Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

One must assume that all garbage is monitored by the state. Anything less would be a pre-9/11 mentality.

Revolutionize your heart out. We'll still have this country by the balls.

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

If you've never wept and want to, have a child.

The truth is we're lousy at recognizing when our normal coping mechanisms aren't working. Our response is usually to do it five times more, instead of thinking, maybe it's time to try something new.

So often people are working hard at the wrong thing. Working on the right thing is probably more important than working hard. Much more important than working hard is knowing how to find the right thing to work on. Paying attention to what is going on in the world. Seeing patterns. Seeing things as they are rather than how you want them to be.

The capital-T Truth is about life before death. It is about making it to 30, or maybe 50, without wanting to shoot yourself in the head. It is about simple awareness -- awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us. It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive, day in and day out.

David Runciman:

The things Bill Clinton loves are politics, hard data and his family, in roughly that order. The thing he hates is the media, above all newspapers, on which he blames almost all his troubles. His love of politics is not a love of the sort of low-level politicking in which Stephanopoulos and his fellow staffers indulge. Rather, he has an unquenchable fondness for politicians themselves, with all their foibles and all their weaknesses -- it is, in other words, a kind of self-love.

Taylor Branch, from a conversation in 1997:

After a White House parley, Clinton had asked Senator Alan Simpson in confidence whether Republican strategists really believed the Clintons did something terrible in Whitewater, like theft or perjury. He mimicked the hearty response. 'Oh, hell no,' cried Simpson. 'But our goal is to make people think you did, so we can pay you Democrats back for Iran-Contra.' Clinton chuckled with appreciation. Politicians understood payback.

Kulam Dastagir, 28, a bird seller in Afghanistan:

I don't think the report is true, but these crises work for those who want to make fights between people.

Runciman:

Clinton liked politicians who played dirty because they made him feel better about his own peccadilloes.

Seth Kugel:

That's not grime you're seeing, it's historical charm!

Judith Hertog:

I find other people's errors very reassuring. It makes me feel better about my own deficiencies.

Runciman:

Clinton doesn't do introspection: his obsessive, almost prurient interest in other people is partly there to prevent him having to think too hard about himself.

Mark Bittman:

Who would say you don't need time to think, to reflect, to be successful and productive?

Louis Menand:

People are prurient, and they like to lap up the gossip. People also enjoy judging other people's lives. They enjoy it excessively.

Richard Sandomir:

In the nearly two weeks since Tiger Woods became tabloid fodder, his personal Web site has turned into a kind of town hall meeting on his reported extramarital behavior.

Charles McGrath:

Tiger Woods has had the misfortune to come of age at a time when the public appetite for details about the private lives of celebrities is apparently insatiable.

Neil Howe:

If you think that things couldn't get any worse, wait till the 2020s.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

I Could Fix That

David Foster Wallace:

I never, even for a moment, doubted what they'd told me. This is why it is that adults and even parents can, unwittingly, be cruel: they cannot imagine doubt's complete absence. They have forgotten.

Paul Graham:

Adults lie constantly to kids. I'm not saying we should stop, but I think we should at least examine which lies we tell and why.

Decius:

I've gotten old enough that I now understand why adults seek to escape reality. Paradoxically, I think I was better at escaping reality when I was younger.

Michael Chabon:

The thing that strikes me now when I think about the Wilderness of Childhood is the incredible degree of freedom my parents gave me to adventure there.

Mark C. Taylor:

Belief not tempered by doubt poses a mortal danger.

"Doubt":

Father Brendan Flynn: You haven't the slightest proof of anything!
Sister Aloysius Beauvier: But I have my certainty!

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

All That

William Deresiewicz:

In retrospect, it seems inevitable that once we decided to become friends with everyone, we would forget how to be friends with anyone.

We are nothing to one another but what we choose to become, and we can unbecome it whenever we want.

We seem to be terribly fragile now. A friend fulfills her duty, we suppose, by taking our side -- validating our feelings, supporting our decisions, helping us to feel good about ourselves. We tell white lies, make excuses when a friend does something wrong, do what we can to keep the boat steady.

We have sought to prolong youth indefinitely by holding fast to our youthful friendships, and we have mourned the loss of youth through an unremitting nostalgia for those friendships. One of the most striking things about the way the 20th century understood friendship was the tendency to view it through the filter of memory, as if it could be recognized only after its loss, and as if that loss were inevitable.

James Sloan Allen on Jacques Barzun:

Although he does not make a point of it in Dawn, he surely sees the degradation of friendship in the exaltation of self-indulgence that, among other things, signaled to him Western culture's descending decadence in the twentieth century.

Nicholas A. Christakis & James Fowler:

Each additional happy friend increases a person's probability of being happy by about 9%.

The Economist:

Financial progress is about learning to deal with strangers in more complex ways.

Bill Gurley:

Customers seem to really like free as a price point. I suspect they will love "less than free."

Samantha Power:

There are great benefits to connectedness, but we haven't wrapped our minds around the costs.

Deresiewicz:

Facebook's very premise -- and promise -- is that it makes our friendship circles visible. There they are, my friends, all in the same place. Except, of course, they're not in the same place, or, rather, they're not my friends. They're simulacra of my friends, little dehydrated packets of images and information, no more my friends than a set of baseball cards is the New York Mets.

Noteworthy in 2006:

Social networking is the 21st century equivalent of collecting baseball cards.

Deresiewicz:

There's something faintly obsce... [ Read More (0.2k in body) ]

Faux Friendship

Sandra Steingraber:

If Darwin didn't rock your world, this should.

