Publishers Weekly Starred Review:

After 9/11, Atlantic Monthly correspondent and bestselling author Kaplan (Balkan Ghosts) spent five years living with US troops deployed across the globe. He first reported on his travels in 2005's Imperial Grunts, an incisive and valuable primer on the military's role in maintaining an informal American empire.

In this shrewd and often provocative sequel, Kaplan introduces readers to more of the soldiers, marines, sailors and airmen who staff the empire's forward outposts. Although the author's travels take him to Iraq, he spends most of his time with imperial maintenance units that are training indigenous troops, protecting sea lanes and providing humanitarian relief from Timbuktu to the Straits of Malacca.

Kaplan saves his harshest judgment for his fellow journalists, whose relentless criticism of anything less than perfection amounts to media tyranny, in his view.

Kaplan sees the war on terror and the re-emergence of China as the US's two abiding challenges in the 21st century and argues that, after Iraq, the military will seek a smaller, less noticeable footprint overseas. Kaplan combines the travel writer's keen eye for detail and the foreign correspondent's analytical skill to produce an account of America's military worthy of its subject.

More of Kaplan, from the MemeStreams archive:

When North Korea Collapses...

Sacrifice is not a word that voters in free and prosperous societies tend to like. If voters in Western-style democracies are good at anything, it’s rationalizing their own selfishness.

The Biology of Conflict cites Kaplan's The Coming Anarchy, from 1991.

The Media and Medievalism

"The most blatant tyranny is the one which asks the most blatant questions. All questioning is a forcible intrusion. The questioner knows what there is to find, but he wants actually to touch it and bring it to light."

But few politicians are consistently sly in reading accurately the crowd's daily and hourly shifts in passion, and those who are -- because of the fact of their slyness -- usually find it wiser to cave in to these shifts than to lead the crowd down the hard road elsewhere. Because even our best politicians are cowed by the electoral herd, we must look to another group for the true source of power in our age.

Inside the House of Cards, about a military brigade's restoring order to Iraq's second-largest city.

Force Increase Necessary for War on Terror, Leaders Say

Several years into the war on terrorism, one would think that Pashto would be commonly spoken, at least on a basic level, by American troops in these borderlands. It isn't. Nor are Farsi and Urdu—the languages of Iran and the tribal agencies of Pakistan, where US Special Operations forces are likely to be active, in one way or another, over the coming decade. Like Big Army's aversion to beards, the lack of linguistic preparedness demonstrates that the Pentagon bureaucracy pays too little attention to the most basic tool of counterinsurgency: adaptation to the cultural terrain. It is such adaptation—more than new weapons systems or an ideological commitment to Western democracy—that will deliver us from quagmires.

The Western Front, where Kaplan introduces us to lone American servicemen whose presence in obscure countries is largely unknown.

Hog Pilots, Blue Water Grunts: The American Military in the Air, at Sea, and on the Ground

eWeek is so helpful!

In this IT Planner, eWEEK looks at the five key attributes of these cutting-edge Web technologies and offers some tips on ways that companies can prepare for and even begin building and deploying some of these innovative Web applications.

To save you time, I've taken the liberty of summarizing and paraphrasing their tip list.

First, add drag-and-drop capabilities. (One of the great things about AJAX is that it doesn't require learning new things.)

Second, get "service oriented." (There -- done yet? See, that was easy.)

Third, hold onto every tidbit of data, but keep changing it. (Don't forget to add a bunch of tags to everything.)

Fourth, reroute your APIs through a client-side cache. (This is so you can take the blame for data breaches that occur on customers' machines.)

Fifth, recognize that a true genius embraces the stupidity of others. ("Imagine you're a chef in a popular restaurant. They like your pasta, but they think they have a better recipe for shrimp. Or they want to use your burger, but add it to a pizza from another restaurant. This is the model of next-generation Web applications.")

Five Steps to Next-Generation Web Applications

Economist, on the promise of the semantic web:

The world wide web still resembles a collection of one-trick ponies rather than ... your long-suffering spouse.

Luckily, Rael Dornfest and Gregg Brockway hope to change this.

Improving the internet | Economist

A combination of simple dictionary and brute-force attacks in combination with Google hacking enabled a criminal pair to break into VoIP-provider networks and steal $1 million worth of voice minutes, says one of the duo who has pleaded guilty to his crimes.

He designed software to generate 400 prefixes per second against the carrier gear, scanning all the combinations between 000 and 999 randomly to throw off intrusion-detection systems (IDS) that might pick up a sequential attack.

"Most of the telecom administrators were using the most basic password. They weren’t hardening their boxes at all."

He also wrote search strings that he fed into Google seeking exposed Web interfaces on devices, and that proved fruitful as well.

VoIP hacker talks: Service provider nets easy pickings

Wesley Morgan, 19, a sophomore at Princeton, spent his summer vacation in Iraq on a personal invitation from David Petraeus.

