James Fallows

Two days ago I mentioned a dispatch by William R. Polk, who first visited Afghanistan in 1962 (and first wrote about Iraq for the Atlantic in 1958), on his most recent visit to Afghanistan this summer. That dispatch is here.

Polk has now done a follow-up item, on what exactly it would take to begin a proper withdrawal from Afghanistan. You can read it here. His introductory note says, "while I was in Afghanistan, I wrote the sort of paper I used to write when I was a member of the Policy Planning Council, laying out for Ambassador (General) Karl Eikenberry, what I thought America should be doing. He encouraged me to print it; so I am sharing it with you."

And below, a message that came in after the first Polk article, from the person who blogs under the name "Charlie" at the abu muqawama site. Charlie writes:

I'm currently on my second assignment as a civilian advisor in Afghanistan; previously working with Marines in Helmand and now at the NATO headquarters in Kabul. I've read your notes on Afghanistan carefully, knowing that I share many of your concerns but ultimately arrive at somewhat different policy conclusions.

Based on your set-up, I was excited to read Prof Polk's impressions of Afghanistan. And now, I've spent the last day or so trying to figure out why exactly his piece set me on edge (to the point where I feel compelled to write you). Initially it was because I found him smug. (But I went to Harvard and live in DC; I can deal with smug.) In the end, it's the rank hypocrisy of his dispatch that riles me -- the idea that he discovered the "real" Afghanistan while rattling off a veritable Fodor's guide to ex-pat life in Kabul (The Serena, The Taverna, etc.) Though he's right, the food at Sufi is excellent.

The comparison between the UN's "field" presence and the military's also rings hollow. There are Marine platoons stretched far along the Helmand river valley; there is no UN presence to speak of. The UN offices in Kandahar were closed earlier this year due to security concerns. There is no doubt that too many NATO troops spend too much time on large bases (and life on those bases is even more surreal the Kabul). But to the extent the UN enjoys freedom of movement in Afghanistan, it is because they operate in much more permissive provinces than those assigned to American soldiers and Marines.

We face huge challenges in Afghanistan. Prof Polk's interviews with Dr Samar and Mullah Zaeef highlight corruption and reintegration as chief among them. It's clear that he has specific ideas regarding a better way forward -- would that he had written about them instead.

We aim to please here, and fortunately William Polk has done just what Charlie hoped. Again, his "how to get out of Afghanistan" proposal is here.

Now for Something Completely Different. It's a new month and a new season and a new theme. Ready for a series of stored up "interesting software" thoughts.

I have mentioned many times my enthusiasm for the program SugarSync as no-brainer, multi-platform, risk-minimizing way (a) to have a constant cloud-based backup for all my info, and (b) to keep files on my desktop, my laptops, my wife's computer, my iPad, my mobile phone, etc easily in sync.

But as I've also mentioned, there are some challenges for Sugar Sync, which include backing up or syncing programs that keep their data in "bundled" files. This doesn't involve programs like Word, Excel, PowerPoint, or even Adobe Acrobat, which save their data in easily identifiable standalone files with a .DOC, .XLS. .PPT, or .PDF etc extension. For instance: if you are using Word, you store the .DOC file in the "Magic Briefcase" folder that SugarSync creates on your computer. The contents of that folder are automatically synced and updated on all your other computers. You work on one machine, save the file, and then begin working on the updated version at some other machine. Same with any other program that uses discrete data files.

Many other programs, especially but not only native Mac programs like Scrivener and DevonThink, store their data in "bundles" that are really composed of many subfiles. Can they live happily with SugarSync? Yes they can. It requires a few extra steps, but that is part of why I am here this week -- starting with the how-to instructions for the PC/Mac/Linux intriguing program "Personal Brain."

Here's how you do it. This cookbook list is based on my Mac computers, but I believe it's basically same for the Windows version:

1) Create a new "Brain" file on one computer, and have its storage location be on the "Documents" (Mac) or "My Documents" (Windows) folder of your computer. Let's call it WritingFile.

2) Edit the bejeezuz out of this file on that first computer. When you are done, use Brain's "BrainZip" function. Go to the File menu, and choose CreateBrainZip. There are two check-boxes, for "include attachments" and "include search file." I click them both, but that's optional. IMPORTANT: the Create BrainZip dialogue will ask for a location to store this file. Make sure that you direct it toward the "Magic Briefcase" folder of your computer. Conceptual point here: you now have one ZIPped file that contains all the sub-components of your data. It will have a name like WritingFile.brainzip.

