In an opinion piece published on the news website, rue89, the anonymous duo - political science and communication students in their twenties - said the film was a tongue-in-cheek way of criticising France's niqab ban, which the Senate passed last month and is due to go into force early next year.

"To put a simple burka on would have been too simple. So we asked ourselves: 'how would the authorities react when faced with women wearing a burka and mini-shorts?," asked the students, one of whom is a Muslim.

Josh Harris:

Everything is free, except the video that we capture of you. That we own.

Mark Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Aditya Dev Sood:

Perhaps it all makes sense, for the point is the clothes she is wearing, not the character she is playing.

Alan Kay:

We can't learn to see until we realize we are blind.

Fashion Remix

Virginia Postrel:

In an era of tell-all memoirs, ubiquitous paparazzi, and reality-show exhibitionism, glamour may seem absent from Hollywood. But Barack Obama demonstrates that its magic still exists.

The pleasure and inspiration may be real, but glamour always contains an illusion. The image is not entirely false, but it is misleading.

Magnificence, like spectacle, produces awe; glamour, by contrast, stokes desire.

James Lileks:

The Apple tablet is the Barack Obama of technology. It's whatever you want it to be, until you actually get it.

The Economist on Obama, from November 2008:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

Jeff Jarvis:

After having slept with her (Ms. iPad), I am having morning-after regrets. Sweet and cute but shallow and vapid.

Decius:

Sarah Palin is the slick corporate VP who is all image and no substance, and they love that about her because they have convinced themselves that if they do away with substance it will free them from the problems that substantial people attempt to address.

Kathleen Parker:

Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice.

Postrel:

Glamour not only makes things look better than they really are. It also tends to edit out human complexity -- including, in the political realm, the complexity of disagreements, of clashing values, of diverse wants, of technological, economic, and moral tradeoffs.

Political figures as glamorous as Obama are rare. But glamorous policy proposals are not.

Atul Gawande:

The most interesting, under-discussed, and potentially revolutionary aspect of the law is that it doesn't pretend to have the answers.

That's the one truly scary thing about health reform: far from being a government takeover, it counts on local communities and clinicians for success.

An exchange:

Moe: Think hard, and come up with a slogan that appeals to all the lazy slobs out there.
Homer: [moans] Can't someone else do it?
Moe: "Can't someone else do it?", that's perfect!
Homer: It is?
Moe: Yeah! Now get out there and spread that message to the people!

Richard Haass:

Let's not kid ourselves. We're not going to find some wonderful thing that's going to deliver large positive results at modest costs. It's not going to happen.

Viktor Chernomyrdin:

We wanted the best, but it turned out as always.

A Power to Persuade

David Margolick:

Many of the GOP's most faithful, the kind who vote in primaries despite 115-degree heat, tired long ago of McCain the Maverick, the man who had crossed the aisle to work with Democrats on issues like immigration reform, global warming, and restricting campaign contributions.

"Maverick" is a mantle McCain no longer claims; in fact, he now denies he ever was one.

After retreating on a number of issues, the erstwhile iconoclast has morphed into what the Senate minority leader, Mitch McConnell, calls "a fabulous team player."

Yet here was Palin, urging her fans four times in 15 minutes to send McCain the Maverick back to Washington.

Decius:

Sarah Palin is the slick corporate VP who is all image and no substance, and they love that about her because they have convinced themselves that if they do away with substance it will free them from the problems that substantial people attempt to address.

Kathleen Parker:

Giving up being liked is the ultimate public sacrifice.

Margolick:

For all McCain's talk about money's malign effect on politics, he has millions of dollars on hand, collected from the state's economic and business elite ...

Decius:

Your right to freedom of speech is an inalienable right. Even if you are rich. That's what an inalienable right is. I don't have a solution for the problem of bad taste.

A parting thought:

What hidden potentials exist within YOU?

Perhaps you're a wholly reasonable person, with the potential to become an irrational fool?

Perhaps you're a team player, with a potentially argumentative loner lurking about inside you?

Or perhaps you're a dreamer, within whom lives a potentially disillusioned grouse, simply waiting to take flight on the wings of bitterness?

McCain the Maverick Fights for His Soul

Mark Kingwell:

Incivility doesn't just threaten the etiquette of interchange, it threatens democracy.

We're all in a mess of trouble, though not for the reasons you may think.

An exchange:

Wendell: It's a mess, ain't it Sheriff?

Bell: If it ain't, it'll do til the mess gets here.

"Leonard Nimoy":

It's all lies. But they're entertaining lies. And in the end, isn't that the real truth?

The answer ... is No.

Jon Stewart:

Here's just what I wanted to tell you guys.

Stop.

Stop, stop, stop, stop hurting America.

See, the thing is, we need your help. Right now, you're helping the politicians and the corporations. And we're left out there to mow our lawns.

