Neighbors, friends, elected representatives—I am Margaritaville. My father was a simple shrimp-boat captain who set course for a sleepy fishing village almost 40 years ago. He didn't want much. A little plot of land, some skanks, maybe a flask of rum to warm his swollen belly. I'm not sure a little boy was in the plans, but he raised me with love and, more importantly, a love of this land.

From the crisp scent of vomit-soaked pizza boxes baking in the sunrise on East Sound Pier, to the pink-and-orange sunsets softly shimmering behind the West Railyard prostitute encampments, I love every inch of this town. I took my first body shot right around the time I spoke my first word, and that word was "body shot."

And yet I fear that our children might not grow up in the same Margaritaville we've been able to enjoy. A Margaritaville where you can get shithoused on a quiet jetty and think about what it would be like to get a dolphin high. A Margaritaville where you can take a dump on a snow-white sand dune and swear at a baby pelican. A Margaritaville where college dropouts, irrespective of race or creed, can listen to Pink Floyd and dry-hump below a rainbow. These are the experiences I cherish, and I know that I am not alone.

Toward a Sustainable Margaritaville

While many Democratic strategists are confident that the deteriorating economy virtually assures the victory of their presidential candidate on November 4, there is a quiet debate over whether the party and prospective nominee are likely to get blindsided by Republicans raising issues of terrorism and national security.

Republicans are making no secret of their intentions in the general election.

Alex Castellanos, Republican media strategist, told the Huffington Post that the continuing concerns of American voters about the dangers of another terrorist attack will be the engine behind a Republican victory in November.

I don't think McCain will sign up for that.

Will The GOP Blindside The Democrats On Terror Issues?

From the Annals of "Influencers", a new paper entitled, "Terrorist Recruitment in American Correctional Institutions: An Exploratory Study of Non-Traditional Faith Groups".

The study's main conclusion is that the danger to U.S. security from inmate adherents to nontraditional religions is not the number of adherents to Islam or to White supremacy religions, but rather the potential for small groups of radical believers to instigate terrorist acts upon their release from custody. Among recommendations for addressing this issue is the hiring of chaplains in overcrowded maximum-security prisons, so as to provide authoritative teachers who will ensure moderation and tolerance. Findings show that prisoners have been converted to the following nontraditional religious groups: Islam (traditional Islam, Nation of Islam, Moorish Science Temple, and Prison Islam); Hinduism; Buddhism; Native-American religions; Black Hebrew Israelism; Wicca; and White supremacy religions (Odin/ Asatru and Christian Identity). Although some conversions to these religions are motivated by personal crises and the need for protection, the primary motivation for conversions is spiritual searching. Although most of the prisoner conversions to these nontraditional religions exert a positive influence on inmate attitudes and behaviors, some carry the potential for ideologically inspired criminal attitudes and behaviors. This risk is especially high in overcrowded maximum-security prisons where there are few rehabilitation programs, a shortage of chaplains, and gang influences. The most significant threat stems from fringe elements of Prison Islam. Former gang rivals are joining forces under Islamic banners. Neo-Nazis are becoming Sunni Muslims. There is growing conflict within inmate Islam as various factions of this faith compete for followers. Data were obtained from interviews with 15 prison chaplains, 9 gang intelligence officials, and 30 inmates incarcerated for violent crimes in Florida and California.

Get the full text.

The Local War on Drugs Meets the Global War on Terror

What a difference a decade makes. When I worked in Moscow in 1994 and 1995 for the National Democratic Institute, an American nongovernmental organization, I could not have imagined the present situation. The idea that the collapse of the Soviet Union would be considered the “greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century,” as Putin claims, would have occurred to only a few hard-core, extremist (loony) Communist Party members. Suddenly, this view is not only mainstream but is shared by the youngest generation of Russians— even as they drink Starbucks coffee while surfing the Internet. Alongside Big Macs and iPods, a cottage industry of Soviet nostalgia has sprung up, complete with T-shirts, books, movies, bars, and restaurants. Stores even sell postcards of Stalin.

If Russians feel nostalgia for Soviet days, the run-up to the December elections stirred my own memories of a year of living not at all dangerously in what we thought of then as the new Russia. My thoughts, and those of so many others, go back to the era not only in Russia but also in the United States— the 12 years between the fall of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers. The United States’s efforts to promote democracy abroad had not yet become singed by the war in Iraq, and the democratic balance in its three branches of government seemed reasonably stable.

