A stark assessment of terrorism trends by American intelligence agencies has found that the American invasion and occupation of Iraq has helped spawn a new generation of Islamic radicalism and that the overall terrorist threat has grown since the Sept. 11 attacks.

Islamic radicalism, rather than being in retreat, has metastasized and spread across the globe.

The report says that the Iraq war has made the overall terrorism problem worse.

Spin that.

Spy Agencies Say Iraq War Worsens Terror Threat

Check out the photos of the crowd.

Hundreds of thousands of people stood Friday and chanted "God, God, protect Nasrallah." It was the moment they had waited for: Hezbollah’s leader, Hassan Nasrallah, in person, declaring that his militia was stronger than ever and that no army in the world could force it to disarm.

The crowd was mammoth, packing every corner of the 37-acre square in the southern suburbs of Beirut. There was a plastic chair for nearly everyone, and a baseball cap for protection from the sun. Hezbollah’s martial choir belted out chest thumping music.

"Hello, is this Partyland? Yes, I'd like to see about renting some plastic chairs for an event this weekend ..."

"We came to show the American administration, the British administration, the French administration, that the resistance population is increasing, not decreasing."

You can see the plastic chairs being set up.

Pro-Western Lebanese politicians have watched with dismay as Iranian influence has spread across the region, largely with the help, they say, of American foreign policy. Iran extended its reach into western Afghanistan and has secured a deep hold in Iraq.

Even if the current government remains in power, its influence has suffered severely.

Sheik Nasrallah has emerged as a hero of defiance against American influence and Israeli might for many people across the Middle East.

The group has made much of an incident in the southern town of Merj ’Uyun where the Israeli Army occupied a Lebanese Army barracks and detained the soldiers inside without resistance. Lebanese television aired a videotape of the Lebanese general in charge having tea with Israeli Army officers.

Lebanon Throng Hails Hezbollah Chief, Who Calls Militia Stronger

Joan Didion on Dick Cheney.

In 1991, explaining why he agreed with George H.W. Bush's decision not to take the Gulf War to Baghdad, Cheney had acknowledged the probability that any such invasion would be followed by civil war in Iraq:

Once you've got Baghdad, it's not clear what you do with it. It's not clear what kind of government you would put in.... Is it going to be a Shia regime, a Sunni regime or a Kurdish regime? Or one that tilts toward the Baathists, or one that tilts toward the Islamic fundamentalists?... How long does the United States military have to stay to protect the people that sign on for that government, and what happens to it once we leave?

By January 2006, when the prescience of these questions was evident and polling showed that 47 percent of Iraqis approved of "attacks on US-led forces," and the administration was still calculating that it could silence domestic doubt by accusing the doubter of wanting to "cut and run," the Vice President assured Fox News that the course had been true. "When we look back on this ten years hence," he said, a time frame suggesting that he was once again leaving the cleanup to someone else, "we will have fundamentally changed the course of history in that part of the world, and that will be an enormous advantage for the United States and for all of those countries that live in the region."

Cheney: The Fatal Touch | NYRB

Nicholas Kristof explains why aid is hard.

In rural Indonesia, you see a cultural problem that aid can't easily address: pregnant women and babies going hungry, even having to eat bark from trees, while their husbands are doing fine. It turns out that the custom is for the men and boys to eat their fill first.

Discouraged, you move on to southern Africa. You see the very sensible efforts of aid groups to get people to grow sorghum rather than corn, because it is hardier and more nutritious. But local people aren't used to eating sorghum. So aid workers introduce sorghum by giving it out as a relief food to the poor—and then sorghum becomes stigmatized as the poor man's food, and no one wants to have anything to do with it.

William Easterly, in his tremendously important and provocative new book, The White Man's Burden, asserts with great force that the aid industry is deeply flawed.

Aid: Can It Work? | NYRB

Timothy Garton Ash on Islam in Europe.

