The battle is on for the swaying of hearts and minds of the Muslim masses. Its chief focus for now is the Middle East, but Pakistan and Afghanistan are very much on the radar screen of the Pentagon.

I thought this article was particularly interesting in that all of this military propaganda reminded me of how domestic political dialog has changed.

Odds are even in the 'information' war

It's that time of year again.

An annual compendium of ideas from A to Z.

This is a huge collection of short articles. I'll list a few that are particularly insightful. I've tried to cull as much as possible. Best get a star...

Acoustic Keyboard Eavesdropping
'Acting White' Myth, The
Augmented Bar Code, The
Do-It-Yourself Attack Ad, The
Feral Cities
Fertile Red States
Foolproof Death Penalty, The
*Hawkishness as Evolutionary Holdover
*Income-Variability Anxiety
Invitation-Only, Incentivized Campaign Rally, The
Kill Midlevel Terrorists
Land-Mine-Detecting Plants
*Lawfare
*Listening for Cancer
Making Vaccines Good Business
**Popular Constitutionalism (I'm going to separately meme this...)
*Professional Amateurs
Purple-State Country Music
Strategic Extremism
*Wal-Mart Sovereignty

The Year in Ideas

But it mostly exists to document the connections between people, many of which are not always obvious. A person's otherwise inexplicable behavior is often understood by examining the crowd that person has been hanging out with.

NNDB

The New York Times mocks you, Cobb County.

This book details how God created humans. However, some people insist we are descended from aliens. The reader is advised to keep an open mind, and to stay alert.

Nice cryptoschwa.

The Descent of Dissent

I met quite a number of managers in jihadi organizations who said they would like to quit but they couldn't afford to because they wouldn't make as much in the civilian sector."

Dilbert knows no boundaries.

Jessica Stern, on what lures some to terror

] Political elites, such as party activists and members of
] Congress, tend to be more extreme than the public.
]
] At first, this seems puzzling, because they should have
] an incentive to move to the vote-rich middle. But many
] members of Congress represent districts that are safe for
] their parties, and the threat to their re-election comes
] in party primaries that are dominated by the more
] activist and extreme wings of the parties.
]
] This tendency is reinforced by the rise of cable
] television, which attracts viewers by means of
] contentious "infotainment" programmes, and
] Internet bloggers, who engage in fierce polemics
] with no editorial filter.

A very interesting analysis. I've said that whether you are red or blue has to do with whether you are more afraid of the communists or the fundamentalists. Americans intuitively understand that the structure of their political system is the reason that it doesn't seem to reflect their interests. This comment takes that a little deeper.

I agree with his comment about the blogosphere. Its not a conversation. Its not a dialog. Its a million soap boxes. The popular ones tend to be the most polar because they are the most emotionally charged. The blogosphere, as it currently exists, is part of the problem. Its a check on the mass media, but it will be nothing more unless it can provide discourse.

The red and the blue, by Joseph Nye

The parallels are unavoidable.

This op-ed by Larry Lessig was published in Wednesday's Washington Post.

Bytes and Bullets

It's a "Guns, Germs, & Steel"-informed retelling of the Thanksgiving story by the author of a forthcoming book on pre-Columbian America.

In Jennie Augusta Brownscombe's 1914 painting "The First Thanksgiving," as in other depictions of the first Thanksgiving meal, natives and newcomers share their feast on a field of bluegrass, dandelion and clover - three species that did not exist in the Americas before colonization.

Clover and bluegrass, tame as accountants at home, transformed themselves into biological Attilas in the Americas. The peach proliferated in the Southeast with such fervor that farmers feared the Carolinas would become a wilderness of peach trees.

According to the Pilgrims' own accounts, natives outnumbered newcomers at the meal by almost two to one. But soon after Europeans arrived, European diseases killed 90 percent or more of the hemisphere's original inhabitants.

The huge herds and flocks seen by Europeans were evidence not of American bounty but of Indian absence.

Unnatural Abundance

20,000 insurgents in Iraq,
20,000 hardened insurgents,
take 1,000 down,
move to another town,
22,000 insurgents in Iraq.

"It is pretty clear that the coalition can win in Afghanistan and Iraq in one way or another, but it will be a long, hard slog."

'Slog'

It begins tonight. And with it, the countdown to Pakistan, as well.

US Forces Begin Moving Into Falluja