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My colleague Joshua Green has a good item today about Christina Romer's reported fight inside the Administration to make the stimulus efforts bigger and faster and more sustained, and to worry less about "deficit spending" complaints.

As a supplement to that item, it's worth reading a speech Romer gave yesterday at the National Press Club. She defends what the Administration did but also makes clear that she thinks a lot more needs to be done, and fast. Samples of both arguments after the jump, but the whole speech, which is relatively short, deserves attention. It's available as PDF here.

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I am generally wary of mentioning a news development that I don't have any particular connection to, or angle on, or opportunity to offer new reporting about. The exception in this case is because the line of analysis I'll mention, if true, would be significant. It comes from a source whose judgment I've learned to respect over time. But the conspiratorial interpretation he suggests is one I usually resist, and I don't have the resources or time to go independently into the questions he has raised. So as an alert to a possibility that deserves consideration but that I can't prove myself, here goes:

It is worth reading in order the series of posts on the Fabius Maximus site -- from earliest to latest here, here, here, and here -- making the case that the "official" story of the rape accusations against Julian Assange of Wikileaks is too strange and coincidence-ridden to be easily believable. The first post in this series, more than a week ago, starts with a summary of his hypothesis: "The CIA used to overthrow governments.  Now they cannot even frame a rape charge against the leader of Wikileaks." Nothing is "proven" as of the latest update today; but individually and collectively, the posts do something most newspaper articles haven't. They put the whole story together and say: this part doesn't match that part, and this other part is extremely improbable, and if we're to believe the official version, then the following ten coincidences must all have gone the same way.

I do not know the truth here and am not in a position to dig into it myself. But if his suggestions prove to be true, they would have wide ramifications, and they are worth being aware of now. (Also, see this summary today by the Atlantic's Heather Horn.) So it becomes a test of which is harder to believe: That there was a conspiracy to frame Julian Assange? Or that there wasn't?

I actually would love to find out that the TSA co-sponsored this one. (No policy point here: just charming, to the very end.)


Thanks to Matt Wells

Previously in the series, here, here, here etc. Today in the email inbox, another sign that -- just as I predicted! -- the internet is creating new business opportunities for journalists even as it is destroying old ones.

Hi my name is Taj J[xxxx] and I'm a blog spotter. I basically scour popular blogs in an effort to find great writers....

I'd like to get straight to the point.

Our client wants people like you to sponsor their products and will pay you to do so.

They're launching an educational product on September 7th that teaches others how to make money on the internet by using Facebook and Social Media.

We want to pay you for recommending that product to your loyal blog readers and we will pay you up to $200 for each person that you refer. If you make just one sale a day you're looking at making around $6000 per month.

All you need to do is create a few blog posts that recommend this product. You may also use one of our nice banners and place it on your blog.

It's pretty simple, takes very little time (10 minutes or so) and will be very rewarding.

All sales that you refer are tracked through your own special link and you will get paid every week. Payments are always on time and will be sent to you via Check.

This deal is totally legitimate and we will NEVER ask you for any fee, or to sign any contracts.

What do you need to do if you are interested?

I have more details, a video and instructions for you here: http://www.XXXX

Regards, Taj Jxxxx

Indeed this does sound totally legitimate to me, especially the part about being paid via Check. Sorely tempted as I am to sign on, for now I think I'll just keep the site and product name to myself, and see if recommendations for it pop up elsewhere. And, hey, if you want your name and site passed on to Taj J, just let me know.

Back in 1958, the Atlantic published "The Lesson of Iraq," by a young Harvard professor named William R. Polk. The breaking Iraqi news that then required explanation  was the military coup that overthrew the Hashemite monarchy and created the Republic, which Saddam Hussein would later control.

Writing at a time when most of the world was unrecognizably different from now -- tens of millions of Chinese were starving to death during the famines of Mao's Great Leap Forward, the United States was reacting in fear to the recent Soviet launch of Sputnik, France and Germany were taking their first wary steps toward post-war cooperation -- Polk made points that are all too recognizably current: 

The problems of the Middle East will be with us for the foreseeable future. They are primarily the responsibility of the peoples of the area, but they also affect us closely, for the Middle East provides 80 per cent of the oil required by the European economy, is crossed by the major trade routes between Asia-Africa and Europe, and could be the seedbed of a war. The question then is whether we can find in the steps leading up to the Iraqi coup d'état any clues to what lies ahead for Jordan and the Arabian peninsula.

