Howard Schmidt:

Today, I am pleased to announce the latest step in moving our Nation forward in securing our cyberspace with the release of the draft National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace (NSTIC). This first draft of NSTIC was developed in collaboration with key government agencies, business leaders and privacy advocates. What has emerged is a blueprint to reduce cybersecurity vulnerabilities and improve online privacy protections through the use of trusted digital identities.

No longer should individuals have to remember an ever-expanding and potentially insecure list of usernames and passwords to login into various online services.

We seek to enable a future where individuals can voluntarily choose to obtain a secure, interoperable, and privacy-enhancing credential (e.g., a smart identity card, a digital certificate on their cell phone, etc) from a variety of service providers -- both public and private -- to authenticate themselves online ...

From the Loose Tweets Sink Fleets Department:

What in the world is going on? Oh, it's a hacker causing all of this chaos. A hacker has gotten into the U.S. Federal payroll system and electronically issued paychecks ... to himself! totaling billions of dollars!

Paul Ferguson:

We are all responsible.

And we are all failing.

Andrew Keen:

In the future, I think there will be pockets of outrageously irresponsible, anonymous people ... but for the most part, we will have cleansed ourselves of the anonymous.

Bruce Schneier:

Will not wearing a life recorder be used as evidence that someone is up to no good?

New Scientist:

The US Department of Homeland Security is developing a system designed to detect "hostile thoughts" in people walking through border posts, airports and public places ...

Decius:

Unless there is some detail that I'm missing, this sounds positively Orwellian.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

The National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace

Stanley McChrystal:

Time is running out.

Richard Holbrooke:

Only with hindsight can one look back and see that the smartest course may not have been the right one.

George Packer:

Obama wanted a serious internal debate about his policy, and he got one, with advisers considering whether the war was already lost. Yet the conclusion was, in a sense, foreordained by the President's campaign promises. Intellectual honesty in the private councils of the White House told you something about the calibre of the officials involved, but in the realm of public policy it made little difference.

Richard Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

Richard Holbrooke:

The war in Afghanistan will be much tougher than Iraq.

It's going to be a long, difficult struggle.

Ezra Klein:

The implicit assumption of these arguments about strategy is that there is, somewhere out there, a workable strategy.

Ahmed Rashid:

Democratic politicians are demanding results before [the 2010] congressional elections, which is neither realistic nor possible. Moreover, the Taliban are quite aware of the Democrats' timetable.

John Sweeney:

Western policy seems glued to fighting a war that many people in the know are now saying the west is never going to win.

Michael Hastings:

The president finds himself stuck in something even more insane than a quagmire: a quagmire he knowingly walked into, even though it's precisely the kind of gigantic, mind-numbing, multigenerational nation-building project he explicitly said he didn't want.

Jackson Diehl:

In the end, Obama adopted what is beginning to look like a bad compromise. He approved most of the additional troops that McChrystal sought, but attached the July, 2011 deadline for beginning withdrawals. Since then both sides have been arguing their cases, in private and in public, to the press and to members of Congress.

Garry Wills:

McChrystal's removal will not make the Afghan war go any better, for the simple reason that nothing will do that.

No other general is going to succeed with such men in such a position. The overwhelming lesson of Hastings's article is not: "Get rid of McChrystal." It is, simply: "Get out!"

Evgeny Morozov:

We want to cultivate voters who are less susceptible to propaganda than Shirky's beloved South Korean teenagers. Very little suggests that we are enjoying greater success in this quest than we did in the golden era of network television. The environment of media scarcity produced voters who, on average, were far less partisan and far better informed about politics than are today's voters.

David Isenberg:

The shift from scarcity to plenty is often the harbinger of new value propositions.

Decius:

I said I'd do something about this, and I am.

Paul Graham:

Officially the purpose of schools is to teach kids. In fact their primary purpose is to keep kids locked up in one place for a big chunk of the day so adults can get things done.

Richard Haass:

Let's not kid ourselves. We're not going to find some wonderful thing that's going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It's not going to happen.

Atul Gawande:

This is a deeper, more fundamental problem than we acknowledge. The truth is that the volume and complexity of the knowledge that we need to master has grown exponentially beyond our capacity as individuals. Worse, the fear is that the knowledge has grown beyond our capacity as a society. [...] We're not talking about a problem rooted in economics. We're talking about a problem rooted in scientific complexity.

The most interesting, under-discussed, and potentially revolutionary aspect of the law is that it doesn't pretend to have the answers.

