"Don't Lase Me, Bro!"

While the task force heard descriptions of dozens of technically feasible and operationally relevant directed energy programs and activities, the report focuses on a smaller number of the most promising applications. Applications with potential to provide superior capabilities include long-range strategic missions such as space control and force protection, and tactical missions such as ground-based defense against rockets, artillery, and mortars and defense against man portable air defense systems. For some applications directed energy has the potential to compete favorably with kinetic solutions; for others, no adequate kinetics approach currently exists.

Defense Science Board Task Force on Directed Energy Weapons

Rarick concludes that the members of the Donner party were neither heroes for surviving nor scoundrels for the manner in which they did so. He writes: “They were Everyman. Often, adventure stories feature larger-than-life figures, grand Victorian explorers or indomitable generals or pith-helmeted naturalists resolutely seeking some wondrous discovery. ... Such quests have much to teach us, but so too does the drama of the mundane gone madly wrong.”

To my mind, the lesson of the Donner party is not so much about what they did or did not consume as it is about our appetite for such dramas.

See also, My dinner with antrophagus. (full text here)

The Archaeology of Hunger

Over recent months, the level of violence along the U.S.-Mexican border has begun to rise substantially, with some of it spilling into the United States. Last week, the Mexican government began military operations on its side of the border against Mexican gangs engaged in smuggling drugs into the United States. The action apparently pushed some of the gang members north into the United States in a bid for sanctuary. Low-level violence is endemic to the border region. But while not without precedent, movement of organized, armed cadres into the United States on this scale goes beyond what has become accepted practice. The dynamics in the borderland are shifting and must be understood in a broader, geopolitical context.

The Geopolitics of Dope

Blue-eyed? Thank a genetic switch that turns off your body's ability to make brown pigment in your peepers. Researchers have finally located the mutation that causes blue eyes, and the findings suggest that all blue-eyed humans share a single common ancestor born 6000 to 10,000 years ago.

Researchers have implicated the OCA2 gene in several eye colors. The gene is involved in the production of melanin, a pigment that gives hair and skin their hues. It also codes for brown eyes and can lead to green or hazel eyes when mutated. Despite years of searching, however, scientists have not found a mutation for blue eyes on the gene.

It turns out they were looking in the wrong place. Trying to narrow the site of the mutation, gene mapper Hans Eiberg of the University of Copenhagen and colleagues examined members of a large Danish family, an approach that allowed them to follow DNA as it passed from one generation to another. Then, by comparing people with brown or blue eyes, including people from Jordan and Turkey, the researchers were able to pinpoint the exact mutation. It wasn't on the OCA gene but rather on a nearby gene called HERC2.

Don't It Make Your Brown Eyes Blue?

So what will make this year different from all other years? Talk to Clinton advisers and they’ll tell you: Nothing. It won’t be. The Republicans who are currently praising Obama are wolves in sheepskin, and Obama himself, with his appeal to transcending partisanship, is the little lamb that never smelled the blood of the slaughterhouse and won’t know what’s happening until the knife is at his throat.

If I were advising the Obama campaign, I’d find a quiet way to get as many copies of “Hillary: The Movie” into voters’ hands as possible—only because it will remind them of the relentless ugliness in store for all of us if she becomes the nominee or the President.

Mud Season | Interesting Times: George Packer

Yesterday the Senate had two votes related to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act and President Bush devoted a portion of his State of the Union Address to a call for an extension of his surveillance authority and for immunity for telecommunications companies who cooperated with his administration in surveillance operations. But questions surrounding surveillance are far more pervasive than even this controversy suggests. No Comment puts six questions to Christopher Slobogin, a law professor at the University of Florida widely regarded for his work in the area. Professor Slobogin’s new book, Privacy at Risk: The New Government Surveillance and the Fourth Amendment, has just been published by the University of Chicago Press.

Six Questions for Christopher Slobogin, Author of ‘Privacy at Risk’

Office of Special Counsel chief says his investigation into alleged politicization of the attorney general's agency has been repeatedly 'impeded.'

Justice Dept. accused of blocking Gonzales probe

To gauge market “expectations,” real estate industry observers have increasingly referenced the Chicago Mercantile Exchange’s nascent real estate futures market. This paper tests whether prices on that exchange have proved to be unbiased predictors of real estate prices. Empirical evidence suggests that prices for more distant contracts–futures contracts that expire in six months or more–have tended to predict larger home price declines than ultimately occurred. Prices for contracts that were closer to expiration, by contrast, were less susceptible to such bias.

Real Estate Futures Prices as Predictors of Price Trends

Commercially, the 17th century was an age of silver, tobacco and slaves, and Brook shows how the three interconnect to form an intricate economic network. This new international economy is revealed in every aspect of life, not only in the account books of the VOC and the histories of the Jesuit missionaries in China and Latin America, but also in the items depicted in paintings by a Delft artist who died young. All our experience is global. As Brook writes in his final chapter, "If we can see that the history of any one place links us to all places, and ultimately to the history of the entire world, then there is no part of the past -- no holocaust and no achievement -- that is not our collective heritage." Vermeer's Hat shows how this is true of the 17th century and by so doing provides not only valuable historical insight but also enthralling intellectual entertainment.

Painting the World

In a daring ambush, insurgents blasted a U.S. patrol with a roadside bomb Monday and showered survivors with gunfire from a mosque in increasingly lawless Mosul. Five American soldiers were killed in the explosion — even as Iraqi troops moved into the northern city to challenge al-Qaida in Iraq.

5 US soldiers killed in N. Iraq