What is the greatest threat to U.S. security? The greatest threat to U.S. security is something that would upset the usefulness of the Terrorist Identities Datamart Environment (TIDE), the consolidated U.S. government database of terrorist suspects around the world. The government uses that database to establish watch lists, no-fly lists, screen visa applicants at U.S. consulates, conduct surveillance, coordinate investigations with foreign and local partners, etc. It was the lack of such a database and its applications that permitted 9/11 to happen. Today, the TIDE database and the activities it supports is the U.S. government’s most important counterterrorism tool. —“The Greatest Threat”, Robert Haddick, Small Wars Journal
Robert Spinrad, Xerox PARC leader, dies;
a new Somerset Maugham bio (via);
James Patterson to inflict 17 more books on world
SPIEGEL: How has the experience changed you?
Groos: Heightened danger made me more thin-skinned — but also tougher. Today, if someone attacked my kids, I could shoot that person dead and have no trouble sleeping at night. I don’t know whether I should find that disturbing or not.
SPIEGEL: What was your worst experience in Afghanistan?
Groos: That would be the suicide attack on our bus in June 2003. There was absolute chaos, and it was way too much for our assistants to handle. I assigned numbers to the wounded, noted their injuries, and saw to it that they got the medical attention they needed so that they could be transported elsewhere. After they had all been taken away, it was eerily quiet. Another doctor, myself, and the dead were the only ones left. At that point, we didn’t know what to do next. Normally, as an emergency physician, you express your condolences to the dead person’s family and then you leave. But in this case we’d somehow slipped into the role of the bereaved. —“SPIEGEL Interview with Former Army Doctor in Afghanistan: ‘I Didn’t Want to Be Part of This Insane Mission’,” Spiegel Online
Both the Hindustan Times and the Times of India publish a running tally of how many people are killed each year by Delhi’s Blueline, those rickety private buses that prowl the city streets like wolves in a horror movie. Despite the volume with which they roar down the street—you hear them coming from a quarter-mile away—they still manage to pounce on an astounding number of victims. At least 115 people were killed by Blueline buses in 2008. —“Why Delhi’s Buses Are so Deadly: An economic analysis,” Dave and Jenny, Our Delhi Struggle (via)
I thought of Jarrell and the conflation of difficulty with neglect after reading Time book critic Lev Grossman’s rather unfortunate consideration, in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, of the Obscurity of the Modern Novelist. “Good Books Don’t Have to Be Hard,” would make a fine, snarky dismissal of Grossman’s argument, were it not the actual title the Journal had given to the piece. —“The Calculating Critic,” by Harper’s editor Christopher R. Beha, n+1