves from our animality is a large question, but surely the human fear of death figures in the answer.

What we see animals do an awful lot of is die, very often at our hands. Animals resist dying, but, having no conception of death, they don't give it nearly as much thought as we do. And one of the main thoughts about it we think is, will my own death be like this animal's or not?

The belief, or hope, that human death is somehow different from animal death is precious to us — but unprovable.

Whether it is or is not is one of the questions I suspect we're trying to answer whenever we look into the eyes of an animal.

While it bears certain resemblances to "Climbing the Redwoods" -- it is a reflective tale of one man's adventure in the outdoors -- the story told here comes "full circle" in a way that the New Yorker piece does not.

The Modern Hunter-Gatherer

It was about this time I conceived the bold and arduous project of arriving at moral perfection.

For this purpose I therefore contrived the following method.

Pair it with Rumsfeld's Rules and Powell's Rules.

Read while listening to Johnny Cash's "Old Chunk of Coal".

Benjamin Franklin's 13 Virtues

All serial entrepreneurs end up looking like IETF old-timers, minus the beard and the belly.

Sketch of the day: Generic PCForum2006 Middle-Aged White Guy

We are at the bright dawn of the movies' digital age, but the Hollywood establishment still has its shades drawn.

The Oscar revelers seemed unaware that movies have two big problems: the way they're made and the way they're shown.

Rodriguez: "It's nice because you don't have this huge army. It's a commando group of people really into the project."

Spielberg: "I just love going into an editing room and smelling the photochemistry and seeing my editor with mini-strands of film around his neck."

To directors, moviegoing is an almost religious act: a Mass experience.

The genius of late 20th century entrepreneurism was to get people to pay a lot for things they were used to getting cheap (coffee) or free (water).

All five of last year's top worldwide grossers were fantasies, and all but one (The Chronicles of Narnia) a sequel or a remake.

Interesting data points:

It costs about $1,200 for a film print and about $200 for a digital print.

Can This Man Save The Movies? (Again?)

This document is worth your time, despite the way it glosses over reality in an attempt at clarity.

The White House is releasing its National Security Strategy, a report that reaffirms the strike-first policy that President Bush first laid out in 2002. The release comes "in conjunction with a speech that Bush's national security adviser, Stephen Hadley, is delivering at the U.S. Institute of Peace," the Associated Press reports, but you can read the report now.

You can download the full document from our site in PDF (note the large file size -- 632 KB), or read it in chunks on White House web pages.

Inside the report, the president's introduction is blunt: "America is at war. This is a wartime national security strategy required by the grave challenge we face -- the rise of terrorism fueled by an aggressive ideology of hatred and murder, fully revealed to the American people on September 11, 2001. This strategy reflects our most solemn obligation: to protect the security of the American people."

The National Security Strategy 2006

The implications for network discrimination should now be pretty clear. If the network discriminates by sending misleading signals about congestion, and sending them preferentially to certain machines or certain applications, the incentive for those machines and applications to stick to the social contract and do their share to control congestion, will weaken.

Will this lead to a wave of defections that destroys the Net? Probably not, but I can't be sure. I do think this is something we should think about.

Discrimination, Congestion, and Cooperation