American Madness

Intelligent Criticism in the Service of a Better Nation

In the Intelligence Community,
the Kids Are Running the Candy Store
…but is that such a bad thing?

I live in Washington, DC so pretty much every third person I know is a spy. Intelligence runs like a leitmotif through every policy discussion in this town on Iraq, Iran, North Korea, China and terrorism. The talking heads on the all news channels and think tank policy wonks who focus on this issue [...]

Not exactly “Comcastic”:
Youthful Experimentation with VOIP

A few weeks ago, my wife and I moved into a new apartment and I signed us up for phone, cable and internet service with the only local service provider of all three, COMCAST.
In my old apartment, I had phone, cable and internet through RCN so I figured COMCAST Triple Play was pretty much the [...]

The World is Flat? (Part I)

I was against reading the World is Flat from the beginning. I get enough of Friedman’s globalization cheer-leading in his New York Times column. I also spend most of my working days studying terrorism and radical Islam so the idea that globalization is somehow triumphing over religion, ethnicity and regionalism is something of a non-starter. [...]

If you are in need of beach reading…

…this one could be entertaining. Diary of a Lost Girl: The Autobigraphy of Kola Boof is about a Sudanese-American women who claims to have been the mistress of Osama bin Laden. Boof is a self-styled “womanist poet” and, it would appear she and James Frey are a matched pair. She claims, in one lurid passage, [...]

The showdown over the shoot down

Right now Kim Jong Il is fueling a missile for a test to see if he could hit the United States in a nuclear confrontation. In an effort to stop him, the Bush Administration is leaking that they may shoot down the missile if the North Korean’s do in fact test it. They have readied [...]

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