According to the Pew Research Center, polls conducted over twenty years reveal little movement in the percentage of the public who accept evolution. In a one-to-one ratio that echoes my own classroom findings, about 40 to 50 percent of Americans say they believe in it, and a slightly smaller percentage say they do not. Those who believe that natural selection is the driver of evolution (Darwin's keynote point) are firmly in the minority at 14 to 26 percent.

With numbers like these, I am unsurprised that the findings emerging from an obscure field of study called epigenetics have not yet rocked the world. They are rocking my world, though, and they are also mounting a profound challenge to the traditional systems of environmental regulation.

David Dobbs:

Risk becomes possibility; vulnerability becomes plasticity and responsiveness. It's one of those simple ideas with big, spreading implications.

Freeman Dyson:

Now, after some three billion years, the Darwinian era is over.

Ecological Inheritance

Geoffrey Miller:

About five years ago, genetics researchers became excited about new methods for "genome-wide association studies" (GWAS). We already knew from twin, family and adoption studies that all human traits are heritable: genetic differences explain much of the variation between individuals. We knew the genes were there; we just had to find them.

GWAS researchers will, in public, continue trumpeting their successes to science journalists and Science magazine. They will reassure Big Pharma and the grant agencies that GWAS will identify the genes that explain most of the variation in heart disease, cancer, obesity, depression, schizophrenia, Alzheimer's and ageing itself. Those genes will illuminate the biochemical pathways underlying disease, which will yield new genetic tests and blockbuster drugs. Keep holding your breath for a golden age of health, happiness and longevity.

In private, though, the more thoughtful GWAS researchers are troubled.

Martin Schwartz:

Science makes me feel stupid too. It's just that I've gotten used to it.

The looming crisis in human genetics

Christopher Soghoian:

Over the last few years, consumers, corporations and governments have rushed to move their data to "the cloud," adopting web-based applications and storage solutions provided by companies that include Amazon, Google, Microsoft and Yahoo.

Unfortunately the shift to cloud computing needlessly exposes users to privacy invasion and fraud by hackers. Cloud based services also leave end users vulnerable to significant invasions of privacy by the government, resulting in the evisceration of traditional Fourth Amendment protections of a person's private files and documents. These very real risks associated with the cloud computing model are not communicated to consumers, who are thus unable to make an informed decision when evaluating cloud based services.

This paper will argue that the increased risk that users face from hackers is primarily a result of cost-motivated design decisions on the part of the cloud providers, who have repeatedly opted to forgo strong security solutions already used in other Internet based industries.

With regard to the intrusion upon user privacy performed by government agencies, fault for this privacy harm does not lie with the service providers; but the inherently coercive powers the government can flex at will. The third party doctrine, which permits government agents to obtain users' private files from service providers with a mere subpoena, is frequently criticized by privacy scholars. However, this paper will argue that this doctrine becomes moot once encryption is in use and companies no longer have access to their customers' private data. The real threat to privacy lies with the fact that corporations can and have repeatedly been forced to modify their own products in ways that harm end user privacy, such as by circumventing encryption.

Noam Cohen's friend:

Privacy is serious. It is serious the moment the data gets collected, not the moment it is released.

Steve Bellovin et al:

Architecture matters a lot, and in subtle ways.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Caught in the Cloud: Privacy, Encryption, and Government Back Doors in the Web 2.0 Era

Eliot A. Cohen:

In Afghanistan, we have a plan -- but that's not the same as a strategy.

The kind of specific knowledge needed does not lend itself to treatises, much less bestsellers. Making COIN work in real time requires the right kinds of practitioners, vast patience and local knowledge of a kind that is difficult to build up and easily perishable in large organizations. As Obama will discover, even setting the strategy seems easy by comparison.

David Kilcullen:

You've got to make a long-term commitment.

Stewart Brand:

In some cultures you're supposed to be responsible out to the seventh generation -- that's about 200 years. But it goes right against self-interest.

John Nagl:

I am starting to understand in the pit of my stomach how hard, how long, how slow counterinsurgency really is.

There is no prospect it's going to end anytime soon.

Obama's COIN toss

Ahmed Rashid:

Those who feel the war is futile were bound to be disappointed.

The Economist on Obama, from last November:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

George Packer:

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.

Rory Stewart:

"We're beating the cat."

"Why are you beating the cat?"

"It's a cat-tiger strategy."

Rashid:

Seventy percent of today's ANA recruits are illiterate.

Nathaniel Fick and Vikram Singh:

The average Afghan spends one-fifth of his income on bribes.

Rashid, back in September:

The Taliban's game plan of waiting out the Americans now looks more plausible than ever.

Elizabeth Rubin, from the Korengal Valley:

It didn't take long to understand why so many soldiers were taking antidepressants.

Afghanistan: The Missing Strategy

Gil Shochat:

It was clear that the impulse toward secrecy and dissimulation Seymour Hersh was forced to combat in the US was operating here, too. Canadians didn't know much about what their government was up to, and politicians wanted to keep it that way.

A cultural shift, if it is to come, will likely have to begin with local initiatives and public pressure.

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

On John Young's Cryptome:

It's like a nihilist art project: Provide your readers with more than 40,000 files of data the government doesn't want you to have, data that exposes the lies of the powerful, and then remind them that you can never, ever know for sure who is lying.

Into the depths:

Having been told that the world rested on a platform which rested on the back of an elephant which rested in turn on the back of a turtle, he asked, what did the turtle rest on?

Another turtle.

And that turtle?

"Ah, Sahib, after that it is turtles all the way down."

The Dark Country