Earlier this year, I visited the famous cathedral of Saint-Denis, on the outskirts of Paris. I admired the magnificent tombs and funerary monuments of the kings and queens of France, including that of Charles Martel ("the hammer"), whose victory over the invading Muslim armies near Poitiers in 732 AD is traditionally held to have halted the Islamization of Europe. Stepping out of the cathedral, I walked a hundred yards across the Place Victor Hugo to the main commercial street, which was thronged with local shoppers of Arab and African origin, including many women wearing the hijab. I caught myself thinking: So the Muslims have won the Battle of Poitiers after all! Won it not by force of arms, but by peaceful immigration and fertility.

Just down the road from the cathedral of the kings, in the discreet backyard offices of the Tawhid association, I met Abdelaziz Eljaouhari, the son of Berber Moroccan immigrants and an eloquent Muslim political activist. He talked with fluent passion, in perfect French, about the misery of the impoverished housing projects around Paris—which, as we spoke, were again wracked by protests—and the chronic social discrimination against immigrants and their descendants. France's so-called "Republican model," he said furiously, means in practice "I speak French, am called Jean-Daniel, and have blue eyes and blond hair." If you are called Abdelaziz, have a darker skin, and are Muslim to boot, the French Republic does not practice what it preaches. "What égalité is there for us?" he asked. "What liberté? What fraternité?" And then he delivered his personal message to Nicolas Sarkozy, the hard-line interior minister and leading right-wing candidate to succeed Jacques Chirac as French president, in words that I will never forget. "Moi," said Abdelaziz Eljaouhari, in a ringing voice, "Moi, je suis la France!"

And, he might have added, l'Europe.

Islam in Europe | NYRB

This paper argues that the benefits of information superiority in attaining military superiority may be vastly overestimated. The economics of ‘information-rich’ environments inherently inspire perverse incentives that frequently generate unhappy outcomes. The military must rigorously guard against the threat of ‘diminishing returns’ on its net-centric investments. Drawing on the author’s private sector experiences with net-centric transformations, several approaches for reassessing the military value of information transparency are suggested.

Perfect Information and Perverse Incentives: Costs and Consequences of Transformation and Transparency

This is the long-form preprint version of Andrew Odlyzko's article in a recent issue of IEEE Spectrum.

Metcalfe’s Law states that the value of a communications network is proportional to the square of the size of the network. It is widely accepted and frequently cited. However, there are several arguments that this rule is a significant overestimate. (Therefore Reed’s Law is even more of an overestimate, since it says that the value of a network grows exponentially, in the mathemat- ical sense, in network size.) This note presents several quantitative arguments that suggest the value of a general communication network of size n grows like n log(n). This growth rate is faster than the linear growth, of order n, that, according to Sarnoff ’s Law, governs the value of a broadcast network. On the other hand, it is much slower than the quadratic growth of Metcalfe’s Law, and helps explain the failure of the dot-com and telecom booms, as well as why net- work interconnection (such as peering on the Internet) remains a controversial issue.

A refutation of Metcalfe’s Law and a better estimate for the value of networks and network interconnections

Reviewers often praise video games for their great graphics, cool sci-fi settings and replay value.

With "LocoRoco," heaps of cuteness, creativity and charm make what could have been another boring platformer into one of the year's most original and irresistible video games for the PlayStation Portable.

I am not a PSP owner, but this game sounds like it follows in the footsteps of Katamari Damacy.

LocoRoco is one of the year's most irresistible offerings

A blog on social software, collaboration, trust, security, privacy, and internet tools, by Christopher Allen.

I've had this blog in my NetNewsWire client for a few years now.

You may also recall that I recently blogged Mr. Allen's talk on the Dunbar number, although no one else either looked at it or seemed to find it worth recommending. Maybe you'd like to reconsider?

Life With Alacrity

Engineers have developed a system for taking anonymous cell-phone location information and turning it into an illuminated traffic map that identifies congestion in real time. The system takes advantage of the steady stream of positioning cues -- untraced signals all cell phones produce, whether in use or not, as they seek towers with the strongest signals. It is the first traffic-solution technology that monitors patterns on rural roads and city streets as easily as on highways.

New technology uses cell phone positioning data to report traffic tangles