Penelope Trunk:

Stop talking about time like you need to save it. You just need to use it better.

Colin Marshall:

Who doesn't want to be more productive?

Merlin Mann:

People wanted nonsense. People wanted something to distract them for a little while.

Peter Bregman:

Sure I might want to watch an episode of Weeds before going to sleep. But should I? It really is hard to stop after just one episode. And two hours later, I'm entertained and tired, but am I really better off? Or would it have been better to get seven hours of sleep instead of five?

So why is this a problem? It sounds like I was super-productive. Every extra minute, I was either producing or consuming.

But something -- more than just sleep, though that's critical too -- is lost in the busyness. Something too valuable to lose.

Boredom.

Being bored is a precious thing, a state of mind we should pursue. Once boredom sets in, our minds begin to wander, looking for something exciting, something interesting to land on. And that's where creativity arises.

Molly Young:

The difference between successful and unsuccessful people is that the first kind gain momentum from boredom and the second kind don't.

Caterina Fake:

Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on.

Nancy Folbre:

We constantly exhort young people to invest in their human capital. But investments in human capital, like those in real estate, don't always yield a reliably high market rate of return.

Middle-class culture in the United States rests on the precepts of human capitalism -- invest in your own skills and those of your children, and the market will reward you. These precepts now seem shakier than they have in the past. No wonder middle-class spirits, as well as incomes, are sagging.

David Foster Wallace:

Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.

Sarah Silverman:

You're very free if you don't love money.

NYT:

Surely the case of Maher Arar was a chance to show that those who countenanced torture must pay a price.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price.

David Cole:

The courts have washed their hands of the Maher Arar affair, but that does not mean that it is resolved.

To the Obama administration, defending government officials from suit, regardless of the gravity of the allegations, is evidently more important than holding individuals responsible for complicity in torture.

Scott Shane:

The case of Yahya Wehelie illustrates the daunting challenge, both for people like Mr. Wehelie and for their FBI questioners, of proving that they pose no security threat.

The no-fly list gives the American authorities greater leverage in assessing travelers who are under suspicion, because to reverse the flying ban many are willing to undergo hours of questioning.

But sometimes the questioning concludes neither with criminal charges nor with permission to fly.

Dan Elliott and Chris Brummit:

Gary Faulkner, an American construction worker, has been detained in the mountains of Pakistan after authorities there found him carrying a sword, pistol and night-vision goggles on a solo mission to hunt down and kill Osama bin Laden.

Scott Faulkner insisted his brother was on a rational mission.

Scott Faulkner:

He's as normal as you and I. He's just very passionate.

Johan de Kleer:

One passionate person is worth a thousand people who are just plodding along ...

Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

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.

As Normal As You And I

NYT:

Surely the case of Maher Arar was a chance to show that those who countenanced torture must pay a price.

Malcolm Gladwell:

Free is just another price.

Bill Gurley:

Customers seem to really like free as a price point.

Martin Kaplan:

What we really need are leaders with more character, followers with more discrimination, deciders who hear as well as listen and media that know the difference between the public interest and what the public is interested in.

Merlin Mann:

I love when [...] people unfollow me. It delights me, because that is the sound of my audience getting better.

William Deresiewicz:

Excellence isn't usually what gets you up the greasy pole. What gets you up is a talent for maneuvering.

James Lileks:

The Apple tablet is the Barack Obama of technology. It's whatever you want it to be, until you actually get it.

Viktor Chernomyrdin:

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

The Economist on Obama, from November 2008:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

NYT:

There is no excuse for the Obama administration's conduct.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, in 2005:

If you [...] tell them the truth even when it threatens their beliefs, you run the risk of losing them. But if you peddle cleverly manipulated talking points to people who trust you not to lie, you won't merely lose them, you'll break their hearts.

Kathleen Parker:

Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice.

No Price to Pay

At the mall, an exchange:

Blakey: Okay, listen. At the mall, there is all the stuff you want, but like, can't have, right?

Tara: Yeah, so?

Blakey: Well, I mean that's like totally like being in hell, right?

Tara: Um, I don't know, Blakey, cause, like, all that wanting is, like, what I dream about all week long. I think it helps to want more than I can have, you know what I mean? Cause, like, I love to want.

Blakey: I love to want, too, but like, I love to have, way more.

Tara: Yeah. I know, having is sooo much better than wanting.

Blakey: I know, but like, wanting is like, part of life, right?

