Ahmed Rashid, in The New York Review of Books:

When Osama bin Laden decided to launch a jihad against the US and the West from his new base in Afghanistan in 1996, few took him seriously. Several developments at that time got little attention from Western governments as Afghanistan became the incubator of a new, Arab-led "global jihad" against the West. The fifteen-year-long insurrection against the Indian government of Kashmir introduced the skills of suicide bombing to South Asia. The endless civil war in Somalia eliminated any clear center of power there and freewheeling jihadist groups emerged in the chaos. The Israeli–Palestinian conflict was seen as becoming increasingly insoluble. President Clinton's failed attempt to foster peace at the end of his administration came just as many Palestinians were beginning to embrace more extremist Islamic ideas.

Two of the books under review are so illuminating about this twilight period in the 1990s that I even wonder if September 11 could have been averted if they had been published a decade earlier. One is Omar Nasiri's Inside the Jihad, a first-person account by a Moroccan-born spy who infiltrated Islamist groups on behalf of European intelligence organizations in the 1990s; the other is Brynjar Lia's Architect of Global Jihad, a Norwegian scholar's account of a top al-Qaeda strategist named Abu Mus'ab al-Suri, who was arrested in Pakistan in 2005 and handed over to the US. He is now one of the "rendered" or disappeared prisoners. Both books are about men who were trained in terrorist camps in Afghanistan in the early 1990s—when bin Laden was not even there—and who then traveled across Europe to mobilize Muslims for the emerging global jihad. The Afghan camps were providing military and technical training, ideological education, and new global networks well before al-Qaeda arrived on the scene.

Jihadi Suicide Bombers: The New Wave

Apparently the theory is that if we buy enough Chinese laptops, they won't have any left for themselves.

U.S. defense intelligence agencies should aim to “eliminate” the capabilities of opponents to operate effectively against the United States from outer space or cyber space, according to a new Pentagon strategy for defense intelligence.

Defense intelligence shall “eliminate any advantage held by our adversaries to operate from and within the space and cyber domains,” says the new strategy document, “Defense Intelligence 2008″ (strategic objective IV).

“As stated in the U.S. National Space Policy, the focus of defense intelligence in space will be to ensure full situational awareness for military and civilian decision-makers, support military planning initiatives, and satisfy operational requirements. As addressed within the Comprehensive National Cybersecurity Initiative, cyberspace has become a vital national interest economically, militarily and culturally, and the current patchwork of passive defense is likely to fail in the face of greater vulnerabilities and more sophisticated threats.”

“Defense intelligence must do its part to defeat this critical threat.”

Defense Intelligence Strategy 2008

Back in 2006, when I was 24, my life was cozy and safe. I had just been promoted to associate editor at the publishing house where I’d been working since I graduated from college, and I was living with my boyfriend, Henry, and two cats in a grubby but spacious two-bedroom apartment in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. I spent most of my free time sitting with Henry in our cheery yellow living room on our stained Ikea couch, watching TV. And almost every day I updated my year-old blog, Emily Magazine, to let a few hundred people know what I was reading and watching and thinking about.

Exposed

Donald MacKenzie:

Of course, the credit crisis has increased the risk of systemic economic failure. But the existence and rising price of the end-of-the-world trade indicate something beyond that. The crisis isn’t just about the bursting of the US housing bubble and dodgy sub-prime lending. Nor is it merely a reflection of the perennial cycle in which greed trumps fear to create a euphoric disregard of risk, only for fear to reassert itself as the risk becomes too great. What is revealed by the end-of-the-world trade is that the current crisis concerns the collapse of public fact.

End-of-the-World Trade

Quitting is contagious!

Background The prevalence of smoking has decreased substantially in the United States over the past 30 years. We examined the extent of the person-to-person spread of smoking behavior and the extent to which groups of widely connected people quit together.

Methods We studied a densely interconnected social network of 12,067 people assessed repeatedly from 1971 to 2003 as part of the Framingham Heart Study. We used network analytic methods and longitudinal statistical models.

Results Discernible clusters of smokers and nonsmokers were present in the network, and the clusters extended to three degrees of separation. Despite the decrease in smoking in the overall population, the size of the clusters of smokers remained the same across time, suggesting that whole groups of people were quitting in concert. Smokers were also progressively found in the periphery of the social network. Smoking cessation by a spouse decreased a person's chances of smoking by 67% (95% confidence interval [CI], 59 to 73). Smoking cessation by a sibling decreased the chances by 25% (95% CI, 14 to 35). Smoking cessation by a friend decreased the chances by 36% (95% CI, 12 to 55 ). Among persons working in small firms, smoking cessation by a coworker decreased the chances by 34% (95% CI, 5 to 56). Friends with more education influenced one another more than those with less education. These effects were not seen among neighbors in the immediate geographic area.