In the past few weeks, this same William R. Polk -- who has had a long career as professor, author, and foreign-policy advisor* in the intervening 52 years -- traveled to Afghanistan to report on prospects there. Last week he sent a summary around privately to associates. With his permission, we are publishing his whole dispatch on our site. You can read it here. It is lengthy and discursive, but as I reached the end of each page I felt a grim compulsion to go on to the next.

Those of us who have not spent time on the ground in Afghanistan have a hard time assessing reports of "progress" or "hopelessness." But Polk's very sobering conclusions are based in long, repeat exposure to this part of the world over the decades, since his first visit in 1962. Here is a sample from one of his interviews, with Mullah Abdul Salam Zaeef, who had been head of central banking under the Taliban and then was captured and spent four years in prison, including at Guantanamo:

In our talk [Polk writes], I found no sign of animosity toward me or even, as I expected from his autobiography, toward America and Americans. After preliminaries, I asked what he saw ahead and how the Afghan tragedy could be solved.

In reply, he said, " it is very hard to devise a way, but we should know that fighting is not the way. It won't work. And it has many bad side effects such as dividing the people from the government." ... It was clear that he was thinking in terms broader than Karzai. He meant that the Afghans must have an accommodation to government, per se, if they are heal their wounds and improve their condition.

The only realistic way ahead, he went on, "is respect for the Afghan people and their way whereas America is now relying wholly on force. Force didn't work for the British or the Russians and it won't work for the Americans." The word "respect" often figured in his remarks, as from my study of Afghanistan and the Arabs and Iranians, I knew it would....

So how do the Taliban see a post-US-controlled Afghanistan? I asked.

He replied that "it all depended on how it comes about. If it comes through negotiation, then probably the Taliban will be content with genuine participation in the government, but if it comes through force, then the Taliban will take everything."

I asked about what he has been doing since his autobiography was translated. He perhaps did not quite understand my question and said that he was in Guantánamo until he was released. He suddenly asked me how old I am and, when I replied with my august status, he said "good. There was a man in Guantanamo who also was old and he was gentle with me. The younger men were not."

Entire dispatch is here; Polk's bio is after the jump. Thanks to FCS and JRG.

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Back in June, I thought that President Obama's first speech from the Oval Office, about the BP oil spill, was his first significant under-performance as an orator. Content not up to the occasion; stage presence detracting from rather than bolstering the message.

More details tomorrow, but Instant Analysis of tonight's address is: a better job on all fronts. A speech that in its content and line-by-line phrasing clearly conveyed its message. (Turning the page; now let's look to the next set of problems; even an oblique nod to William James at the end, with the exhortation that the public now had to match the commitment and bravery of the troops.) And bearing that backed up the sobriety of the content. Tiny but important performance detail: Obama's noticeable hands, which had been flying all over the place in his first address, were interlaced and immobile throughout.

I don't know how many people were watching or whether this will change any minds. But as a performance, clearly it helped rather hurt.

Melissa Block was part of the NPR team that happened to be in Chengdu for pre-Olympic China coverage when the devastating Sichuan earthquake occurred in May, 2008. She has done a number of China features since then -- including an interview this afternoon on All Things Considered with the author of a new book on what you learn about China by learning Chinese. The story and audio are here.

Even if that author weren't my wife, Deborah Fallows, I'd think it was a great segment. At this point, I realize I've exhausted my quota of decent opportunities to describe events for and reaction to her book. So with parting links to this nice item about the book in Oprah's magazine, this one in National Geographic Traveler, and this one in Asia by the Book, I refer you for further info to Deb's own site. It now has some entries on why it's worth the bother of trying to learn this language, and it will eventually have info on her upcoming book events on the west and east coasts.

This evening President Obama delivers his second televised address from the Oval Office. The first was on efforts to contain the BP disaster in the Gulf; this one is on the end of official combat operations in Iraq. I don't mean to prejudge what he will say (Marc Ambinder has an informed preview), but here are two preliminary notes of stage business. First, from an announcement sent yesterday to many people in the press. Click for larger -- but if the point still is not clear, look at the second shot below.