Tim Kreider:

Quite a lot of what passes itself off as a dialogue about our society consists of people trying to justify their own choices as the only right or natural ones by denouncing others' as selfish or pathological or wrong.

Decius:

I've come to the conclusion that you actually want shifty, dishonest politicians elected by an apathetic populace. This means that things are working. I'm confident that technology has improved the resources available to people if/when they choose to act. So far they don't need to, largely. Don't wish for times when they do.

Decius:

There is a lot of bad speech in our democracy. I don't have a solution for the problem of bad taste. But in my experience the answer to bad speech has always been more speech. It isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Kingwell:

Question: what is the only thing worse than un-civil discourse? Answer: no discourse at all.

It is sometimes said that literacy is the software of democracy. Let's be more accurate, and more demanding. The real software of democracy is not bare literacy, which permits and even enjoys all manner of rhetorical nonsense and short-sighted demagoguery. It is political literacy, the ability to engage in critical dialogue with ideas both agreeable and disagreeable, interests that align with ours and those that do not. We need to learn this skill, run it, and revise it constantly by repeated engagements. We must be prepared to sacrifice something we value, for the sake of the larger good.

On John McCain:

In all his speeches, John McCain urges Americans to make sacrifices for a country that is both "an idea and a cause".

He is not asking them to suffer anything he would not suffer himself.

But many voters would rather not suffer at all.

Cormac McCarthy:

Anything that doesn't take years of your life and drive you to suicide hardly seems worth doing.

The Shout Doctrine

Decius:

We need to balance privacy interests with the state's interest in monitoring suspected criminals.

CNCI Initiatives:

1. Manage the Federal Enterprise Network as a single network enterprise with Trusted Internet Connections.
2. Deploy an intrusion detection system of sensors across the Federal enterprise.
3. Pursue deployment of intrusion prevention systems across the Federal enterprise.
4: Coordinate and redirect research and development (R&D) efforts.
5. Connect current cyber ops centers to enhance situational awareness.
6. Develop and implement a government-wide cyber counterintelligence (CI) plan.
7. Increase the security of our classified networks.
8. Expand cyber education.
9. Define and develop enduring "leap-ahead" technology, strategies, and programs.
10. Define and develop enduring deterrence strategies and programs.
11. Develop a multi-pronged approach for global supply chain risk management.
12. Define the Federal role for extending cybersecurity into critical infrastructure domains.

Ellen Nakashima:

The administration did not declassify a summary of the legal justification of Einstein 3. The analysis is based on the notion that the public has no reasonable expectation of privacy in communications to the government, said sources familiar with it.

Siobhan Gorman:

The White House's new cyber-security chief, Howard Schmidt, said addressing potential privacy concerns was one of the ten initial steps he planned to take.

"We're really paying attention, and we get it," he said.

Decius:

What you tell Google you've told the government.

Eric Schmidt:

If you have something that you don't want anyone to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place.

Bradley A. Smith:

The law, Malcolm Stewart contended, would even require banning a book that made the same points as the Citizens United video.

There was an audible gasp in the courtroom. Then Justice Alito spoke, it seemed, for the entire audience: "That's pretty incredible."

Decius, 2010:

The thing that sucks about freedom of speech is that rich people can afford more speech than you can.

Decius, 2003:

Your right to freedom of speech is an inalienable right. Even if you are rich. That's what an inalienable right is.

Decius, 2009:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

The Myth of Campaign Finance Reform

Tony Judt:

Why is it that here in the United States we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? We appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. Why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?

Mark Twain:

When an entirely new and untried political project is sprung upon the people, they are startled, anxious, timid, and for a time they are mute, reserved, noncommittal. The great majority of them are not studying the new doctrine and making up their minds about it, they are waiting to see which is going to be the popular side.

Noteworthy:

Do you understand the difference between "Is it worth buying?" and "Can it be sold?"

Decius:

It's important to understand that it isn't Congress that must change -- it is us.

Mark Whitehouse:

Giving up on the American dream has its benefits.

Joe Nocera:

They just want theirs. That is the culture they have created.

Jon Lee Anderson:

The air stinks heavily of raw sewage, but no one seems to notice.

Decius:

This is the road to despotism. This is the fevered dream of theocracy. This is America.

Jules Dupuit:

It hits the poor, not because it wants to hurt them, but to frighten the rich ... Having refused the poor what is necessary, they give the rich what is superfluous.

David Foster Wallace:

The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the "rat race" -- the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.

What Is Living and What Is Dead in Social Democracy?

Joseph Turow, a professor at the Annenberg School for Communication at the University of Pennsylvania:

Generally speaking, [average internet users] know very, very little about what goes on online, under the screen, under the hood. The kinds of things they don't know would surprise many people around here.

Alan Davidson, director of US public policy affairs at Google:

We had the assumption that people who were interested in privacy and were going to visit the [behavioral advertising] site would all be opting out, but that was not the case.

