Building a new nation is never a straight, steady climb upward. Today can sometimes look worse than yesterday -- or even two months ago. What matters is the overall trajectory: Where do things stand today when compared to what they were five years ago?
You know it's hard out here for a pimp. It's even harder, let me tell you, for a whore.
America looks to the day when the people of the Middle East leave the desert of despotism for the fertile gardens of liberty, and resume their rightful place in a world of peace and prosperity.
Americans love gumption. We believe that stupid ideas become brilliant ones if you just keep working on them with bullish tenacity.
This not a war against terror any more than World War II was a war against kamikazes.
I have a distinct memory of the first place and time I saw soxmas.mov.
Counterinsurgency is more like an election than a military operation.
Curiosity becomes yearning, and yearning becomes obsession.
The report of the 9/11 Commmission is now available as a comic book.
The level I work at is at the juxtaposition, say, of Prada and Santeria. But it's not about Prada or Santeria. It's not about having ideas about either. It's about seeing what happens when the two are put together.
He has built "unplayable" musical instruments -- including a 25-foot-long accordion -- and created such signature works as "Video Quartet" and "Crossfire," film clip remixes powering mind-bending interactions among images, soundscapes and music.
Indeed, only 63 words ... are needed to make up half of everything said on TV.
He was free to be less than perfect, which is more interesting than perfect.
Brian Eno once famously remarked that the problem with computers is that there isn't enough Africa in them.
Escape the rat race.
... attempting to fasten a usable structure around a continually evolving computational ecology ...
To the extent that the Internet is a niche machine, dividing its users into tiny, self-defined categories, it is providing a challenge to the movies that not even television did, because the Internet addresses a change in consciousness while television simply addressed a change in delivery of content. The Internet ... plays to [a] powerful force in modern America and one that undermines the movies: narcissism.
A strange cycle has set in, whereby the most valuable attribute an artist can have is "promise." With a lot of big bets being placed, the artist has to be both young and verifiable. In other words, marketable. But almost none of our superstar artists have delivered on their promise.
... 10 years from now the model for the music business will resemble the patron-artist relationship of the 17th century renaissance ...
Open land undefiled by sheep droppings has most likely been mined.
When a body plummets down a stairwell or is hurled against a slot machine, it does so with conviction.
"If you can pass an HD lens, you can pass any test."
In Afghanistan, roadside bomb attacks have doubled this year [2006], and suicide bombings have tripled.
In early November 2002, a CIA drone armed with a Hellfire missile killed a top al-Qaeda leader traveling through the Yemeni desert. About a week later, Rumsfeld expressed anger that it was the CIA, not the Defense Department, that had carried out the successful strike.
"How did they get the intel?" he demanded.
Gen. Michael V. Hayden, then director of the National Security Agency and technically part of the Defense Department, said he had given it to them.
"Why aren't you giving it to us?" Rumsfeld wanted to know.
Hayden, according to this source, told Rumsfeld that the information-sharing mechanism with the CIA was working well. Rumsfeld said it would have to stop.