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... who just happens to be performing with Pomplamoose (which I've promised not to mention any more) and Ben Folds, in a new video song here.

 

It's perfectly respectable and hip to mention Hornby, so I feel no style-guilt in passing this on. Also, the point he makes in the "lyrics" here is a little icicle to the heart of anyone in the middle of a big writing project, like for instance me. Oh well. Thanks to reader SH. (And although Nick Hornby is not involved, consider also this one and of course this classic.)

I spend a lot of my time urging outsiders not to believe everything they hear about China's "unstoppable" rise, its perfect coordination, its flawless concentration on the challenges that matter, and so on. It's a big, shaggy operation with a lot of strengths and a lot of weaknesses. I take this tone mainly in response to Americans who, in my opinion, have been too credulous about the "everything works just right in China" view propounded by, say, Cartman in his  "Olympic Nightmare" episode.

But if I came across more Americans who were taking the opposite line -- China's a flash in the pan, it's all a mirage, soon its people will rise up against the government, etc -- I'm sure I'd spend my time saying: Wait, no, you really have to take this seriously! And a bit of material I would use is the note I received yesterday from an American friend who has lived and worked for quite a while in Beijing. He sent a note about this past weekend's bike ride south of the city.

If you know the Beijing landmarks he is referring to, the account is particularly vivid. But even if you don't, it's worth reading to get an idea of the My God!! reaction that the speed of Chinese urban demolition and construction so often evokes. His account continues after the jump, with a few pictures from his bike ride. It was the predictable surprise of experiences like this that makes being in China so engrossing. My friend writes:

I awoke this morning determined to ride my bike somewhere, somewhere new.

Even as I got ready to ride, I got a message that someone wanted me to go to a meeting that was of importance to me, but I was determined and ignored it. I'm glad I did.

I rode south from my apartment near the Temple of Heaven fully expecting to be in the countryside in an hour or so.

Didn't happen.

I was headed to Daxing District, but having been there, I specifically intended to ignore and bypass the Beijing Economic Development Area (BDA) where there are a lot of auto manufacturers and pharmaceutical companies.

I failed. Oh, I missed what I knew of as the BDA; I was well west of it, but I had not missed the BDA. I could not have missed it heading south. It has now expanded westward by at least five kilometres and will likely head westward even more.

As I encountered it, there was park construction on my right, to the west. I stopped and asked some workers if it was a park or golf course. They told me it was a park. I continued on, and so did the park, at least another hour by fast bike on a smooth, untrafficked road along the Yongding River south of Beijing.  [Insta-park, below.]



I rode for another hour and never got to the southern end of the new area. This means it's about ten times bigger than the Galleria in Houston or 20 times the size of Las Colinas in Dallas. [My friend is from Texas.] I spotted a station for a light-rail line I didn't known was even planned. Red and black colored trains were waiting at the station.

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I mentioned yesterday a friend's sighting of a mismatched American Airlines airplane at the Miami airport. Most of plane painted one way; nosecone painted another way.

Read John Shepley writes to say, au contraire! That "nosecone" is actually a radome (for radar dome), and there's even more to know about it, as follows:

The appropriate term is 'Radome' rather than nosecone. The difference is important. A nosecone would imply a physical, structural part of the airplane and might be made of metal - or some material with the preference to structural integrity above all other characteristics.

A radome is constructed to allow the passage of both outbound and inbound radar (radio) waves with a minimum of signal loss and distortion. Usually they are constructed of a fiberglass-reinforced plastic or Kevlar material. And they must be tested to ensure they are specifically compatible with the weather radar in the aircraft. And , of course, they must be strong enough to withstand the forces of normal operations, rain, hail, lightning strikes, etc., and maintain flightworthiness. As such they are enormously expensive and also must be painted with radar compatible paints. And they are quite bulky. Radomes are more susceptible to damage from a lighting strike than the rest of the airframe. Often, lighting will pass into and right back out of the conductive skin of an aircraft with little or no damage. The radome is a non-conductive dielectric, and the lighting will 'blast' it's way through on its way towards an offsetting charge. Most radomes include lighting arrestors of some kind, and they help, but do not provide immunity to lighting damage. The ridges on the P-3 radome shown below are the lightning protection. Note that they served to channel the lightning back to the A/C skin, but did not completely protect the radome from damage. Of course other kinds of physical damage may impact a radome more than other areas of the aircraft because of its location and construction. [Picture of Navy P3-Orion with lightning damage to radome, below.]

It's not surprising, nor is it much of an indictment on our airline industry that a new or limited edition paint scheme might not have properly painted spares at all parts depots. If a radome needs to be replaced, they'd have to use what they have on hand to maintain flight operations.

Another damaged-radome picture after the jump.

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(see update at bottom) .... something preposterous happened over the weekend in Santa Barbara. I've resisted mentioning it, because it involves one of my hobby-horse subjects (general aviation). Nonetheless I think it deserves broader attention than it has received so far.

The main characters here are John and Martha King. If you have come anywhere near the flying world, they need no further introduction -- and very vivid associations will spring  immediately to mind. They run a well-known set of flight schools, but beyond that they are omnipresent because of their somewhat hokey, but extremely wholesome and all-American toned, set of instructional videos. Here are the Kings, in their trademark matching shirts:

Oprah isn't really the right comparison among mainstream celebrities, since she is more blindingly famous, plus hipper-seeming. Maybe Mister Rogers, in his heyday on PBS, would come closest to The Kings in being well known and also unembarrassed about his earnest tone. Maybe I'd add a little dash of Ron Popeil, the infomercial titan, since like him the Kings seem genuinely excited about the message they have to impart to their viewers. And a touch of the "Well, Timmy... " narrator from 1950s-era instructional videos, or Clark Griswold from the National Lampoon Vacation movies. You get the idea.

Unlike Clark Griswold, the Kings are highly accomplished at what they do. As they point out on their site, "John and Martha are the only husband and wife to both hold every category and class of FAA pilot and instructor certificates." That is, from gliders to helicopters to jets, they are certified as practitioners and teachers.

Over the weekend, the Kings were detained at gunpoint by Santa Barbara police and held in  handcuffs for half an hour, for reason that appear not to have been their fault in any way. The details are here and here, but the heart of the story is this:

- Eight or so years ago, a small Cessna 150 airplane was stolen in Texas;
- Each aircraft has a registration number, often known in America as the "N-number" since it begins with an N for US-registered aircraft. When a plane is destroyed, stolen, exported, or otherwise put out of commission, the FAA eventually "deregisters" its N-number and makes it eligible for reassignment to a new plane;
- Several years after the theft in Texas, the FAA deregistered the stolen plane's N-number -- N50545 -- and made it eligible for reassignment;
- Last year, that number was assigned to a small Cessna 172
- The Kings had leased that plane and were making a perfectly normal business trip. But some security agency - reportedly a branch of the DEA -- still had the number on its "stolen aircraft" watch list. When the Kings filed an instrument flight plan with that number, the DEA noticed it and told local police to apprehend the Kings as soon as they landed. And then, as reported on the AOPA site:

According to John King, who was piloting the airplane, upon landing at Santa Barbara, the airplane was directed to a remote part of the airport instead of the FBO [Fixed Base Operator - the normal place for small planes] where the Kings planned to park. There, four police cruisers were parked. After shutting down the engine, King was ordered out of the aircraft with his hands up and told to back slowly toward the officers, who had guns drawn. After he was handcuffed and placed in a cruiser, Martha was ordered to similarly exit the aircraft. She too was handcuffed and placed in a separate cruiser.

Yes, I know: no one was hurt or really seriously inconvenienced. Far, far worse happens every day in big cities and along the border -- and generally to people who, unlike the Kings, don't have the resources and connections to get their story out. And so on. Still, we have people who (by all reports) have done nothing wrong, either in this incident or in a past pattern of behavior, who are held at gunpoint because security agencies didn't update their files. And the general reaction in the flying world is: If John and Martha King, epitomes of the wholesome, can be taken as security threats, how much more suspicious must everyone else seem?

Later, perhaps, a larger point or more information. For now, just noting the news for the record.
____
UPDATE: Max Trescott, who according to his web site was recently the "Certified Flight Instructor of the Year," reports that this is the second time local police have mistakenly detained people flying this same plane. The previous time was in Kansas early in 2009. What this means, of course, is that the same out of date  "stolen plane" info concerning N50545 remained in the DEA's (or some agency's) files even after it was shown to be incorrect.

Another reader writes in with the fair point that this is less a case of "security theater" than of still-disconnected government databases, long after they were supposed (at great expense) to be combined. More on this after a while.

1) I agree entirely with the case made just now by my Atlantic colleague Joshua Green. Laura Tyson, of Berkeley, has again demonstrated the ability to explain big economic issues in clear, simple terms, a talent that many of the Administration's most prominent figures lack.

It should not be that hard to explain why, with the economy again faltering because demand is going down, "deficit spending" is -- for now -- a solution rather than a problem, and "fiscal discipline," which sounds so virtuous, can keep everyone poorer longer. You can imagine Bill Clinton spelling this out and hardly breaking a sweat. For many decades after the Great Depression, the name "Herbert Hoover" conjured up the folly of tightening the public purse strings when loosening them would have helped everyone recover more quickly. Liaquat Ahamed's universally hailed Lords of Finance is a belles lettres version of the same Depression history (with emphasis on the related folly of worshiping the gold standard). James K. Galbraith, of U. Texas, has been a very insistent and effective voice from the academy about the dangers of pursuing deficit reduction now.

I don't know whether Laura Tyson ever wanted an Obama Administration job or exactly why she is not in one. (For the record: she and her husband, novelist and Atlantic correspondent Erik Tarloff, are longtime friends of my wife's and mine.) But, as Josh Green says, this is a moment for Administration officials to notice what she has done -- and, whether or not they bring her aboard, to try a similar approach themselves.

2) Today's NYT has on its front page a story about a new step in hyper-targeted online ads. Since ad systems can figure out exactly who you are and what you've been shopping for, they can serve up commercials for the same companies and products on whatever site you visit.
  
  This is similar to the "giant Japanese salamanders" phenomenon I mentioned over the weekend here. Yesterday a reader wrote about the strangely perspective-limiting effect of such ads:

I have had the same experience, albeit with non-political ads. I forget where they were based, but sites based in other countries with banner ads that were very local to me.

I first paid attention to this some weeks back and it made me sad, in an ineffectual, nostalgic, way.

As a teenager and even after, but especially as a youngster, one thrill of reading a (printed copy) of a foreign publication was the advertising. Ads for mundane products were exciting for me. Exotic.

Cigarettes come to mind. Rothmans. Export A.

In other respects the Internet may bring the world to our door, but in this small way the global village is shrinking us to the village in walking distance of our homes.

3) Wonderful and classy for The Atlantic Wire to note the centennial of William James's death. Only possible improvement: mention of James's final prominent work, and one of the utmost importance to Americans at this moment, The Moral Equivalent of War. (Online text here; Google books scanned text here; free audio book download here.)

I often think that this essay is the indispensable work of American political culture. It examines what is more or less the permanent challenge of American public life: how to evoke the spirit of sacrifice, common national purpose, and long-term perspective that is the noblest part of war, without actually being at war. It was written out of the shared generational experience, both glorious and hideous, of the Civil War, but it applies to chronic issues in American politics, including those of the 21st century.

Modern man inherits all the innate pugnacity and all the love of glory of his ancestors. Showing war's irrationality and horror is of no effect on him. The horrors make the fascination. War is the strong life; it is life in extremis; war taxes are the only ones men never hesitate to pay, as the budgets of all nations show us.

History is a bath of blood. The Illiad is one long recital of how Diomedes and Ajax, Sarpedon and Hector killed.... Our ancestors have bred pugnacity into our bone and marrow, and thousands of years of peace won't breed it out of us. The popular imagination fairly fattens on the thought of wars. Let public opinion once reach a certain fighting pitch, and no ruler can withstand it. In the Boer war both governments began with bluff, but they couldn't stay there; the military tension was too much for them. In 1898 our people had read the word "war" in letters three inches high for three months in every newspaper. The pliant politician, McKinley, was swept away by their eagerness, and our squalid war with Spain became a reality.

Although James proudly announces himself a "pacifist," he goes on to confront the dilemma: war, mankind at its worst, also elevates some individuals and societies to their best. Identifying and sustaining a moral equivalent of war is thus the challenge. The phrase was mocked by the acronym MEOW when Jimmy Carter used it, without explaining the provenance, in some of his speeches about national energy policy in the 1970s. (For the record: I was involved in some of those speeches, and wished they had explained the provenance.) But it's a serious issue, worth reflecting on at any point and all the more so at this centennial observation of James's demise.

