PDF also available. You should check out the ToC for this issue, as it features a whole series of "Perspectives on the Long War."

The result is a change in relative advantage at the individual level played out, for example, in the increasing role of suicide attacks in warfare. In today’s social and political context, it is not enough to focus on military organizational and doctrinal changes like networking and swarming. In the long run, the "swarming" that really counts is the wide-scale mobilization of the global public.

Can I get an Amen?

Will the United States recognize the significance of connectivity and its implications for conflict? It is hard to say.

To win, we must all become super-empowered individuals. Get happy, get angry, whatever; just get going.

I liked that phrase, "the significance of connectivity", and wanted to see who else was using it, and how. It seems most common in a neurobiological context. But I ran across this article from a member of the faculty at Ankara University:

In an age in which the problems that the citizens face exceed local, and even national boundaries, the significance of connectivity on a global scale gains an unprecedented importance.

Remember that guy, "Tom", who used to write openly accessible op-ed articles?

Because globalization has brought down many of the walls that limited the movement and reach of people, and because it has simultaneously wired the world into networks, it gives more power to individuals to influence both markets and nation-states than at any other time in history. Globalization can be an incredible force-multiplier for individuals. Individuals can increasingly act on the world stage directly, unmediated by a state.

So you have today not only a superpower, not only Supermarkets, but also what I call "super-empowered individuals." Some of these super-empowered individuals are quite angry, some of them quite wonderful -- but all of them are now able to act much more directly and much more powerfully on the world stage.

("You don't strike me as super-empowered!")

The New Levée en Masse | PARAMETERS, Summer 2006

Oh, Canada!

But if you accept precaution when it comes to one area, shouldn't you apply that same caution to all areas equally? One would think.

But earlier this year, the Canadian-beef-banning French government backed down from a proposed smoking ban. Parisians can still smoke until they're blue in the face on Rue Saint Germain.

If the precautionary principle is designed to demonstrate the limits of science, it must surely also be an effective tool to illustrate our priorities and our national character. We can't call ourselves particularly cautious, but we sure can call ourselves puritanical.

I imagine The Book will include a chapter on genetically modified foods, either chronicling Europe's unsubstantiated paranoia or America's unforgivable naivety. But it probably won't have much to say about Ontario's propensity to poke at Quebec by way of Paris.

The vagaries of the precautionary principle

We have no idea whether thoroughbred horses love to race.

I have been a racing fan for years, and my point is not that horse racing is cruel or morally ambiguous.

I think the sense of obligation runs at a deeper, even subliminal level. We are responsible for racehorses because we in a very real sense created them.

Every thoroughbred is descended from one of three stallions. 95 percent of the thoroughbreds alive today are descendants of Eclipse, bred by a son of King George II and born during a solar eclipse in 1764.

Our Creation, Our Concern

Who knew City Planet would occur in the desert? Gibson taught us to expect it in the Northeast corridor, or around Tokyo. But Phoenix?

The Biosphere, miles from nowhere when it was built in the 1980's, is now within the reach of a building boom streaking north from Tucson and south from Phoenix (and which some demographers say will eventually join the two cities, once 100 miles apart).

It could be replaced by a housing development called Biosphere Estates. In January, Fairfield registered that name and a number of variants with the State of Arizona.

Sprawl Outruns Lofty Experiment

Even with a network of processors that ran four times faster than the ones on "The Incredibles," each frame of "Cars" took an average of 17 hours to render.

This is a misleading quote. It implies that the whole network was working on a single frame. If that were the case, then they were producing less than two seconds of film per month. That would work out to more than 3900 months to produce the 116 minute film.

With 'Cars,' Pixar Revs Up to Outpace Walt Disney Himself

Vanessa Redgrave will star in a play of "The Year of Magical Thinking."

Vanessa Redgrave as Joan Didion in 'The Year of Magical Thinking'

Reminiscent of a John Cheever story like "The Swimmer," it is a surreal reflection on perception, reality and memory, whose focus shifts as the film burrows ever more deeply into subterranean territory. No matter how serious it becomes, however, "La Moustache" never forsakes an underlying attitude of high-style playfulness that recalls Hitchcock's cat-and-mouse romantic thrillers.

La Moustache - Review

"Cavite" is a textbook example of seat-of-the-pants guerrilla filmmaking.

This unblinking tour of Asian misery offers an unsettling contemplation of life at the bottom of the human food chain. It touches on all the questions about nationality, faith, immigration, assimilation, globalization, poverty and the roots of terrorism that people are asking themselves, questions that aren't about to be answered either tomorrow or the day after.

Cavite - Review

Cannes reveals just how much interesting, ambitious and surprising work is being done, both in established centers of film production and in countries whose film industries have lain fallow or barely existed.

Mr. Linklater's other festival film, the Certain Regard Selection "A Scanner Darkly," based on a novel by Philip K. Dick, sends tendrils of anxiety in all directions. Is the war on drugs worse than the drug epidemic? Can you tell the difference? Is the government spying on us, or does our own paranoia make such a program redundant?

Cannes Again Offers a Year of Political Films, This Time From America

The book's style resembles the early years of Wired magazine.

He has now turned that presentation into a book and a documentary film, both called "An Inconvenient Truth."

As for the book, its roots as a slide show are very much in evidence.

'An Inconvenient Truth,' by Al Gore | Book Review