Sometimes it helps if your foes think you're ready for war.

M.A.D. About You

Did the military really have a better understanding of Iraq?

Rumsfeld and His Critics

This time, let's finish the job.

No More Vietnams

The Iraqi Army versus the Keystone Kops insurgency.

Back to Falluja

Mr. Bush has spent three years in a futile effort to establish a strong central government in Baghdad, leaving us without a real political settlement, with a deteriorating security situation—and with nothing but the most difficult policy choices. The five-point alternative plan offers a plausible path to that core political settlement among Iraqis, along with the economic, military and diplomatic levers to make the political solution work. It is also a plausible way for Democrats and Republicans alike to protect our basic security interests and honor our country’s sacrifices.

Unity Through Autonomy in Iraq, by Joe Biden and Leslie Gelb | Council on Foreign Relations

Imagine a world in which millions of senior citizens and disabled Americans, among others, can have, if they want, their medical conditions monitored continuously by devices that communicate over high speed, broadband networks that can automatically alert them if they require immediate medical attention. Such "remote disease management" systems not only would be highly convenient for patients, but based on evidence from the Veterans Administration's use of systems that do not yet make extensive use of broadband, could lead to huge savings in health care costs. I have calculated in a recent report that the health care cost savings and the reduced need for institutionalizing seniors and the disabled could top $1 trillion over the next 25 years.

But there is a hitch. Remote disease monitoring — and telemedicine more broadly — cannot use broadband networks unless they are reliable. Even more important than not having your streamed movie interrupted by heavy traffic from other Internet users is not having your vital signs transmitted without interruption to the individual or computer that is remotely monitoring your health.

Yet perhaps without realizing it, those who are now advocating "net neutrality" — the notion that those who shell out the big bucks to build new much higher speed networks can't ask the websites that will use the networks intensively to help pay for them — could keep this new world from becoming a reality. Further, they could deprive the websites themselves of the benefits of being able to use the networks to deliver their data-heavy content.

Catching the Web in a Net of Neutrality -- Robert E. Litan

On first viewing, Atanarjuat is perplexing. The opening is elliptical, stirring a nagging sense that readers of subtitles are being left out of the whole picture.

Unlike the typical foreign-language film-viewing experience, the number of syllables uttered by Atanarjuat's actors doesn't correspond with the basic sentences printed along the bottom of the screen. The actors are inexpressive compared with those in mainstream movies, particularly in the close-up, the shot that lifted the cinematic form from carnival curiosity to mass entertainment. Indeed, the whole film defies classical shot structures: typically, there is no establishing master shot but rather one continuous shot that is broken by jump-cuts and cutaways. As for what is actually happening, no one gets it the first time through: Something bad is taking place but you're not certain what it is. Yet the rhythm, once established, is mesmerizing. It's like listening to Kunuk speak, like being there.

The Hunter Who Happens to Make Movies

If today Internet-protocol television (IPTV) is a technological reality, then why aren't millions of Americans watching high-def movies on demand or viewing live concerts and sports events via their home wireless networks with user-controllable multiple camera angles on their screens? Why aren't more blog-minded citizens turning their homes into mini-broadcast studios?

The reason is that U.S. government policies and private corporate decisionmaking have fallen well behind the technological curve. We are paying a stiff social, economic and cultural price for our collective folly.

Why has the United States become a broadband backwater?

Apparently, he reads our blogs.

The Shocking Truth About Osama bin Laden

“Are rainbow parties pretty common?” inquired a rapt Oprah, to which Burford replied, “I think so. At least among the 50 girls that I talked to…this was pervasive.”

the latest teen craze?