To simply say that people aren't informed, and if you inform them they want to get rid of this stuff, is probably too simplistic a view. Many consumers do understand there is a bargain here.

Decius:

If you give me money, everything's going to be cool, okay? It's gonna be cool. Give me money. No consequences, no whammies, money. Money for me ... Money for me, databases for you.

A day in New York:

[Marge and Lisa are gazing dreamily into a window filled with glamorous shoes.]

Lisa: Look at all those beautiful shoes! I know they're made from animals but WOW!
Marge: Mmmm, If only I didn't already have a pair of shoes.
Bart: Speaking of shoes, I don't care about shoes. I'll meet you ladies back here in half an hour.

Homer:

You know, Marge, I was thinking about how much I enjoy your interest. So I wandered over to that theater you went to last night and I bought tickets to their entire season. Look, "Mostly Madrigals"... Yeah, that might be good. Ooh, ooh, "An Evening with Philip Glass." Just an evening?

Joe Queenan:

Even if life were not too short, it would still be too short to read anything by Dan Aykroyd.

Groups Far Apart on Online Privacy Oversight

David Pozen:

In the vast literature on government secrecy, little attention has been paid to the structure of government secrets, as distinct from their substance or function. Yet these secrets differ systematically depending on how many people know of their existence, what sorts of people know, how much they know, and how soon they know. When a small group of similarly situated officials conceals from outsiders the fact that it is concealing something, the result is a deep secret. When members of the general public understand they are being denied particular items of information, the result is a shallow secret. Every act of state secrecy can be located on a continuum ranging between these two poles.

Attending to the depth of state secrets can make a variety of conceptual and practical contributions to the debate on their usage. The deep/shallow distinction provides a vocabulary and an analytic framework with which to describe, assess, and compare secrets, without having to judge what they conceal. It sheds light on how secrecy is employed and experienced, which types are likely to do the most damage, and where to focus reform efforts. And it gives more rigorous content to criticisms of Bush administration practices. Elaborating these claims, this Article also mines new constitutional territory - providing an original account of the role of state secrecy generally, as well as deep secrecy specifically, in our constitutional order.

Thomas Powers:

Is more what we really need?

Abaddon:

Something needs to be said for keeping such knowledge secret.

Peter Galison and Robb Moss:

Depending on whom you ask, government secrecy is either the key to victory in our struggle against terrorism, or our Achilles heel. But is so much secrecy a bad thing?

On John Young's Cryptome:

It's like a nihilist art project: Provide your readers with more than 40,000 files of data the government doesn't want you to have, data that exposes the lies of the powerful, and then remind them that you can never, ever know for sure who is lying.

Deep Secrecy

Matthew Hoh, in September:

It is with great regret and disappointment I submit my resignation from my appointment as a Political Officer in the Foreign Service and my post as the Senior Civilian Representative for the US Government in Zabul Province.

Success and victory, whatever they may be, will not be realized in years, after billions more spent, but in decades and generations.

Karen DeYoung, yesterday:

While he did not share Hoh's view that the war "wasn't worth the fight," Holbrooke said, "I agreed with much of his analysis."

George Packer:

Richard Holbrooke must know that there will be no American victory in this war; he can only try to forestall potential disaster. But if he considers success unlikely, or even questions the premise of the war, he has kept it to himself.

DeYoung continues:

Late last year, a friend told Hoh that the State Department was offering year-long renewable hires for Foreign Service officers in Afghanistan. It was a chance, he thought, to use the development skills he had learned in Tikrit under a fresh administration that promised a new strategy.

The Economist on Obama, from last November:

He has to start deciding whom to disappoint.

Ahmed Rashid, last month:

For the first time, polling shows that a majority of Americans do not approve of Obama's handling of Afghanistan. Yet if it is to have any chance of success, the Obama plan for Afghanistan needs a serious long-term commitment -- at least for the next three years. Democratic politicians are demanding results before next year's congressional elections, which is neither realistic nor possible. Moreover, the Taliban are quite aware of the Democrats' timetable. With Obama's plan the US will be taking Afghanistan seriously for the first time since 2001; if it is to be successful it will need not only time but international and US support -- both open to question.

Lucian K. Truscott IV, in 2005:

The Army will need this lieutenant 20 years from now when he could be a colonel, or 30 years from now when he could have four stars on his collar. But I doubt he will be in uniform long enough to make captain.

If you keep faith with soldiers and tell them the truth even when it threatens their beliefs, you run the risk of losing them. But if you peddle cleverly manipulated talking points to people who trust you not to lie, you won't merely lose them, you'll break their hearts.

Andrew Lahde:

Today I write not to gloat. Instead, I am writing to say goodbye.

Frank Sandoval:

My heart swells in my chest and while I laugh,
I feel fear, smell a faint stench of insanity.

Dear Ambassador ...