"What the president did with the NSA [was] a proposal for a worse way."

You can watch a video of FISA court chief judge Royce Lamberth at the ALA convention.

Judge Discusses Details of Work On Secret Court

Imagine having a spare copy of your immune system on ice, ready to replace your existing one should you fall victim to AIDS, an autoimmune disease, or have to undergo extensive chemotherapy for cancer.

An Anglo-American company called Lifeforce has received permission from the US Food and Drug Administration to do just that.

From the web site:

The Immune System Bank™ facilities consist of secure locations for the frozen storage of the white blood cells from whole blood. The white cells form the basis of an individual’s immune system. Sampling immune cells from a patient, enhancing them, and then returning them to the patient is called Adoptive Immunotherapy or Biological Therapy. These terms are also used to describe therapies that naturally assist your immune system to fight disease.

Lifeforce® takes a sample of your healthy blood. We then extract the white blood cells from the whole blood and freeze them after division into three separate samples. These immune system cells will be stored in liquid nitrogen vapour in three geographically remote and secure freezers.

Before the advent of Lifeforce®, the immune system cells in Biological Therapy had been collected from patients only after they had fallen ill, and were therefore of inferior quality, i.e. diseased and only partially, if at all, effective. Lifeforce® preserves a sample of an individual''s white blood cells before they fall ill, at a time when their immune system is pristine, more complete, and uncontaminated by disease. Lifeforce®, when requested, then supplies the cells back to the patient’s physician for reinfusion.

Storing a representative sample of a person''s immune system prior to them becoming ill is unique to Lifeforce®. World medical leaders in immunology consider the Lifeforce® Immune System Bank™ service will enable valuable therapies. The Lifeforce® service can save life, extend life and enhance the quality of life whilst reducing personal and healthcare industry costs.

Lifeforce® charges an initial fee of £395, followed by a monthly fee of £12.

Create a back-up copy of your immune system

A double agent for Saddam’s notorious Mukhabarat and Israel’s Mossad has returned to Canada. How did he get here? Did Canada once deliver him into torture? And has Sumaida finally found sanctuary?

The Very Strange Case of Hussein Ali Sumaida

Fareed Zakaria called this article "deeply illuminating."

What turned Mohammad Sidique Khan, a softly spoken youth worker, into the mastermind of 7/7? I spent months in a Leeds suburb getting to know Khan's brother. A complex and disturbing story of the bomber's radicalisation emerged.

'My brother the bomber' | Prospect

Amid the clamor, it is difficult to figure out what is actually going on.

Fareed Zakaria's weekly column.

People in the Muslim world travel to see the glitz in Dubai, not the madrassas in Tehran.

By and large, radical Islam is not winning the argument, which is why it is trying to win by force.

...

How to open up and modernize the Muslim world is a long, hard and complex challenge. But surely one key is to be seen by these societies and peoples as partners and friends, not as bullies and enemies. That is one battle we are not yet winning.

True or False: We Are Losing The War Against Radical Islam

... gorgeous ... mesmerizing ... important, disquieting ... absorbing, if unsettling ...

Make time to see this film. (Don't forget about Iraq in Fragments.)

Edward Burtynsky is internationally acclaimed for his large-scale photographs of nature transformed by industry. Manufactured Landscapes – a stunning documentary by award winning director Jennifer Baichwal – follows Burtynsky to China, as he captures the effects of the country’s massive industrial revolution. This remarkable film leads us to meditate on human endeavour and its impact on the planet.

Wired offers photographs, along with an interview with the photographer Ed Burtynsky:

"I started to think: where is all this natural material going, where does it get formed into the products that we buy?"

Manufactured Landscapes

Keep your eye on the ball.

Today's global liberal democratic order faces two challenges. The first is radical Islam -- and it is the lesser of the two challenges. Although the proponents of radical Islam find liberal democracy repugnant, and the movement is often described as the new fascist threat, the societies from which it arises are generally poor and stagnant. They represent no viable alternative to modernity and pose no significant military threat to the developed world. It is mainly the potential use of weapons of mass destruction -- particularly by nonstate actors -- that makes militant Islam a menace.

The second, and more significant, challenge emanates from the rise of nondemocratic great powers: the West's old Cold War rivals China and Russia, now operating under authoritarian capitalist, rather than communist, regimes. Authoritarian capitalist great powers played a leading role in the international system up until 1945. They have been absent since then. But today, they seem poised for a comeback.

I am skeptical of the idea that Russia is poised for a comeback. Putin and his government may be poised, but the people are not. Russia will have a political role, due to its Security Council seat, but economically, what does it have to offer?

The Return of Authoritarian Great Powers | Foreign Affairs

It's interesting to see how little this kind of analysis seems to factor into the debate about immigration reform in the US.

Robert Putnam’s sobering new diversity research scares its author.

Putnam’s study reveals that immigration and diversity not only reduce social capital between ethnic groups, but also within the groups themselves. Trust, even for members of one’s own race, is lower, altruism and community cooperation rarer, friendships fewer. The problem isn’t ethnic conflict or troubled racial relations, but withdrawal and isolation. Putnam writes: “In colloquial language, people living in ethnically diverse settings appear to ‘hunker down’—that is, to pull in like a turtle.”

If he’s right, heavy immigration will inflict social deterioration for decades to come, harming immigrants as well as the native-born. Putnam is hopeful that eventually America will forge a new solidarity based on a “new, broader sense of we.” The problem is how to do that in an era of multiculturalism and disdain for assimilation.

Bowling With Our Own

Shortly after 9/11, Senator Bob Graham, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called for “a symbiotic relationship between the intelligence community and the private sector.” They say you should be careful what you wish for.

... As it happened, the dot-com bubble had burst shortly before 9/11, cutting loose a generation of technology entrepreneurs who, when the government came calling, were only too happy to start developing new data-mining algorithms and biometric identification programs.

There is nothing inherently wrong with all this.

The problem is that the “symbiotic relationship” has turned decidedly dysfunctional, if not downright exploitative.

Don’t Privatize Our Spies

A year after the National Security Agency nearly maxed out its electrical capacity, some offices are experiencing significant power disruptions as the agency confronts the increasingly urgent problem of an infrastructure stretched to its limits.

The issue has become a top priority for the NSA's director, Lt. Gen. Keith B. Alexander. In recent testimony, he warned that the agency would have to shut down significant amounts of equipment and resort to rolling blackouts if drastic action were not taken.

Power supply still a vexation for the NSA