"It is impolite to criticize your host; it is militarily stupid to criticize your allies."

Mr. Rumsfeld has put the Pentagon at the mercy of his ego, his cold warrior's view of the world and his unrealistic confidence in technology to replace manpower.

The true professional always looks to the "What's next?" phase.

Our most important, and sometimes most severe, judges are our subordinates.

A Top-Down Review for the Pentagon

Well, the worst case scenario is a wave of defaults, foreclosures, and forced sales, forcing home prices appreciably (depreciably?) lower.

Sounds like a good time to be a buyer!

Gee, I hope Carmella's Spec house wasn't variable mortgaged.

Heh.

Did you read the update?

A quick back of the envelope calculation shows that the resets ... are dwarfed by the much bigger macro issue of the loss of cash out refis -- which have been a major driver of consumer spending.

Former Fed Chair Greenspan estimates that over $600 billion in cash out refis took place in 2004 -- that dwarfs the increase in monthly payments. Goldman Sachs estimates that in 2005, it was $834 billion. The expectation is that consumers spent 68% of that money.

The Big Picture: Coming Soon: Mortgage Payment Resets

The temptation is to dismiss it as a joke. Unfortunately, the tower is too loaded with meaning to dismiss. For better or worse, it will be seen by the world as a chilling expression of how we are reshaping our identity in a post-Sept. 11 context.

Let's just forget about a tower; I could really go for another Botanical Garden.

NYT on the freedom tower

The scattered rubbish and tang of urine made me think of structures closer to home in England - run-down tower blocks and motorway exit ramps, pedestrian underpasses sprung from the drawing boards of enlightened planners who would never have to live in or near them, and who were careful never to stray too far from their Georgian squares in the heart of heritage London.

Or Atlanta. (I really want to know what genius thought up the pedestrian underpass. Have you ever seen a "nice" one?)

Hitler and Stalin were intrigued by modernism, which seemed part of a new world of aviation, radio, public health and mass consciousness.

"This web site needs more AJAX!", they shouted in unison.

Fearing ourselves, we need our illusions to protect us, even if the protection takes the form of finials and cartouches, corinthian columns and acanthus leaves.

Feed me, Agent! Tell me what to read next!

As in the cases of the pyramids and the Taj Mahal, the Siegfried line and the Atlantic wall, death always calls on the very best architects.

JG Ballard on modernists and death

Follow this link for unfiltered posts.

In general, the "noteworthy" stream will transition toward a filtered version of the "possibly noteworthy" stream.

MemeStreams | Post Haste

On these pages, the artist Jeff Koons, whose Pop aesthetic straddles pool toys and porn stars with equal glee, reimagines Gretchen Mol's — and Bettie Page's — transformation.

Only this time around, Mol is a star.

Click through to the slideshow. I like the next to last one, with Tweety Bird.

Gretchen Mol | NYT Style

The electronic version of this article is awkward to navigate, but I found it to be interesting reading. You have to visit the "gallery" to read the interviews. (Click through the link at the bottom of the lead-in text.)

Marissa Mayer, a VP at Google, uses Pine (not Gmail) to process her 700-800 daily work emails. On a weekend, she'll sit down and do email for 14 hours straight.

Wynton Marsalis has never sent an email. John McCain can't type. Richard Posner doesn't get to the office until 10, and then he goes home after lunch. (He works everywhere.) The BlackBerry is a very polarizing technology. (As if you didn't already know that.)

Here are the executive summaries from the interviews:

Don't just cope with information -- revel in it.

Cut through the noise.

Get away from the routine.

Rise early -- and have the occasional jolt of joe.

Challenge each other -- but don't hold grudges.

Focus relentlessly.

Be compulsively organized -- and delegate.

Take a break, even if you work Sunday nights.

It's a game of pinball, and you're the ball.

Be open to ideas that come over the transom.

Seek the most efficient mode of communication.

Work the phone -- and the clock.

Secrets of greatness: How I work | FORTUNE

Network academics caution that the field is still in its infancy and should not be regarded as a panacea. (Yet.)

Can Network Theory Thwart Terrorists?

Ballet Mécanique is awesome. Once you finish it, go watch the video for "Closer" by Nine Inch Nails.

Virtually all the Unseen Cinema items are striking, and some are downright dazzling. One example is Ballet Mécanique (1924), directed by the French artist Fernand Léger and the American cinéaste Dudley Murphy, who provided many of the movie's playful, collagelike visual ideas. A staple of modernist programs in classrooms and elsewhere, the film contains many seminal Dadaesque images: a woman swooping upside down on a garden swing, a newspaper headline with animated letters, a washerwoman trudging up a staircase that never ends. What's new in the Unseen Cinema presentation is the presence of George Antheil's music, composed for the film in 1924 but never before paired with the movie in a readily available edition — not surprisingly, since Antheil's score calls for an unorthodox orchestra including a siren, three xylophones, numerous electric bells, and three airplane propellers.

After years of viewing Ballet Mécanique in silence, I found it thrilling to see and hear it in a form even more authentic than that experienced by its original Vienna audience some 82 years ago, when the music — too unwieldy to sync up properly with the movie — was ingloriously omitted. Its unprecedented sounds and images remind me why I love exposing students to such audacious, inimitable work. In an age when movies and TV shows are straitjacketed in a tiny number of iron-clad formulas, the obstreperous sights and sounds of a Ballet Mécanique are eruptions of liberating artistic freedom that wake and shake our habit-ridden sensibilities.

Both of the film collections reviewed in this article are available through NetFlix.

DVD Access to the Avant-Garde

Did you know that Douglas Hofstadter had a new book on the way?

Douglas R. Hofstadter's long-awaited return to the themes of Godel, Escher, Bach -- an original and controversial view of the nature of consciousness and identity.

What do we mean when we say "I"?

Can thought arise out of matter? Can a self, a soul, a consciousness, an "I" arise out of mere matter? If it cannot, then how can you or I be here?

I Am a Strange Loop argues that the key to understanding selves and consciousness is the "strange loop" -- a special kind of abstract feedback loop inhabiting our brains. Deep down, a human brain is a chaotic seething soup of particles, on a higher level it is a jungle of neurons, and on a yet higher level it is a network of abstractions that we call "symbols." The most central and complex symbol in your brain or mine is the one we both call "I." The "I" is the nexus in our brain where the levels feed back into each other and flip causality upside down, with symbols seeming to have free will and to have gained the paradoxical ability to push particles around, rather than the reverse.

For each human being, this "I" seems to be the realest thing in the world. But how can such a mysterious abstraction be real--or is our "I" merely a convenient fiction? Does an "I" exert genuine power over the particles in our brain, or is it helplessly pushed around by the all-powerful laws of physics?

These are the mysteries tackled in I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas R. Hofstadter's first book-length journey into philosophy since Godel, Escher, Bach.

Compulsively readable and endlessly thought-provoking, this is the book Hofstadter's many readers have long been waiting for.

I Am a Strange Loop, by Douglas Hofstadter