Washington has always had a choice in how to approach grand strategy. One popular option among some libertarians is isolationism. This approach is based on the assumption that there is no region outside the Western Hemisphere that is strategically important enough to justify expending American blood and treasure. Isolationists believe that the United States is remarkably secure because it is separated from all of the world’s great powers by two giant moats—the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans—and on top of that it has had nuclear weapons—the ultimate deterrent—since 1945. But in truth, there is really no chance that Washington will adopt this policy, though the United States had strong isolationist tendencies until World War II. For since then, an internationalist activism, fostered by the likes of the Rockefeller Foundation, has thoroughly delegitimized this approach. American policy makers have come to believe the country should be militarily involved on the world stage. Yet though no mainstream politician would dare advocate isolationism at this point, the rationale for this grand strategy shows just how safe the United States is. This means, among other things, that it will always be a challenge to motivate the U.S. public to want to run the world and especially to fight wars of choice in distant places. Offshore balancing, which was America’s traditional grand strategy for most of its history, is but another option. Predicated on the belief that there are three regions of the world that are strategically important to the United States—Europe, Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf—it sees the United States’ principle goal as making sure no country dominates any of these areas as it dominates the Western Hemisphere. This is to ensure that dangerous rivals in other regions are forced to concentrate their attention on great powers in their own backyards rather than be free to interfere in America’s. The best way to achieve that end is to rely on local powers to counter aspiring regional hegemons and otherwise keep U.S. military forces over the horizon. But if that proves impossible, American troops come from offshore to help do the job, and then leave once the potential hegemon is checked.

Selective engagement also assumes that Europe, Northeast Asia and the Persian Gulf are the only areas of the world where the United States should be willing to deploy its military might. It is a more ambitious strategy than offshore balancing in that it calls for permanently stationing U.S. troops in those regions to help maintain peace. For selective engagers, it is not enough just to thwart aspiring hegemons. It is also necessary to prevent war in those key regions, either because upheaval will damage our economy or because we will eventually get dragged into the fight in any case. An American presence is also said to be valuable for limiting nuclear proliferation. But none of these strategies call for Washington to spread democracy around the globe—especially through war.

The root cause of America’s troubles is that it adopted a flawed grand strategy after the Cold War. From the Clinton administration on, the United States rejected all these other avenues, instead pursuing global dominance, or what might alternatively be called global hegemony, which was not just doomed to fail, but likely to backfire in dangerous ways if it relied too heavily on military force to achieve its ambitious agenda.

Global dominance has two broad objectives: maintaining American primacy, which means making sure that the United States remains the most powerful state in the international system; and spreading democracy across the globe, in effect, making the world over in America’s image. The underlying belief is that new liberal democracies will be peacefully inclined and pro-American, so the more the better. Of course, this means that Washington must care a lot about every country’s politics. With global dominance, no serious attempt is made to prioritize U.S. interests, because they are virtually limitless.

via Imperial by Design | The National Interest.

Justin Parker and Andi Kovel started Esque Studio to use their glass-blowing techniques to “create original, conceptual and content-based work, attaching craft to function to fine art.” More conceptual artists than craftspeople, Parker and Kovel have exhibited their work alongside art world luminaries like Jim Dine, Claes Oldenburg, Kiki Smith and Damien Hirst. Their utterly unique Glass Skull (2010) is the embodiment of the duo’s artistic vision, using a traditional material (glass) to create something beautiful, inspiring and a little naughty. A bit glam, a bit Goth, the Skull is made from smoked glass and has a silvered interior and gold leaf accents, like its tooth. Hand-sculpted, no two are exactly alike.

via Design Within Reach.

... turned 13 today.

Jacques Kallis tries in vain to survive a bouncer from Sreesanth, South Africa v India, 2nd Test, Durban, 4th day, December 29, 2010

via ESPN Cricinfo.

This is really fun to poke around in!

This is just a little hobby of mine, that I thought might be interesting to a lot of people. Some people collect stamps. Others collect coins. I collect dialects.

via aschmann.net.

There's a lot more to this than might seem on a quick look:

As business models go, there are currently two dominant ones: either people like your product enough to purchase it or they don’t care enough to buy it but will overlook its deficiencies if it’s “free” in exchange for their personal browsing and purchasing info sold to advertisers. The former model is Apple’s, the latter is Google’s.

