Our enemies are winning. The enemies know it. We know it.
Afghanistan is drowning in a frothing quicksand.
Obama says he is serious about Afghanistan.
It will be like solving a human Rubik’s Cube during a firefight while the media screams every time you make a wrong move — or what is perceived as a wrong move — and there is a clock ticking and at some unknown point the Cube self-destructs.
Recently:
"You Westerners have your watches," the leader observed. "But we Taliban have time."
There's a gap emerging between the kind of thinking that requires long, uninterrupted, serious concentration on something and superficial surfing behaviour.
What I'm seeing is that there's a great deal of people who we wouldn't think of as being intellectuals in the normal sense, but in certain specific realms they are quite sophisticated, knowledgeable and able to focus for long stretches of time.
You're inside for several years and then suddenly the gates fly open! And you're plunged into this complete interaction with the outside world.
From the archive:
Being in the water alone, surfing, sharpens a particular kind of concentration, an ability to agree with the ocean, to react with a force that is larger than you are.
Also:
I had one little side room we called “the pi room,” because on its walls were 53,000 digits of pi, done in pale green on black, a “Matrix” homage. But a very funny thing happened once it was up — people would go into the pi room, and their brains would become quiet, and they would emerge relaxed — to the point where if someone was getting stressed, we’d say, “Go stand in the pi room.”
Finally:
That's the kind of thinking that comes naturally in such a place, where 100 years is nothing.
None of this is the fault of the left. No, we on the right did it. The financial crisis that is hoisting us on our own petard is only the latest (if the last) of the petard hoistings that have issued from the hindquarters of our movement.
"It was one of those things where it pops up on your screen and your jaw drops."
Lawmakers are considering legislation to undo the change, but several aides said they were still torn between their belief that the change is illegal and fear of further destabilizing the economy.
"None of us wants to be blamed for ruining these mergers and creating a new Great Depression," one said.
The Great American Housing Market Nightmare: The Next Phase
Topic: Business
7:34 pm EST, Nov 11, 2008
The end of the decline in home prices will come only when there are no new economic forces driving them down.
When will that be? I'd love to say it's just around the corner. But everything I see tells me that, despite the sharp declines already recorded, a steeper plunge in home values is dead ahead.
Already, in 2008, one in ten American homeowners has defaulted on their mortgage or lost their home in foreclosure. Nearly four in ten owe more than their home is worth.
And all this is before the recession deepens and before we experience the next phase of the Great American Housing Nightmare.
The International Monetary Fund is establishing a new credit facility that allows financially sound periphery countries to borrow without any conditions up to five times their annual quota, but that is too little too late. A much larger pool of money is needed to reassure markets. And if the top tier of periphery countries is saved, what happens to the lower-tier countries? The race to save the international financial system is still ongoing. Even if it is successful, consumers, investors, and businesses are undergoing a traumatic experience whose full impact on global economic activity is yet to be felt. A deep recession is now inevitable and the possibility of a depression cannot be ruled out. When I predicted earlier this year that we were facing the worst financial crisis since the 1930s, I did not anticipate that conditions would deteriorate so badly.
From late September:
A brave man would see catharsis in all this misery; a wise man would not be so hasty.
From January:
There will and must be many more such booms, for without them the economy of the United States can no longer function. The bubble cycle has replaced the business cycle.
Two pressing problems face the world: economic meltdown and global warming. Conveniently, a solution presents itself that apparently solves both: governments should invest heavily in green technology, thus boosting demand while transforming the energy business.
Just as military spending at the end of the 1930s defeated both fascism and the Depression, so spending on fighting climate change should both wean mankind off fossil fuels and avert what might otherwise turn into the most serious downturn since the 1930s. Isn’t that neat?
Memeorandum Colors: Visualizing Political Bias with Greasemonkey
Topic: Politics and Law
8:25 am EST, Nov 7, 2008
Andy Baio:
Like the rest of the world, I've been completely obsessed with the presidential election and nonstop news coverage. My drug of choice? Gabe Rivera's Memeorandum, the political sister site of Techmeme, which constantly surfaces the most controversial stories being discussed by political bloggers.
While most political blogs are extremely partisan, their biases aren't immediately obvious to outsiders like me. I wanted to see, at a glance, how conservative or liberal the blogs were without clicking through to every article.
With the help of del.icio.us founder Joshua Schachter, we used a recommendation algorithm to score every blog on Memeorandum based on their linking activity in the last three months. Then I wrote a Greasemonkey script to pull that information out of Google Spreadsheets, and colorize Memeorandum on-the-fly. Left-leaning blogs are blue and right-leaning blogs are red, with darker colors representing strong biases. Check out the screenshot below, and install the Greasemonkey script or standalone Firefox extension to try it yourself.
