What a week for a computer crash, right? You miss a single day here and you miss some great talk. I’m still catching up. Anyway, as part of my news-catch up today I read this announcement from the U.S. Army about Apps for the Army, an “application-development challenge… used to help the service more quickly [...]

After the 9/11 attacks, the United States declared war on terror. From that point forward, whenever any nation sought to kill or imprison people they disagreed with or didn’t like, they had merely to call them ‘terrorists’ and take whatever action they desired. No longer could the US, the UN and the West decry human [...]

As an ex-squid, I should probably hate Marines. But the smartass in me has always liked them: Notwithstanding their hoo-rah, “kill kill” reputation, the jarheads have a greater tolerance than most military organizations for nonconformity, innovation, and out-of-step thinking. See also: “semper gumby.” Nowhere has this tendency been more evident than in counterinsurgency: The Corps [...]

The Emirates is banning the Blackberry, apparently because, with their internal hardware-based encryption, Canadian servers and user-configured symmetric-key encryption there’s no way for intelligence and internal security agencies to monitor communications that utilize the Blackberry device. Ok. They can do that – and on the scale of “things despotic governments do in violation of basic [...]

Not exactly national security, but pretty darned important nonetheless: Judge Vaughn Walker overturns Calif. gay marriage ban. A federal judge overturned California’s same-sex marriage ban Wednesday in a landmark case that could eventually land before the U.S. Supreme Court to decide if gays have a constitutional right to marry in America. Chief U.S. District Judge [...]

Who says hippie freaks and war hawks can’t live in mutual understanding and harmony? In a guest post today for The Atlantic’s estimable Ta-Nehisi Coates, author Ayelet Waldman writes of her experiences as the token liberal female Hebraic Berkeleyite at an Army War College seminar. And she comes away with one of the most important [...]

In the weeks and months following the 9/11 attacks, there was a great deal of discussion centered on the premise “the constitution is not a suicide pact”. Now, I don’t much care for this kind of shallow thinking about fundamental issues, but if you do choose to consider the constitution in this context, then I [...]

I’m kicking it to the new Big Boi album this morning, and in my morning news shuffling I came across this initially baffling headline: Taliban code of conduct seeks to win hearts, minds. It’s true, right? While that’s not exactly what I expected to read this morning, the insertion of “Taliban” where usually NATO/ISAF is [...]

As the outcry in favor of an attack on Iran goes on, unchecked and accelerating, the single most basic calculation is being made frivolously, if at all. And the most aggressive supporters of an attack, by their unwillingness to address honestly and realistically the consequences of that attack, seem to be making the same horrendous [...]

Jonathan Bernstein points out that conservatives aren’t the only ones making a big deal out of trivial “issues.” Specifically, he points to MoveOn.org, and their campaign to keep Fox from getting Helen Thomas’ seat in the White House briefing room. He’ s 100% right in that this is a complete non-issue, and MoveOn shouldn’t be [...]