At each branching point the options are well defined, but the choice is arbitrary. So two systems that are wholly identical at the outset might end up on quite different branches while experiencing the same driving force, simply because they happened to take different paths at each junction. "Time forks perpetually towards innumerable futures," as Jorge Luis Borges says in his story "The Garden of Forking Paths."

The new media and technologies by which we amplify and extend ourselves constitute huge collective surgery carried out on the social body with complete disregard for antiseptics. If the operations are needed, the inevitability of infecting the whole system during the operation has to be considered. For in operating on society with a new technology, it is not the incised area that is most affected. The area of impact and incision is numb. It is the entire system that is changed.

This needs to be seen.

Newly discovered snapshots donated to the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum provide a stunning counterpoint to what up until now has been the only major source of preliberation Auschwitz photos.

Read the accompanying article. You'll find more information about the exhibit at ushmm.org.

In the Shadow of Horror, SS guardians frolic

No, not this one. The one before that.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning book version was recommended here back in 2003.

Charlie Wilson, a Texas congressman known for his foreign exploits, love of beautiful women, fun-loving lifestyle and serious legislating, always seemed to be a creation of Hollywood.

Now, he is.

The former Democratic lawmaker, who retired in 1996, is the main character in "Charlie Wilson's War," a movie starring Oscar winners Tom Hanks as Wilson, Julia Roberts as a connected Houston socialite and Philip Seymour Hoffman as a shadowy CIA agent. The film, directed by Mike Nichols, is nearly wrapped up for release on Christmas Day.

"It's just unworldly," Wilson said of watching Hanks play him.

Here's the plot outline:

A drama based on a Texas congressman Charlie Wilson's covert dealings in Afghanistan, where his efforts to assist rebels in their war with the Soviets have some unforeseen and long-reaching effects.

The film is directed by Mike Nichols, whose prior work includes "Closer" and "The Graduate".

America's Afghan Victory, Coming Soon to a Theater Near You

Alexis de Tocqueville is a towering figure in 19th-century political thought, on a par with Karl Marx and John Stuart Mill and more prophetic than either of them. It is therefore a bit confounding to realize that, despite all the books and essays about Tocqueville's masterpiece, Democracy in America, there was no full-scale biography in English of the man himself.

Now there is.

Obligatory caveats aside, Brogan's achievement here is monumental. He wears his learning lightly, the analysis conveys a distilled wisdom that is blessedly bereft of academic jargon, the prose is engaging (with a conversational voice that invites the reader into an ongoing dialogue), and the posture toward Tocqueville is appreciative but never mindlessly celebratory. This is a book virtually certain to win some major prizes.

Democracy's Prophet

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"A nation can be maintained only if, between the state and the individual, there is interposed a whole series of secondary groups near enough to the individuals to attract them strongly in their sphere of action and drag them, in this way, into the general torment of civil life."

-- Emile Durkheim

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"The art of association then becomes, as I have said before, the mother of action, studied and applied by all."

-- Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America

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"Modernity in its essence means an enormous change in the human condition, from fate to choice."

-- Peter Berger

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Learning history isn't mostly about "a-ha moments." It's about laboring through a lot of information and ideas that are often less than magical.

Therein lies the real trouble. Learning is labor. We're selling the fantasy that technology can change that. It can't. No technology ever has.

Gutenberg's press only made it easier to print books, not easier to read and understand them.

-- Peter Berger, The land of iPods and honey

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"I like English history. I have volumes of it, but I never read anything but the first volume. Even at that, I only read the first three or four chapters. My purpose is to read Volume Zero, which has not been written."

-- Louis Kahn, What Will Be Has Always Been

It is surprising how affordable flowers really are: 120 years ago, the best roses sold in New York for $18 a dozen, and arrangements went for $40 or $50 — this at a time when hotel rooms rented for $5. Today a bouquet costs about the same as it did then, but $5 won’t cover cab fare to a hotel, much less a room for the night.

Local Color

Smeed and I agreed that Bomber Command could substantially reduce losses by ripping out two gun turrets, with all their associated hardware, from each bomber and reducing each crew from seven to five. The gun turrets were costly in aerodynamic drag as well as in weight. The turretless bombers would have flown 50 miles an hour faster and would have spent much less time over Germany. The evidence that experience did not reduce losses confirmed our opinion that the turrets were useless. The turrets did not save bombers, because the gunners rarely saw the fighters that killed them. But our proposal to rip out the turrets went against the official mythology of the gallant gunners defending their crewmates. Dickins never had the courage to push the issue seriously in his conversations with Harris. If he had, Harris might even have listened, and thousands of crewmen might have been saved.

It's hard to be a contrarian. Especially when you're right.

Be sure to read Part I, as well.

A Failure of Intelligence, Part II

So you like war stories, but you're getting tired of reading about IEDs in Iraq? Then let Freeman Dyson take you back to the dark days of the 1940s.

My first day of work was the day after one of our most successful operations, a full-force night attack on Hamburg. For the first time, the bombers had used the decoy system, which we called WINDOW and the Americans called CHAFF. WINDOW consisted of packets of paper strips coated with aluminum paint. One crew member in each bomber was responsible for throwing packets of WINDOW down a chute, at a rate of one packet per minute, while flying over Germany. The paper strips floated slowly down through the stream of bombers, each strip a resonant antenna tuned to the frequency of the German radars. The purpose was to confuse the radars so that they could not track individual bombers in the clutter of echoes from the WINDOW.

That day, the people at the ORS were joyful. I never saw them as joyful again until the day that the war in Europe ended. WINDOW had worked. The bomber losses the night before were only 12 out of 791, or 1.5 percent, far fewer than would have been expected for a major operation in July, when the skies in northern Europe are never really dark. Losses were usually about 5 percent and were mostly due to German night fighters, guided to the bombers by radars on the ground. WINDOW had cut the expected losses by two-thirds. Each bomber carried a crew of seven, so WINDOW that night had saved the lives of about 180 of our boys.

... Within a month, loss rates were back at the 5 percent level, and WINDOW was no longer saving lives.

This story continues with Part II.

A Failure of Intelligence, by Freeman Dyson

I recommended this book, Failing To Win, a few weeks ago. The book sounds like a miss, but the authors argue some interesting points.

The 1992-94 US intervention in Somalia, in which military forces were sent "to secure the delivery of humanitarian aid to Somalia," is "usually judged as an unmitigated failure."

Yet Operation Restore Hope is "widely acknowledged to have saved the lives of tens or hundreds of thousands of Somalis."

What most people remember is "the infamous 'Black Hawk Down' battle in the Somali capital, Mogadishu, in early October 1993, in which 18 US soldiers were killed." Although that battle, which took place during the Clinton administration, resulted in US forces' "killing perhaps fifty opponents for every loss of their own," the images of dead American soldiers dragged through the streets left a deep impression on both the US public and the White House. A poll soon afterward found that only 25 percent of Americans considered the intervention in Somalia successful.

Because the Somalia operation came to be viewed as, the authors assert, "the greatest US failure since Vietnam," the Clinton administration declined to intervene half a year later in Rwanda, thus arguably permitting a genocide of about 800,000 people to proceed without interference.

Bottom line: "winning" is complicated business.

On Books | In world politics, when is a loss a win?