A friend who has lived in Europe for many years sent this picture, taken out the window of the American Airlines Admiral's Club at Miami airport. More images of the same plane after the jump.

Of course a swapped-in nosecone with a different paint scheme is not a "safety" issue  -- any more than was the "speed tape" shown on a Chinese regional airliner a couple of months ago, here. But my friend writes that as soon as he glimpsed the plane, he took it as:

a metaphor (are only words metaphors?) for the current state of the airline industry.... By the way, I have accumulated over 7 million miles in the American Airlines Advantage program and was an original member when the program began, so I've watched the evolution of the airline for more than forty years. Since so much of my career has involved management of others -- both XXX and XXX [two companies he has led] each had more than 6,000 employees -- I've always been fascinated by the challenges of managing and motivating large numbers of people in various organizations. Contrast the spirit one immediately feels waking into an Apple Store in the experience of flying on a commercial airline and it's not hard to understand how the airlines began their descent long before they faced the problems of budget fares and high fuel costs.

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I mentioned yesterday my surprise at seeing an ad for the California Senate race -- specifically, an attack ad on Barbara Boxer from a "Protect Life" group -- when I was checking out a Spanish-language news site based in Paraguay. Plus an English-language ad for giant salamanders, left. The explanation for at least the Carly ad turned out to be that the Paraguayan ad-server detected that I was coming in from California and so delivered a relevant commercial.

A reader quickly responded that, in fact, most online users like me were true naifs about the extent of ever-evolving profiles of our online identities. He writes:

Around 8 years ago, I started a company in the Internet advertising industry. In the last 8 years, the one constant has been the growth in how much we know about you and all the other Internet surfers out there. It used to be that we could just map your ip address to a location and tell what time of the day it was. Then we started getting some demographic information like age and gender. These days there has been an explosion of data, to name just a few:

- Look alike data: Other web surfers with similar surfing habits like yours are known to perform activities A, B and C, therefore you are likely to do so too.
- Behavioral data: You recently researched a Honda Accord so perhaps we should show you ads for Toyota Camry
- Social data: You share these interests and therefore are perhaps interested in these products. Your friends share these interests, so perhaps you might be interested in them too.
- Offline data: Your credit score, your zipcode (of where you live rather than where you are at this moment), the wealth percentile of your household... Contextual data: Deep, real time contextual information about the page you are on at this moment.

All of this data is anonymous, so it's not a privacy risk (at least not yet), but it is scary how much data is out there. What is scarier is how much data is out there that nobody (at least not officially for moral/PR reasons) is using yet. Depending on the type of the data, this data is usually auctioned off to the highest bidder in real time or shipped to any one who asks for a fee.

Agencies then craft campaigns that pull together various combinations of these targeting criteria to decide whom to target with which ad and how. Companies like mine excel at using huge mounds of this data to model advertiser performance (dollars spent versus revenue generated) to ensure that every ad that is shown has the maximum impact on advertiser top line/bottom line.

My guess is that the industry has just got started.

I wrote back asking, But what about the giant salamander? And after the jump, the explanation -- along with another reader's experience with ads showing up in unexpected venues.

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An otherwise-unexplained message from the FAA yesterday to pilots who have signed up for regular safety announcements. Click for larger:

For those pondering the future of the press, a dispatch from George Plank, a theatre specialist at West Point (and long ago a student of mine in a writing course at Camp Zama, in Japan):

At a supermarket in a town about 10 minutes north of USMA, I picked up a copy of today's NYTimes along with a couple of other items. The checkout clerk was a young girl, a teenager I guess. The paper had, I think, four sections today. To prepare it for scanning, she separated the four sections. She found the bar-code on the first page and scanned the first section. There was a beep, and a price was recorded. She then began to look for a bar-code on the second section.

I was puzzled, but then realized that she probably was used to scanning tabloids with only one section. I said to her, "It's all one paper." She said, "It is?" I said, "It's the New York Times." She said, "Oh."

I am in San Francisco at the moment -- hot yesterday, back to typical August raw chill tonight -- and was typing up the notes from the day's interviews. Naturally this involves going to track down odd references on The Internet, and one such oddity led me to a Spanish-language news site based in... Paraguay.

The Atlantic is all in favor of increased online display-ads to boost revenue for news organizations, so I was glad to see that this site had plenty. Here's the one that ran wall to wall across the top of the page. Click for larger: