BLOGGING IS LIKE A SIMILE

BLOGGING IS LIKE A SIMILE. Let's try some news and article dumping throughout the day here, eh?

The Amygdala staff has been slack, scattered, and unfocused on posting to this blog; the staffers responsible have been sacked; once again, new staffers for new brain connections!

So: 2 US servicemen mistakenly killed by drone attack in Afghanistan.

[...] The Marines under fire were watching streaming video of the battlefield being fed to them by an armed Predator overhead. They saw a number of "hot spots," or infrared images, moving in their direction. Apparently believing that those "hot spots" were the enemy, they called in a Hellfire missile strike from the Predator.

Technology will triumph.

It worked in Vietnam! We're winning.

After all, unlike Vietnam, there are no safe havens across borders: Pakistan Tells U.S. It Must Sharply Cut C.I.A. Activities:

Pakistan has demanded that the United States steeply reduce the number of Central Intelligence Agency operatives and Special Operations forces working in Pakistan, and that it halt C.I.A. drone strikes aimed at militants in northwest Pakistan. The request was a sign of the near collapse of cooperation between the two testy allies.

Pakistani and American officials said in interviews that the demand that the United States scale back its presence was the immediate fallout from the arrest in Pakistan of Raymond A. Davis, a C.I.A. security officer who killed two men in January during what he said was an attempt to rob him.

In all, about 335 American personnel — C.I.A. officers and contractors and Special Operations forces — were being asked to leave the country, said a Pakistani official closely involved in the decision.

It was not clear how many C.I.A. personnel that would leave behind; the total number in Pakistan has not been disclosed. But the cuts demanded by the Pakistanis amounted to 25 to 40 percent of United States Special Operations forces in the country, the officials said. The number also included the removal of all the American contractors used by the C.I.A. in Pakistan.

This is what we call "big news."

It's also, when you read between the lines, leverage, and there will be a trade-off, and you'll have to read between the lines, at best, and look carefully at the right sources, to find information about it when it happens, should said information be findable -- but traces always surface on the internet:

[...] In addition to the withdrawal of all C.I.A. contractors, Pakistan is demanding the removal of C.I.A. operatives involved in “unilateral” assignments like Mr. Davis’s that the Pakistani intelligence agency did not know about, the Pakistani official said.

An American official, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, said without elaborating that the Pakistanis had asked “for more visibility into some things” — presumably the nature of C.I.A. covert operations in the country — “and that request is being talked about.”

Translation: the ISI just pulled the lever to try to get CIA to be as transparent as is possible with ISI in the hall of mirrors.

Expulsions are part of the game.

All intelligence analysis is about decluttering.

[...] Clutter exists only when those things exert a mental drag, or get in the way of living, in line with the old Afrikaans proverb, 'Alles wat jy besit vat van jou tyd' — 'Everything you own snatches at your time.'

My information sucking is a tad cluttering, but I declutter for you, my guests.

[...] "The cost of a thing is the amount of what I call 'life' that is required to be exchanged for it, immediately or in the long run," is how Henry David Thoreau, everyone's favourite 19th-century hut-dwelling minimalist, expressed the sense that owning things constitutes a spiritual burden. He advocated not decluttering, though, so much as simplicity; not throwing things out so much as not acquiring them in the first place. Decluttering can be a step towards greater simplicity. But only if, having thrown off the ballast, you resist accumulating more. Otherwise, you're not really decluttering. You're just keeping the decluttering industry in business.

Your Amygdala declutters information. (Link via Stef.)

I could check the quote, but there would be a cost. Without going to the source, I note that Wikiquotes has it as:

And the cost of a thing it will be remembered is the amount of life it requires to be exchanged for it.

-- Journals (1838-1859) (After December 6, 1845.)

Yet more succinctly, I note that:

* It is a great art to saunter.
o April 26, 1841

I must return to more saunter in my blogging.

* For many years I was self-appointed inspector of snowstorms and rainstorms, and did my duty faithfully, though I never received one cent for it.
o After February 22, 1846

Thoreau was, as we know, an early blogger. He merely lacked Hellfire missiles.

He also notes in Life Without Principle (1863):

We do not live for idle amusement. I would not run round a corner to see the world blow up.   

I would at least saunter.  I'm easily amused.

More information clutter to come.

ADDENDUM, 9:36 a.m.: Good to be back on Memeorandum.

ADDENDUM, 10:17 a.m.: Longer and considerably more serious and detailed variant about AfPak posted at Obsidian Wings.  Links to, and quotes from, Spencer Ackerman, David Ignatius, and Bruce Rolston, as well as myself.

ADDENDUM, 12:06 p.m.: George Carlin on Stuff: