Pete Warden breaks up the United States based on data collected solely from Facebook.

– Slate has a great roundup of national anthems in anticipation of the Olympics. Good luck identifying “Kimigayo.”

– Nothing quite like learning from the best: many of the high-tech crowd dispersal units used in Tehran were bought from China. Pioneering the art of authoritarian crackdown since 1949.

– Don’t give up hope on Iran just yet. There’s too much at stake, and a democratic outcome would be nothing less than world-shattering. Reuel Marc Gerecht in the New York Times (via Sullivan):

A democratic revolution in Tehran could well prove the most momentous Mideastern event since the fall of the Ottoman Empire.

– The Times takes a welcome stance against Amnesty International’s firing of Gita Saghal. A once-proud institution that has completely sullied its reputation by enabling Islamic extremists and perpetuating the ‘Cageprisoners’ story.

– Galrahn takes a look at upcoming naval ship class retirements, deployments, and possible replacements.

Back on Track?: Jobs lost per month between December 2007 and January 2010 (via GOOD).

In any world menu, Canada must be considered the vichyssoise of nations — it’s cold, half-French, and difficult to stir.

– Stuart Keate

As Iran prepares for today’s festivities…

– Moscow seems surprised that the world gets a bit nervous when Russians start talking about reenacting Red Dawn.

– And if you weren’t yet feeling nostalgic for the Cold War… that’s okay, because we may be on the verge of a new one with China. And it’s the Chinese who say so.

– Nate Silver crunches the numbers and possible scenarios for a 2012 Palin bid in the Republican primary. There are many more avenues open than I care to see.

– A nifty little overview is available at Howstuffworks on snipers. More detailed than I thought it would be.

Rest in peace, John Murtha.

– Being educated can now be scientifically equated with holding more liberal views. Seriously, that absolutely depends on where you went to school. Condemnation from a student group like SDS can have the opposite effect (via GOOD).

– The Danger Room raises the capabilities VoIP services have for embedding confidential data. Skype: espionage abettor?

– Hitchens v. Vidal, round three. Vidal’s “small anthology of half-argued and half-written shock pieces [which] either insinuated or asserted that the administration had known in advance of the attacks” was just an attempt to be “playful,” writes a defender.

– International high politics: NSFW. Pepsi brings your ancestors back from the dead!

WHO DAT NEW ORLEANS!

– We didn’t think we’d go out like this. Krugman: “Instead of re-enacting the decline and fall of Rome, we’re re-enacting the dissolution of 18th-century Poland.”

– Politics and football: as American as global power projection. America Bowl breaks down the relationships: 44 presidents, 44 Superbowls (via Andrew Sullivan).

– Since winning an election, Hamas has been unable to govern responsibly. Or really govern at all. Michael Herzog in Foreign Affairs:

Constantly torn between its ideology as an Islamist jihadi movement and its responsibilities as a governing authority in the Gaza Strip, Hamas has proven unwilling to transform itself. The result has been an ongoing ideological and political crisis for Hamas and, more generally, the Palestinian Authority.

– The Air Force is canceling new systems left and right across the board and turning to old models with life extensions, such as the C-17, C-5, and the HH-60 for CSAR operations. War is Boring lays out why the CSAR-X cancellation probably isn’t a good thing.

Chinese digital camouflage variants, part of a great collection of global camo uniforms at Strike - Hold!

I have so often seen how people come by the name of genius; in the same way, that is, as certain insects come by the name of millipede — not because they have that number of feet, but because most people won’t count up to fourteen.

— Georg Christoph Lichtenberg

– I’ve railed a number of times against the seemingly-necessary dumbing down of politics and mass communication. But it turns out that it might be stupidity on a subconscious level rather than a conscious one. Easy = true?

– However, Jacob Weisberg at Slate agrees with my original hypothesis: people are stupid.

– Food for thought: our entire universe might be a giant hologram.

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Members of the Indian Border Security Forces mounted on camel rehearse "Beating the Retreat" as part of preparations for Republic Day celebrations at Vijay Chowk in New Delhi, India, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010

The desire for safety stands against every great and noble enterprise.

–Tacitus

– Claude Berube makes the libertarian case for replacing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” with “Didn’t Know, Don’t Care.”

– Basic services – paid for with taxes – become scams. This particular case is of a firefighting bill for $28,000. This trend started with rescue operations of hikers and outdoors-types getting lost, rescued by helicopter, and charged for their troubles. Now it’s a service whose very existence and purpose is funded by tax dollars (i.e., they exist just for this kind of accident). If the insurance companies and homeowners are equally pissed, that’s never a good sign (via Shloky).

– Apparently the sheer audacity of my writing this blog is weird for my generation. I love it when that happens (via Sullivan).

– Subversion is 85% of intelligence work (as opposed to intelligence-gathering). Sadly, whatever is happening to the US is not due to any outside power (or rather, any one targeted, concerted effort):

It takes from 15 to 20 years to demoralize a nation. Why that many years? Because this is the minimum number of years required to educate one generation of students in the country of your enemy exposed to the ideology of [their] enemy.

…The next stage is destabilization … It only takes two to five years to destabilize a nation.

– Even if their convention is a racist warehouse devoid of intelligence and independent thought, the Teabaggers Partiers might just be on to something. John Robb makes a convincing argument that the Tea Party is a) open-source warfare, only politics, and b) that it’s a further sign pointing towards the hollowing out of the state. I think to an extent he’s right (mostly as to what their frustrations mean), but depending on the extent of ‘astroturfing’ and corporate funding, it may not be nearly as spontaneous as it looks. Certainly the convention isn’t.

U.S. Army Staff Sgt. Chad Melanson, Provincial Reconstruction Team-Kunar security forces member from the Nevada National Guard's 1st Squadron, 221st Calvary Regiment currently assigned to Camp Wright in Asadabad, Afghanistan, speaks with other members of the security team prior to a night patrol of the camp's perimeter, Jan. 24.

The American is the Englishman left to himself.

– de Tocqueville

– Chirol reminds us that after Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia is the most popular destination for IEDs. He wonders: is Russia’s future as the new Nigeria?

– John Bruton is adorable. He thinks that a) supranational organizations deserve the same level of bilateral communication as nation-states, and b) thinks that the EU matters. Sorry to disappoint; I don’t think the EU-US Summit is going to be quite all it’s cracked up to be.

– Via Road to Academia: Iran successfully launches the cast of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of Nimh into space. Possibly to counter this, Daniel Pipes wants Iran wiped off the map. Now, it’s definitely been said that Obama could end up salvaging his presidency (assuming domestic reforms go all to hell) by focusing on foreign policy, sort of a quasi-voluntary LBJ-style pivot, but a third underfunded, underplanned, idiotic, and roundly condemned Middle Eastern war is absolutely not the way to glory. Behold the Machiavellian wonder that is Pipes:

Not only does a strong majority — 57, 52, 58, 61, and 61 percent in these five [pretty outrageous push] polls — already favor using force, but after a strike Americans will presumably rally around the flag, sending that number much higher.

– Retrofitting for multitouch just got a whole lot easier. And it’s not just preexisting screens – you can just as easily turn a wooden coffee table into a multitouch-capable interface.

A UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter swiftly departs the flight line during dusk on Camp Taji, Iraq, Jan. 11, 2010. The helicopter is assigned to the 1st Cavalry Division's 1st Air Cavalry Brigade, which conducts aviation operations 24 hours a day, seven days a week, to support U.S. and Iraqi forces.

– Ever wonder why so many terrorists have engineering degrees? Isegoria has the answers.

– War is Boring (yes, they’re on a roll) analyzes the new Russian T-50 and finds it to be an update of the Su-30, rather than some sort of “Raptorski.”

– The 60 Minutes piece of several nights ago on the “quiet professionals” is pilloried by Tim Lynch. So many mistakes on so many levels, and the ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ of embedding only makes it worse. Though if this was the best footage of these guys… what was the other stuff like? (via Registan)

– Petraeus has announced that in addition to the eight-land based Patriot missile batteries, two Aegis destroyers are on station ready to intercept outgoing missiles. Too bad about that SBX radar.

– ‘Humane bombs‘: an oxymoron no more?

– Australia and the UK have begun talks for collaborating on a future ship design. (via Kings of War)

– Perhaps the backlash to an overreaction works both ways? Danes have the highest casualty rate in Afghanistan of any NATO contributor, yet half of Denmark supports their continued deployment, with only one-third demanding withdrawal. Thanks to the cartoon ‘scandal’, even the socialist party supports the war. Would provoking the Islamic world into further overreaction unite the west?

– A new entente cordiale?

– How much of the al Shabab-al Qaeda merger is real? How much is to put on a public face? For al Qaeda it’s a win; it proves a continued relevance for the organization. Not entirely sure of the benefits to al Shabab…

– John Bowen on the Western fear of an Islamic invasion. Americans are blunter about it, Europeans decry its insidious nature. Again, no monolithic culture to be mindful of. Characteristics. As Bowen says, the gap is one of differing religiosity.

Sorry for the increasing number of pauses. I’m doing my best to keep up…

– A couple interesting videos on augmented reality, both Japanese (natch).  Good has the real-life example, the N Building in Tokyo. Kitsune Noir features an art piece called “Augmented (hyper)Reality.” Shades of Blade Runner.

– Absolutely everyone has to read The Whig Interpretation of History. If we’d all just do that, then Joshua Foust wouldn’t have to remind us that not everything historical is an appropriate allegory:

It’s bad enough that writers think it’s witty to jump from 326 B.C. to 1200 A.D. to 1842 and assume that’s all history has to offer; when they look at unrelated wars and try really hard to draw parallels, I sometimes wonder if they just hate the very concept of understanding something.

– The banality of jihad.

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