Dreaming of a Democratic Russia

This is the first history of public health surveillance in the United States to span more than a century of conflict and controversy. The practice of reporting the names of those with disease to health authorities inevitably poses questions about the interplay between the imperative to control threats to the public's health and legal and ethical concerns about privacy. Authors Amy L. Fairchild, Ronald Bayer, and James Colgrove situate the tension inherent in public health surveillance in a broad social and political context and show how the changing meaning and significance of privacy have marked the politics and practice of surveillance since the end of the nineteenth century.

See also the preview in Google Books, including the very-cool "Places mentioned in this book" feature:

... Battles over the scope and goals of surveillance activities took place at CDC headquarters in Atlanta, at the Department of Health and Human Services ...

Read Chapter Two, Opening Battles: Tuberculosis and the Foundations of Surveillance.

Searching Eyes: Privacy, the State, and Disease Surveillance in America

Andrew Odlyzko has a new paper.

Network neutrality as such may fade from public interest discussions, but historical precedents going back for centuries argue that the underlying issues will continue to be debated. Those issues revolve around the basic tension between efficiency and fairness in markets, a tension that has never been completely resolved. Further, this tension is unlikely to ever be resolved, since our well-documented inability to predict the development of technology and its impact on society mean that no fixed set of rules can work indefinitely.

Should net neutrality or some similar set of rules come to dominate (either because of market forces, or through regulation), attention would likely turn to other parts of the economy that might be perceived as choke points for social, economic, and political activities. If Net search becomes as important as Google stock price seems to imply, for example, it might be the focal point for such concerns.

Future controversies are of course matters of speculation. On the other hand, net neutrality and its close relatives, such as common carriage for the Internet, are current issues that have to be decided soon. What appears to be missing in the current debate is a discussion supported by reliable data of the basic fundamental economic question, namely whether a net neutral communication infrastructure can be viable. And if it is not, just how far from net neutrality is it necessary to move? Should pricing for Internet access be dependent on the income of the user, for example?

There are arguments that a net neutral communication infrastructure should be viable. But to get there would require a major restructuring of the industry. The prospects of that are tied up not just with politics, but also with some of the great paradoxes of the current financial markets.

It is possible to argue that the best outcome might be to have Google defeat AT&T in the battle over net neutrality, but then (and likely in any case) society might have to get ready to regulate Google!

Network neutrality, search neutrality, and the never-ending conflict between effciency and fairness in markets

Dear John McCain:

You were right on Iraq when others were panicking or saying nothing. Your national-security experience, aversion to pork-barrel spending, recognition of global warming as a problem, and refusal to get too close to the religious right, are all major points in your favor. Yes, you have some big-government tendencies I dislike, and your campaign-finance “reforms” were wrongheaded. Overall, you are the most attractive candidate. I will vote for you on Super Tuesday, and hope to do so also in the general election. But if you do something crazy—like select Huckabee as your running mate—all bets are off.

Open letters to the Republican candidates

Prosecutors in the US attorney's office in Los Angeles are exploring the possibility of charging Lori Drew with defrauding the MySpace social networking website by allegedly creating a false account, according to the sources, who insisted on anonymity because they are not authorized to speak publicly about the case.

It would be more ironic if the reporter assigned a pseudonym to the sources, instead of simply leaving them unnamed.

Maybe the MySpace registration form needs a check box where you can "insist" on your anonymity instead of entering false information.

L.A. grand jury issues subpoenas in Web suicide case

We feel terrifically betrayed, not only by Ron Paul, but by older libertarians like yourself for not publicly warning us about him. If you knew he was such bad news and that he was becoming one of the biggest mainstream representatives of libertarian thought, why didn't you warn us?

As Virginia notes:

When you give your political heart to a guy who spends so much time worrying about international bankers, you're not going to get a tolerant cosmopolitan.

The Libertarian Turnip Truck

Normally in an election year, U.S. attention on global affairs dwindles precipitously, allowing other powers to set the agenda. That will not be the case, however, in 2008.

Annual Forecast 2008: Beyond the Jihadist War