Conclusions Network phenomena appear to be relevant to smoking cessation. Smoking behavior spreads through close and distant social ties, groups of interconnected people stop smoking in concert, and smokers are increasingly marginalized socially. These findings have implications for clinical and public health interventions to reduce and prevent smoking.

From the recent archive:

Hugh pointed out that I had five cigarettes left in my pack.

“Are you just going to leave them there on the table?”

I answered with a line I’d got years ago from a German woman. Her name was Tini Haffmans, and though she often apologized for the state of her English, I wouldn’t have wanted it to be any better. When it came to verb conjugation, she was beyond reproach, but every so often she’d get a word wrong. The effect was not a loss of meaning but a heightening of it. I once asked if her neighbor smoked, and she thought for a moment before saying, “Karl has ... finished with his smoking.”

The Collective Dynamics of Smoking in a Large Social Network

Not far from our hotel in the center of Palermo is Oratorio di San Lorenzo, a little Baroque church founded by one of those orders that looks after the unwanted dead. The space is crammed with plaster skulls and skeletons, mostly painted, but the last chapel on the right held what we had come to see: matching pairs of stucco corpses by the sculptor Giacomo Serpotta, who could impart life and motion to all kinds of unlikely entities, such as abstract Virtues and tired old scriptural stories. These are called skeletons in the guidebook, but at least half the flesh still clings to the bones, especially on the chest and diaphragm. They've also kept their original grime; in the shadows, the stark white flesh is almost black with it.

The Museum of the Dead

This new Rambling Podcast is The New Orleans Show, about the musical tradition of New Orleans and Hurricane Katrina. If you care as much about these issues as I do, here are two charities I recommend contributing to: Habitat for Humanity has specific projects to rebuild homes in the Ninth Ward. The Tipitina's Foundation collects and donates instruments for disenfrenchised schools to preserve and nurture the New Orleans musical tradition.

Here is the setlist:

* Johnny Dodd’s Washboard Band – Bucktown Stomp (02:50-5:55)
* Fats Domino – No No Baby (06:50-09:10)
* The Meters – Cissy Strut (10:05-13:50)
* Snooks Eaglin – Hello Josephine (15:00-18:30)
* Professor Longhair – Big Chief (19:05-22:50)
* Dr. John – Walk on Guilded Splinters (24:00-29:10)
* Guitar Slim – The Things that I Used to Do (29:30-32:30)
* Jelly Roll Morton – Sweet Substitute (33:35-36:30)
* Louis Armstrong – Basin Street Blues (36:50-43:35)
* Rebirth Brass Band – Tubaluba (44:40-50-25)
* Galactic – Crazyhorse Mongoose (50-55:58:55)
* John Butler Trio – Gov’ did Nothing (01.00.15-01:07:45)
* Dirty Dozen Brass Band – What’s Going On (01:08:45-01:13:10)
* Bob Brozman – Look at New Orleans (01:13:10-01:18:55)
* Stanton Moore – When the Levee Breaks (01:20:05-01:25:40)

Musical Ramblings: May 2008 Podcast: the New Orleans Show

Death to SBU! Long live CUI!

Sometime in the next few years, if a memorandum signed by President Bush this month ever goes into effect, one government official talking to another about information on terrorists will have to begin by saying: "What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination."

That would mean, according to the memo, that the information requires safeguarding because "the inadvertent or unauthorized disclosure would create risk of substantial harm."

Bush's memorandum, signed on the eve of his daughter Jenna's wedding, introduced "Controlled Unclassified Information" as a new government category that will replace "Sensitive but Unclassified."

Keeping Secrets: In Presidential Memo, A New Designation for Classifying Information

The priority is containment. That’s as fancy as it sounds: With the water table only 20 centimeters below the surface in Myanmar, it is little use to dig pit latrines, so buckets or tanks for human waste are needed instead. Providing such things is made harder by the refusal of Myanmar’s government to accept help. And it is also hampered by our unwillingness to even talk about it.

In our sanitary, plumbed lives, the toilet — an engineering marvel — removes waste out of sight and out of mind.

Send in the Latrines

MATHEMATICIANS have long tried, and failed, to solve the Riemann Hypothesis, a stubbornly unyielding math problem. Good luck to whoever tries to figure it out. For the first correct proof, a $1 million prize will be awarded by the Clay Mathematics Institute.

Similarly, two successive Microsoft chief executives have long tried, and failed, to refute what we might call the Single-Era Conjecture, the invisible law that makes it impossible for a company in the computer business to enjoy pre-eminence that spans two technological eras. Good luck to Steven A. Ballmer, the company’s chief executive since 2000, as he tries to sustain in the Internet era what his company had attained in the personal computing era.

The Computer Industry Comes With Built-In Term Limits