"No fighter pilot is ever going to pick up a girl at a bar by saying he flies a UAV."

How do you persuade a grown man to get circumcised?

If you’re out of caviar, use a slightly bent pickle.

Now you can access every last drop of mayonnaise!

"I added that third, green tube for fun. The higher you turn it up, the more it bounces up and down."

"I saw bodies eaten by fire." "I noticed many dead bodies of women and children, including a totally burned body of a child. He was no more than 5 years old."

"The behavior of Iraqi security forces was uncivil," said the spokesman, Ahmed Al-Shakarji. "People were trying to rescue their relatives and friends ... but the security forces opened fire on them."

Unlike the Banana War, the Vodka War is strictly a civil war.

"Their insides were all coming out," said Noor Islam, 22. "We were very upset."

"No one wants to sit by and see mass killing," Hillary said.

"I have no Plan B," Mr. McCain said.

"What keeps me awake?" he asked recently. "Car keys."

So, w... [ Read More (2.9k in body) ]

All governments deny their crimes, and most are understanding of each other's lies about them. Bush and Blair, with still more blood [than Putin] on their hands –– in all probability, that of over half a million Iraqis –– observe these precepts as automatically as Putin.

But there is a difference that sets Putin apart from his fellow rulers in the G8, indeed from virtually any government in the world.

On the evidence of comparative opinion polls, he is the most popular national leader alive today.

Since he came to power six years ago, he has enjoyed the continuous support of over 70 per cent of his people, a record no other contemporary politician begins to approach. For comparison, Chirac now has an approval rating of 38 per cent, Bush of 36 per cent, Blair of 30 per cent.

Russia’s Managed Democracy | LRB | Perry Anderson

This news is ten years old, but I only learned of it recently, in the AFA article on Cyber Command.

Russia retains the right to use nuclear weapons first against the means and forces of information warfare, and then against the aggressor state itself.

Do you think Polonium counts?

Hack Russia, Get Nuked

These are billed as commandments for counterinsurgency, but they seem more widely applicable than the advice in your typical business book bestseller.

1) Do not confuse short-term tactical imperatives and process with longer-term goals.
2) Focus on dealing with constraints to economic growth -- not humanitarian assistance or the provision of security -- as the essential condition for development.
3) In identifying areas for development spending, reinforce existing success.
4) Understand the difference between asymmetric means and asymmetric ends.
5) Accept the way local systems operate.
6) Policies and the message to the local population have to capitalize on fatigue.
7) Never confuse numbers with effects.
8) Understand the basis of local power beyond numbers.
9) Beware of international consultants bearing high-altitude plans.
10) Integrate but calibrate. Don't try to do everything at once.

I am compelled to reference a cult favorite:

There's a war out there, old friend. A world war. And it's not about who's got the most bullets. It's about who controls the information. What we see and hear, how we work, what we think... it's all about the information!

Which brings us back to an old thread. By way of updating my response, I would point to It's the Context, Stupid, from Paul Saffo in 1994.

Ten Counterinsurgency Commandments | FPRI

Following up on America's class system in numbers.

Call them yuppies, yippies, bobos, nobrows, or whatever, the consumers of the new luxury have a sense of entitlement that transcends social class, a conviction that the finest things are their birthright. Never mind that they may have been born into a family whose ancestral estate is a tract house in the suburbs, near the mall, not paid for, and whose family crest was downloaded from the Internet. Ditto the signet ring design. Language reflects this hijacking. Words such as gourmet, premium, boutique, chic, accessory, and classic have loosened from their elite moorings and now describe such ­top-­of-­category items as popcorn, hamburgers, discount brokers, shampoo, scarves, ice cream, and trailer parks. “Luxury for all” is an oxymoron, all right, the aspirational goal of modern culture, and the death knell of the real ­thing.

I want to direct your attention to this (for me) unexpectedly interesting piece in the latest issue of the New York Review of Books:

Radical Hope [excerpt] is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies.

The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe's great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: "When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened."

I'll also remind you of this quote, recently cited in a thread about Ross Anderson, from the French economist Jules Dupuit in 1849:

It is not because of the few thousand francs which would have to be spent to put a roof over the third-class carriage or to upholster the third-class seats that some company or other has open carriages with wooden benches ... What the company is trying to do is prevent the passengers who can pay the second-class fare from traveling third class; it hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... And it is again for the same reason that the companies, having proved almost cruel to the third-class passengers and mean to the second-class ones, become lavish in dealing with first-class customers. Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

Lux Populi

This was published last year but has recently been making the rounds. I had skipped over it when I pointed readers to the article on FutureMAP in the same issue of 'Studies'. But this, too, seems well worth reading.

