I will have a Vice President ... I will have a Secretary of Defense ... I will appoint an Attorney General ...

"I will have a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Agriculture for Marketing and Consumer Services ..."

Note: No mention of a DCI or an intelligence director.

Did I mention values?

... jobs, jobs, jobs ... jobs blah blah jobs blah blah jobs blah blah jobs ...

... and not so much as a word linking jobs with education. Jobs are about people, not policy, not process.

Did I mention values?

NEO: Can you fly that thing?
TRINITY: Not yet.
TANK: Operator.
TRINITY: Tank, I need a pilot program for a military B- 212 helicopter.
TRINITY: Hurry!
TRINITY: Let's go.

He seems deeply confused about foreign relations. First he says, "to protect the American people, fundamental American values ... is the only justification for going to war." Then he talks about the importance of not having "to go it alone in the world." How does he expect other nations to join with us in the protection of American values, if our president is on record that the United States is unwilling to go to war to protect fundamental British values, or French values, or Italian values, or German values, or Spanish values, or Iraqi values, or Pakistani values, or Canadian values?

Did I mention values?

I will immediately reform the intelligence system.

How, please?

I will fight a smarter, more effective war on terror.

How, please?

For a man of details and nuance, he is rather short on both here.

Did I mention values?

We need to lead a global effort against nuclear proliferation – to keep the most dangerous weapons in the world out of the most dangerous hands in the world.

Bandwagoning, motherhood, and apple pie. Sam Nunn and Richard Lugar have been working on this for years now.

"In the past decade, the Nunn-Lugar has spent $4bn to help former Soviet states eliminate or secure weapons of mass destruction. Its successes range from dismantling one of the world's largest biological weapons production facilities in Kazakhstan to deactivating more than 6,000 nuclear warheads spread across Russia and the former Soviet Union."

... balanced budget ... balanced budget ... balanced budget ... I will immediately implement the recommendations of the 9/11 commission.

Does he have any idea how much it will cost to physically inspect every container ship?

http://www.machinevisiononline.org/public/articles/archivedetails.cfm?id=1419

"Some 200 million intermodal cargo containers carry an estimated $12.5 trillion in cargo by ship, rail and truck each year. Today, only 2 percent or of cargo containers are inspected at US ports, and of those inspected, the containers’ contents match the manifest only about 30 percent of the time. Experts estimate that fielding the necessary cargo inspection ... [ Read More (0.1k in body) ]

John Kerry's Acceptance Speech

The American officials now say still-secret parts of the separate report by the Senate Intelligence Committee, which was released in early July, discuss the information provided by Mr. Libi in much greater detail. The Senate report questions whether some versions of intelligence reports prepared by the C.I.A. in late 2002 and early 2003 raised sufficient questions about the reliability of Mr. Libi's claims.

Mystery resolved: it is highly likely that Ibn al-Shaykh al-Libi was the subject of the redacted portion of the Senate report blogged here earlier this month. That is, Libi is the "third man" along with KSM and Abu Zubaydah.

http://www.memestreams.net/users/jlm/blogid4220286

If you haven't yet read "The Man in the Snow White Cell", I highly recommend it as a companion to this article.

http://www.memestreams.net/users/nw/blogid4240453

High Qaeda Aide Retracted Claim of Link With Iraq

Our fast-food culture has neither the time nor the aptitude to digest anything more than issue-obfuscating happy talk and sound bites packed with amorphous concepts like values, hope, security and opportunity.

I'm voting for the low-carb candidate!

I hereby dub him "Bunless." Will it stick?

In John Kerry, the Democrats Have Their Man

So now I'm disillusioned.

All Things to All People

... how many lives did your code save today?

Indeed, charisma, intelligence, and ambition, tempered by a self-deprecating wit, are the particular hallmarks not so much of a great black politician as of any great one.

Watch this space.

The Natural

"This is a big achievement of the Pakistani agencies and a key success in Pakistan's effort against terrorism. It is very important to find the networks and linkages of the terrorists operating in Pakistan."

Social network analysis saves lives.

Pakistan Arrests Suspect in Embassy Bombings

So central is DNA to biology that the names of Francis H. C. Crick and James D. Watson, his American colleague in the discovery, are thought likely to be remembered as long as those of Darwin and Mendel, the architects of the two pillars of modern biology -- the theory of evolution and the laws of genetics.

Crick Dies

Last week, George Friedman gave a talk at Johns Hopkins. These are notes from that talk. (four pages)

General principles of intelligence:

1. Fight the cult of process.
2. Fight the cult of PowerPoint Executive Summaries.
3. Take the long, hard road.
4. Fight the cult of the source.
5. Fight the cult of security [risk aversion].
6. Fight the cult of the classified.
7. Fight the cult of the NIE.
8. Fight the cult of ISR.
9. Analysts must be right or get fired.

Intelligence and Actionable Knowledge

Scale-free networks rely on a relatively small number of highly connected nodes to achieve a high degree of interconnectivity and robustness to random failure, but suffer from a high sensitivity to directed attack. In this paper we describe a parametrized family of networks and analyze their connectivity and sensitivity, identifying a network that has an interconnectedness closer to that of a scale-free network, a robustness to attack closer to that of an exponential network, and a resistance to failure better than that of either of those networks.

Optimization of Robustness and Connectivity in Complex Networks