Tara: Yeah, and life is about getting, so, it all makes sense. Life is about wanting to have, and then getting, and then having, and then, like, wanting more.

Blakey: Whoa. Tara, that is so true.

Michael Lopp:

We're in a world where you can find anything you want, which is great, except when you realize there's a lot of everything.

Randall Munroe:

What if I want something more?

Sarah Silverman:

You're very free if you don't love money.

OMG BFF LOL

Charlie Savage:

In recent months, top lawyers for the State Department and the Defense Department have tried to square the idea that the CIA's drone program is lawful with the United States' efforts to prosecute Guantanamo Bay detainees accused of killing American soldiers in combat.

The Obama administration legal team confronted the issue as the Pentagon prepared to restart military commission trials at Guantanamo Bay. The commissions began with pretrial hearings in the case of Omar Khadr, a Canadian detainee accused of killing an Army sergeant during a firefight in Afghanistan in 2002, when Mr. Khadr was 15.

The Pentagon delayed issuing a 281-page manual laying out commission rules until the eve of the hearing. The reason is that government lawyers had been scrambling to rewrite a section about murder because it has implications for the CIA drone program.

An earlier version of the manual, issued in 2007 by the Bush administration, defined the charge of "murder in violation of the laws of war" as a killing by someone who did not meet "the requirements for lawful combatancy" -- like being part of a regular army or otherwise wearing a uniform. Similar language was incorporated into a draft of the new manual.

But as the Khadr hearing approached, Harold Koh, the State Department legal adviser, pointed out that such a definition could be construed as a concession by the United States that CIA drone operators were war criminals. Jeh Johnson, the Defense Department general counsel, and his staff ultimately agreed with that concern. They redrafted the manual so that murder by an unprivileged combatant would instead be treated like espionage -- an offense under domestic law not considered a war crime.

Kenneth R. Harney:

Don't feel guilty about it. Don't think you're doing something morally wrong.

Benjamin Wallace-Wells:

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.

John Givings:

Plenty of people are onto the emptiness, but it takes real guts to see the hopelessness.

Marcus Aurelius:

We're all forgotten. The abyss of endless time that swallows it all. The emptiness of those applauding hands.

Stanley McChrystal:

You have to not lose confidence in what you are doing. You have to be able to go to the edge of the abyss without losing hope.

Cormac McCarthy:

We're going to be okay, aren't we Papa?
Yes. We are.
And nothing bad is going to happen to us.
That's right.
Because we're carrying the fire.
Yes. Because we're carrying the fire.

Roger Scruton:

There is truth in the view that hope springs eternal in the human breast, and false hope is no exception.

Katja Grace:

Apparently it's crazy to want our species extinct, but crazy not to want it arbitrarily smaller.

Thom Yorke:

It will be only a matter of time -- months rather than years -- before the music business establishment completely folds. It will be no great loss to the world.

Freeman Dyson:

Essentially you need sunshine and water. That's about all.

Jonathan Franzen:

And then there's your e-mail: shouldn't you be dealing with your e-mail?

Sterling Hayden:

What does a man need -- really need? A few pounds of food each day, heat and shelter, six feet to lie down in -- and some form of working activity that will yield a sense of accomplishment. That's all -- in the material sense.

Rivka Galchen:

I prefer the taciturn company of my things. I love my things. I have a great capacity for love, I think.

Sarah Silverman:

You're very free if you don't love money.

Justin E.H. Smith:

Palindromes force you up to the boundary of meaninglessness, and so challenge you to find that acceptable level of near-nonsense that nonetheless seems to say something.

Robert McCrum:

In his new book, Through the Language Glass, Guy Deutscher explains why Russian water (a "she") becomes a "he" once you have dipped a teabag into her, and why, in German, a young lady has no sex, though a turnip has.

Jesse Bering:

It occurred to me while writing this article that the social category of straight men that like to socialize with lesbians is astonishingly vacant in our society.

Merlin Mann voice:

Is that really a good use of your time? What did you make today?

Michael Pollan:

The average amount of time spent on cooking, eating and cleaning up a meal is 31 minutes; the average daily non-professional time at a computer two hours, and in front of a television three hours.

You know, we have been drilled to believe that only in the workplace do Americans produce something. But when we cook we are producers too. It's sad that we are supposed to be just consumers.

Roger Ebert:

I like the internet, but I don't want to become its love slave.

Mark Fletcher:

I fear I spend too much time on the Internet as a crutch to avoid thinking about the crushing sameness of each and every day as well as the black hollowness of my soul.