Beijing’s capture, imprisonment, and eventual release of CIA officers John T. Downey and Richard G. Fecteau is an amazing story that too few know about today. Shot down over Communist China on their first operational mission in 1952, these young men spent the next two decades imprisoned, often in solitary confinement, while their government officially denied they were CIA officers. Fecteau was released in 1971, Downey in 1973. They came home to an America vastly different from the place they had left, but both adjusted surprisingly well and continue to live full lives.

Even though Downey and Fecteau were welcomed back as heroes by the CIA family more than 30 years ago and their story has been covered in open literature—albeit in short and generally flawed accounts— institutional memory regarding these brave officers has dimmed. Their ordeal is not well known among today’s officers, judging by the surprise and wonder CIA historians encounter when relating it in internal lectures and training courses.

This story is important as a part of US intelligence history because it demonstrates the risks of operations (and the consequences of operational error), the qualities of character necessary to endure hardship, and the potential damage to reputations through the persistence of false stories about past events. Above all, the saga of John Downey and Richard Fecteau is about remarkable faithfulness, shown not only by the men who were deprived of their freedom, but also by an Agency that never gave up hope. While it was through operational misjudgments that these two spent much of their adulthood in Chinese prisons, the Agency, at least in part, redeemed itself through its later care for the men from whom years had been stolen.

Two CIA Prisoners in China, 1952-73

Open a window onto the world!

This paper analyzes which pages and topics are the most popular on Wikipedia and why. For the period of September 2006 to January 2007, the 100 most visited Wikipedia pages in a month are identified and categorized in terms of the major topics of interest. The observed topics are compared with search behavior on the Web. Search queries, which are identical to the titles of the most popular Wikipedia pages, are submitted to major search engines and the positions of popular Wikipedia pages in the top 10 search results are determined. The presented data helps to explain how search engines, and Google in particular, fuel the growth and shape what is popular on Wikipedia.

What is Popular on Wikipedia and Why?

When everyone has a red pen, reading is value creation.

Since its inception six years ago, the online encyclopedia Wikipedia has accumulated 6.40 million articles and 250 million edits, contributed in a predominantly undirected and haphazard fashion by 5.77 million unvetted volunteers. Despite the apparent lack of order, the 50 million edits by 4.8 million contributors to the 1.5 million articles in the English–language Wikipedia follow strong certain overall regularities. We show that the accretion of edits to an article is described by a simple stochastic mechanism, resulting in a heavy tail of highly visible articles with a large number of edits. We also demonstrate a crucial correlation between article quality and number of edits, which validates Wikipedia as a successful collaborative effort.

Assessing the value of cooperation in Wikipedia

Christopher Hitchens joins MemeStreams in its celebration of the American South.

I can clearly remember the first time I heard the expression y'all, which was at a Greyhound bus stop in Georgia more than 30 years ago.

Welcome to the You Decade

This is an edited version of a longer interview.

Benny Peiser of Liverpool John Moores University recently interviewed Freeman Dyson about his views on science, hope and the future.

...

Dyson: The principle of maximum diversity says that life evolves to make the universe as interesting as possible.

The principle of maximum diversity operates both at the physical and at the mental level. It says that the laws of nature and the initial conditions are such as to make the universe as interesting as possible. As a result, life is possible but not too easy. Always when things are dull, something new turns up to challenge us and to stop us from settling into a rut.

Examples of things which make life difficult are all around us: comet impacts, ice ages, weapons, plagues, nuclear fission, computers, sex, sin and death. Not all challenges can be overcome, and so we have tragedy. Maximum diversity often leads to maximum stress. In the end we survive, but only by the skin of our teeth.

-- Freeman Dyson, “Infinite in All Directions”

Peiser: How can young scientists develop intellectual independence and autonomy in a bureaucratic world of funding dependency?

Dyson: I like to remind young scientists of examples in the recent past when people without paper qualifications made great contributions. ... Amateurs and small companies will have a growing role in the future of science.

Peiser: How do you feel belonging to a tiny minority of scientists who dare to voice their doubts openly?

Dyson: I am always happy to be in the minority. Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details to be sure that they are unreliable.

Dyson: Yes, the western academic world [today] is very much like Weimar Germany ...

Dyson: I see the discovery of HAR1 as a seminal event in the history of science, marking the beginning of a new understanding of human evolution and human nature.

Dyson: My view of the prevalence of doom-and-gloom in Cambridge is that it is a result of the English class system.

That last one is an interesting comment ...

Check out this RAND report:

Antisocial behavior is a costly and growing concern in the United Kingdom, with Britain’s Home Office logging around 66,000 reports of antisocial behavior each day. Vandalism alone is estimated to cost victims and the criminal justice system around £1.3 billion ($2.5 billion) annually. Other commonly reported forms of antisocial behavior include intimidation, drunkenness, begging, drug dealing, prostitution, rowdiness, graffiti, littering, and dumping rubbish in public places.

Rebel with a Cause: The Optimistic Scientist