His identification card read "journalist," because he keeps a blog about his experiences, but he was treated more like one of the members of Congress or other VIPs who have passed through Iraq.

Petraeus's invitation highlights his desire to attract more people like Morgan to military service -- the guys with degrees from places like Princeton (where Petraeus himself earned a doctorate), the slightly nerdy ones who are as comfortable poring over treatises on counterinsurgency tactics as going out on patrol.

Says his almost step-mother: "I was hoping this day would come when he wasn't sitting alone in his room drawing maps of Iraq and reading."

Talk About Field Trips!

The scene, heavy with the sweet smoke of cigarillos and exploding with hip-hop’s unmistakable pounding bass, could be almost anywhere: New York, Chicago, Memphis, Oakland.

The only sign that this is Colorado Springs is that two churches sit adjacent to the club, La Zona Roja, in an empty strip mall.

The club is part of a thriving hip-hop community that has grown as Colorado Springs, known for its military installations and evangelical groups, has grown. But not everyone is happy that hip-hop has taken root here.

After a spate of shootings, and with a rising murder rate, the police here are saying gangsta rap is contributing to the violence, luring gang members and criminal activity to nightclubs. The police publicly condemned the music in a news release after a killing in July and are warning nightclub owners that their places might not be safe if they play gangsta rap.

The release mentioned an event planned at Eden, called a “Pimp, Thug and Ho Party,” as the “type of behavior that causes concern.” The club’s owners called off the party.

Colorado Police Link Rise in Violence to Music

Actor Owen Wilson, who was hospitalized Aug. 26 after an apparent suicide attempt, is doing well and even making colleagues laugh. The 38-year-old Wilson was taken by ambulance to a hospital after police responded to a call about a suicide attempt at his Santa Monica home.

Owen Wilson doing better after apparent suicide attempt

A month from now, $50 billion worth of adjustable rate mortgages will "reset" from the low interest rates at which they originated in October 2005 to much higher rates that will be due for the next 28 years. Hundreds of thousands of people are about to be hit with 30 to 40 percent increases in their monthly payments. Since house prices are falling and October's resets are just the first of many, a long wave of foreclosures seems inevitable.

A fifth of all subprime mortgages made in California since 2005 are headed for foreclosure.

Also, from this week's Economist:

Not surprisingly, Wall Street's seers are chalking down their projections for construction and house prices. Economists at JPMorgan, for instance, now expect the pace of new-home building to fall by a further 30%, while they expect average house prices to tumble between 7.5% and 15% by the end of 2008. Jan Hatzius, an economist at Goldman Sachs, thinks that house prices could drop by between 15% and 30% over the next few years.

Also, from Bloomberg via Marc Andreessen:

Suppose regulators decide to play hardball on how the financial community marks to market, imposing rules that outlaw the existing freewheeling approach to how over-the-counter derivatives are assayed.

Moreover, suppose those new decrees come just as much of the underlying collateral is so tarnished as to be almost worthless compared with its initial valuation.

The ensuing carnage in the balance sheets of every financial-services company in the world would dwarf the damage wrought in the securities industry by the subprime crisis so far.

Rescuing Mortgage Holders

Rich Miner, a Google executive sometimes described as the company's vice president of wireless, cofounded a super-stealthy start-up called Android Inc. with Andy Rubin, which developed software for mobile phones in Silicon Valley and Boston. (Rubin had earlier helped start Danger Inc., the company that makes T-Mobile's Sidekick cellphone.)

Oh, yeah!

Indica was fixated on my friend Ari. I asked her what kind of phone she had.

“A Sidekick,” she said.

“Wow,” I said. “That’s the same kind Brianna has.”

“Strippers’ phone of choice,” she said.

Introducing the Google Phone

A few months ago, I was sitting with an undergraduate art student and the conversation inevitably turned to activism. The young artist says to me, “I don’t like the activist scene. They are all self-righteous, they tend to be hippies and they don’t have any fun.”

What caught my attention was the description of activism as a “scene.” I countered, “but what if it isn’t a scene? What if anyone in any scene could take part?”

He then insightfully countered back, “You’re kidding yourself. Everything is a scene, activists being one of the more obvious.” I initially dismissed the idea as a defensive reaction by yet another naïve hipster but his point remained with me. He was right.

Activism is a scene and in fact, viewing the world as a series of cultural “scenes” has become normative. Instead of an ideological position, activism is yet another system of sign-play that allows one to differentiate themselves from others. If this kid sensed that most activists got into the game because they could carve their identity out of the rough-hewn block of self-righteousness, he was right. What he sensed, and what is absolutely accurate, is that what makes activism completely unpalatable for others is that activists are completely unaware of how transparent their disdain for the people they are trying to save is.

If activism, like all scenes, is built on the premise of defining who you are not versus who you are, then the contradiction reaches its most painfully obvious form in a scene dedicated to helping those in other “scenes.”

Activism, as a scene, must overcome its own cultural contradiction.

An anecdote on the brilliance of hipsters