"Shorter - there really is an urgent and perilous threat to Israel. It's called "the Israeli government"."

'These developments suggest that the United States is spending huge amounts of money in ways that are actually making Americans less secure, not only against irregular insurgents, but also against smart countries building different sorts of militaries. And the problem goes well beyond weapons and other high-tech items. What’s missing most of all from the U.S. military’s arsenal is a deep understanding of networking, the loose but lively interconnection between people that creates and brings a new kind of collective intelligence, power, and purpose to bear — for good and ill…..”'

"But we must also remember that the Afghans, menaced even though they are by the evil of the Afghans, are not blameless here. Have they sufficiently appreciated our efforts to kill them? No, they have not. Have they effectively and efficiently rebuilt their nation whenever we've had cause to blow it up? No, they have not. Have they become full and effective participants in the ongoing mission to kill them? No, they have not."

"We used to gasp at the way the Soviet Union stuck opponents of the regime in asylums. But the USSR is not the only country in history that has had a hard time seeing its adversaries as rational. The present generation of Americans is made uncomfortable by the idea that their country might have enemies whose enmity is the result of something other than fanaticism or mental illness. Maj Hasan’s colleagues, the Economist writes, say he thought the war on terror was a war on Islam. According to what we think Islam is, he is wrong. But according to a fundamentalist idea of what Islam is, he is right. There is rationality in such enmity, even if that rationality is built on different assumptions."

"System disruption leverages network structure and dynamics to turn small attacks into large events. Selection of the best point to attack is based on an analysis of the network's design and flows. The term to describe this point is: the systempunkt. Essentially, the systempunkt is the point in the network, that if attacked, will yield the maximal possible impact."

"When helicopters pass through dust storms, contact of the particles with the rotating blades produces either sparks or static electricity. The phenomenon has been observed during combat operations in Afghanistan; Michael Yon has documented the effect, and has named it after two U.K. soldiers who died there."

"The only difficulty with this entire story was that it was not remotely true. There had been no sustained assault by the Chinese on the legations, no breakthrough, no last stand, and no slaughter. In fact, July 6th had been quiet enough that Private R.G. Cooper, one of the British soldiers holed up in the legations, had not mentioned it in his diary of the siege. The most pressing news of those few days was the discovery of a buried British cannon from 1860, which the defenders of the legations refurbished and put to use."

Graph #2 is particularly interesting

"China has 1/5 of the world's population. If life were fair, it would have 1/5 of the world’s water. It doesn’t -- China has just 1/14 of the world’s water supplies, and much of that is rank, dank, and polluted. You think oil is important? Try living without water. Or with water too polluted to drink. And problems have worsened considerably in recent years as the population burgeoned and factories dumped toxic pollutants into rivers and lakes. A Chinese bureaucrat recently noted that 90 percent of China's cities and 75 percent of its lakes suffer from some degree of water pollution. They have water – they just can’t drink it."

"The sort of bureaucracy that would label Op-Ed writing an act of war goes a lot deeper than just Bush and Cheney and their immediate circle. There are a lot of people who need to be fired at the very least and prosecuted in many cases. Equating an Op-Ed with war suggests to me that Joe the Plumber is running the Pentagon."

"Trace a line from where US special forces battle Taliban fighters in the corner of empty desert where the Afghan, Pakistani and Iranian frontiers meet, follow it through the badlands of the Pakistani North West Frontier and on through the bomb-blasted cities of northern Pakistan and down through Delhi, attacked in September, to shell-shocked Mumbai, and one thing becomes clear: this zone has displaced the Middle East as the new central front in the struggle against Islamic militancy. The southern Punjab falls on the line's centre point. There may be doubt over the identity of the attackers, but there is none that Multan and Bahawalpur and villages such as Faridkot are in the Indians' sights."

"The best thing for the Democrats will be for the Palin cultists to keep her hopes alive, beating a dead moose. Her stands—anti-evolution, anti-stem cell research, no abortion for rape or incest, humans palling around with dinosaurs—will drive the religious extremists back to the margins they came from."

"Deregulate "the copy": Copyright law is triggered every time there is a copy. In the digital age, where every use of a creative work produces a "copy," that makes as much sense as regulating breathing. The law should also give up its obsession with "the copy," and focus instead on uses -- like public distributions of copyrighted work -- that connect directly to the economic incentive copyright law was intended to foster."

"Top White House officials were told in early 2002 about harsh measures used by the CIA to extract information from suspected al-Qaeda terrorists in the agency’s secret prisons, according to an account given to congressional investigators by the office of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice.
The details of the controversial program were discussed in multiple meetings inside the White House over a two-year period, triggering concerns among several officials who worried that the agency’s methods might be illegal or violate anti-torture treaties, according to separate statements signed by Rice and her top legal adviser. . . ."

"Strange as it may seem, torturers and their apologists really do care."