Apple sells emotional experiences. The price is what users pay to be delighted by Apple’s stream of innovations and to be free of the lowest common denominator burdens and the pervasive harvesting of their personal info.

Google sells eyeballs. To be more precise, the clickstream attached to those eyeballs. Thus scale, indeed dominance, is absolutely crucial to Google’s model.

The weight of scale

Android may be a lackluster clone of iOS in terms of UI and fluidity, but as an economic proposition it’s nothing short of an extension of Google’s desktop/online business model. Google’s model wouldn’t work with something like 20% market share. If a market is highly fractured among smaller players, business models like Google’s that rely on massive scale wouldn’t work well. As with Microsoft’s Win32 API or Office formats, scale is erected to beget inevitability. Inevitability becomes its own marketing engine. Windows had virtually no security architecture by design for so many years, even long after its costly effects became obvious globally, but because it was ubiquitous, thought to be irreplaceable and thus inevitable, it has continued to net Microsoft billions year after year. Likewise, MS Word could get away with some of the most insane formatting problems ever invented by man only because it has so dominated “desktop productivity apps” that it’s become inevitable. If anyone, even Microsoft, were to design a modern word processor today, it sure wouldn’t be Word. And yet everyone else designing a better Word has had a very difficult time of competing with the inevitable. Inevitability is the Kerberos of profitability.

Like Microsoft, Google doesn’t sell best-of-class user experiences to paying customers. It sells their eyeballs to advertisers. The more eyeballs, the better. The most, the best. If it can dominate a market and thus make its products and platforms inevitable, it wouldn’t even have to care about user experience at all.

via CounterNotions.

Every day, for the almost two years I worked as a staff librarian at the Suffolk County House of Correction at South Bay, the pattern was the same: Seconds after they were released from their units, inmates would not walk, they would run — as though catapulted — towards the prison’s library. Many inmates, especially those in a hurry, arrived with some specific order of business. They would grab a book of case law, or they’d check out a newspaper or magazine and take a seat at the library’s long table. They might disappear into the labyrinth of bookshelves. Many would line up to speak with me. They’d pose legal questions, talk about their families and health concerns, describe their spiritual and educational quests. Time and resources were short, and the needs were urgent. The library was a site of activity, of perpetual motion.

via The Boston Globe.

The uniqueness of the Boston prison library, the element that made it strange, provocative even, was its utter normality. Were it not for inmates clad in prison uniforms — every color but orange, it seemed — the space might easily have been mistaken for a small public branch library. It felt like the outside world. Banal features of the room — for example, wall-to-wall carpeting — stood out amid the echo chambers of steel and concrete prison units. You could retreat into a corner of the shelves with a book, or sit at the long wooden table, and forget that you were in prison. You could, as inmates often told me, “feel like a normal person.”

There were differences, of course. There was no Internet connection. Our patrons were subject to body searches by officers, sometimes right outside the library door. Inmates came and went in tightly regimented shifts, according to their housing units, men during the day and women — who lived entirely separately — in the evenings. As a librarian, I had to stay vigilant for inmates storing or exchanging contraband. During a prison lock-down, the library would, without warning, lose its clientele.

Certain books, usually oversized volumes like art books or legal tomes, would sometimes serve as ad hoc mailboxes. Inmates would write letters or brief notes and stash them in the pages for other inmates. In a world without cellphones or Facebook, this was a central form of communication — especially between men and women.

What truly made the library unique, though, and what started to give me a clue to its promise, was its inhabitants. Take Fat Kat, for example. He got this nickname because he was a large fellow. But the name also revealed something more: He was a boss persona, a leader. In the prison library where I worked, he held sway. He helped run the circulation desk and fielded questions from other prisoners about the law and a variety of other topics. As the unofficial captain of the prison library inmate work detail, Kat had found his calling.

“This is where I’m doing my time,” he once told me, pointing to his seat behind the prison library’s circulation desk. “This is what I’m about now.”

Kat had about three years of prison behind him, with three more to go. He had spent his 20s involved with guns, drugs, and gangs. As it turned out, he was also an excellent and dedicated librarian. He tutored his fellow inmates in reading and math. He encouraged young inmates to pursue an education. Kat capitalized on his invaluable street cred and, in the library, reshaped himself into a new kind of role model. He was trusted by all — both inmates and staff. When he was released from prison, he found a job as a community mentor and educator, and continues this work today.