Judith A. McHale was expecting a contentious session with Ansar Abbasi, a Pakistani journalist known for his harsh criticism of American foreign policy, when she sat down for a one-on-one meeting with him in a hotel conference room in Islamabad on Monday. She got that, and a little bit more.

After Ms. McHale, the Obama administration’s new under secretary of state for public diplomacy and public affairs, gave her initial polite presentation about building bridges between America and the Muslim world, Mr. Abbasi thanked her politely for meeting with him. Then he told her that he hated her.

“ ‘You should know that we hate all Americans,’ ” Ms. McHale said Mr. Abbasi told her. “ ‘From the bottom of our souls, we hate you.’ ”

. . .

She said that even though she knew that she did not sway Mr. Abbasi, it was good to hear what he thought because she wanted to try to understand the source of much of the anti-Americanism in Pakistan.

Part One: Computers

David Sedaris or Andy Rooney on Computers, Exhibit A:

I hate computers for any number of reasons, but I despise them most for what they’ve done to my friend the typewriter. In a democratic country you’d think there would be room for both of them, but computers won’t rest until I’m making my ribbons from torn shirts and brewing Wite-Out in my bathtub. Their goal is to place the IBM Selectric II beside the feather quill and chisel in the museum of antiquated writing implements. They’re power hungry, and someone needs to stop them.

David Sedaris or Andy Rooney on Computers, Exhibit B:

Bill Gates got off on the wrong foot the first time he decided to turn off his computer. Do you simply press a button that says OFF when you want to turn it off? You do not. The first thing he has us do to stop is to press START.

Makes sense, doesn’t it?

Next, it asks SHUT DOWN?

Then it says WHAT DO YOU WANT IT TO DO? Well, didn’t I just tell you what I want it to do? It isn’t finished either. It asks SHUT DOWN THE COMPUTER? What the hell else do you think I want to shut down? The bedroom window?

Computers aren’t nice to us. My typewriter never threatened me with a prison sentence by saying I have performed an illegal operation.

When I want to write something, the computer demands a password. In all the years I wrote on my typewriter, it never asked for a password, and no one ever stole anything I wrote either.

Answer to Part One: Computers here.

Part Two: Our Litigious Society

David Sedaris or Andy Rooney on Our Litigious Society, Exhibit A:

I’ve been thinking of quitting work and suing big companies for a living, instead. Suing has become a popular American pastime and I’d like to get in on some of the easy money.

. . .

If someone is killed when his car turns over going around a curve at 90 miles an hour, his family sues the car manufacturer or the company that made the tires. If he hits a telephone pole, they sue the telephone company.

The wife of a man who was murdered sued the company that made the gun. The tobacco companies, the gun manufacturers and the tire companies have it coming but the amount of some of these awards don’t make sense.

David Sedaris or Andy Rooney on Our Litigious Society, Exhibit B:

At the San Diego Zoo, right near the primate habitats, there’s a display featuring half a dozen life-size gorillas made out of bronze. Posted nearby is a sign reading CAUTION: GORILLA STATUES MAY BE HOT. Everywhere you turn, the obvious is being stated. CANNON MAY BE LOUD. MOVING SIDEWALK IS ABOUT TO END. To people who don’t run around suing one another, such signs suggest a crippling lack of intelligence. Place bronze statues beneath the southern California sun, and of course they’re going to get hot. Cannons are supposed to be loud, that’s their claim to fame, and – like it or not – the moving sidewalk is bound to end sooner or later. It’s hard trying to explain a country whose motto has become You can’t claim I didn’t warn you. What can you say about the family who is suing the railroad after their drunk son was killed walking on the tracks? Trains don’t normally sneak up on people. Unless they’ve derailed, you pretty much know where to find them. The young man wasn’t deaf and blind. No one had tied him to the tracks, so what’s there to sue about?

Answer to Part Two: Our Litigious Society here.

Part Three: Recycling

David Sedaris or Andy Rooney on Recycling, Exhibit A:

Americans put their whole lives by the side of the road to be carted away Monday, Wednesday and Friday.

Mechanical engineers have invented ingenious devices to help make disposal quick and easy.

Some things get thrown out more than others. Summer furniture gets thrown away – all kinds of kitchen equipment, dishwashers, stoves, hot water heaters. There are enough junked refrigerators to chill whole neighborhoods.

Gadgets that seemed like a good idea in the store go. Venetian blinds get the heave-ho.

There are mountains of used cardboard containers at the dump. Recycling is an unsubstantiated rumor.

David Sedaris or Andy Rooney on Recycling, Exhibit B:

Pandas and rain forests are never mentioned when it comes to the millions of people taking joyrides in their Range Rovers. Rather, it’s the little things we’re strong-armed into conserving. At a chain coffee bar in San Francisco, I saw a sign near the cream counter that read NAPKINS COME FROM TREES – CONSERVE! In case you missed the first sign, there was a second one two feet away, reading YOU WASTE NAPKINS – YOU WASTE TREES!!! The cups, of course, are also made of paper, yet there’s no mention of the mighty redwood when you order your four-dollar coffee. The guilt applies only to those things that are being given away for free. Were they to charge you ten cents per napkin, they would undoubtedly make them much thinner so you’d need to waste even more in order to fight back the piping hot geyser forever spouting from the little hole conveniently located in the lid of your cup.

Answer to Part Three: Recycling here.

Part Four: Working Away From Home

David Sedaris or Andy Rooney on Working Away From Home, Exhibit A:

When forced to leave my house for an extended period of time, I take my typewriter with me, and together we endure the wretchedness of passing through the X-ray scanner. The laptops roll merrily down the belt, while I’m instructed to stand aside and open my bag. To me it seems like a normal enough thing to be carrying, but the typewriter’s declining popularity arouses suspicion and I wind up eliciting the sort of reaction one might expect when traveling with a cannon.

“It’s a typewriter,” I say. “You use it to write angry letters to airport authorities.”

The keys are then slapped and pounded, and I’m forced to explain that if you want the words to appear, you first have to plug it in and insert a sheet of paper.

The goons shake their heads and tell me I really should be using a computer. That’s their job, to stand around in an ill-fitting uniform and tell you how you should lead your life. I’m told the exact same thing later in the evening when the bellhop knocks on my hotel door. The people whose televisions I can hear have complained about my typing, and he has come to make me stop. To hear him talk, you’d think I’d been playing the kettledrum. In the great scheme of things, the typewriter is not nearly as loud as he makes it out to be, but there’s no use arguing with him. “You know,” he says, “you really should be using a computer.”

David Sedaris or Andy Rooney on Working Away From Home, Exhibit B:

I recently bought this new laptop to use when I travel. Look at that that … fits right into my briefcase. It weighs less than three pounds. I lose that much getting mad waiting to get on the plane through security at the airport.

But that’s it. I’m ready to go. Well … almost ready.

Actually, I do have to bring the power cord and the AC adapter so that I can recharge the battery when I get to the hotel room.

Naturally, I want to get on the Internet when I’m away. So I bring the telephone cord. This plugs in here on the side, and the wall in the hotel room.

I always write on a floppy disk. I write anything I do on the floppy disk. That way, when I get back to the office, I can copy it to my regular computer. This plugs into the side of the computer.

If I write a letter or something — anything I write, really — I want to be able to print it. This is my printer. I bring that along. They make them smaller than this now but you can’t buy a new one of everything the day it comes out, so I still have this one.

The printer has a converter. Naturally, I have to have power for the computer so I bring that along. There is a cable that goes from the computer to the printer, so I always have that.

Now, these are the compact disks with the encyclopedia and dictionary on them. I need some research tools if I’m going to write anything, so I always bring that. Now, this box is something called a D-Link. I
don’t totally understand it, but I know that when I’m using more than one of these other devices, I have to have it. So I always bring that.

But there you are. When I’ve got everything together, I put the computer in the briefcase. Then I pack everything else into a small suitcase and away I go.

To tell you the truth, I might be better off bringing my Underwood.

Answer to Part Four: Working Away From Home here.

Well, now we have proof:

The Department of Homeland Security is warning law enforcement officials about a rise in “rightwing extremist activity,” saying the economic recession, the election of America’s first black president and the return of a few disgruntled war veterans could swell the ranks of white-power militias.

Scary stuff.

(Via Yglesias, who also links to local Seattle author Dave Weigel’s reporting from a gun show)

President-elect Barack Obama has pledged to quickly nominate a commerce secretary after his first choice, Gov. Bill Richardson of New Mexico, withdrew this week. Frankly, the far more pressing task at the Commerce Department is to name a new director of the Census Bureau.

With only a year to go before the nationwide count in 2010, Mr. Obama needs to nominate a strong new director who can move swiftly to counteract years of political meddling and neglect that have left the bureau ill prepared to conduct the next census.

This page has issued many warnings about the bureau’s state of unreadiness, as have members of Congress and advocates for groups that tend to be undercounted in a less-than-robust census, especially racial and ethnic minorities, immigrants, the poor and the disabled. In November, Congressional investigators named the 2010 census as one of 13 issues requiring Mr. Obama’s immediate attention.

Any further delay increases the chances, which are already too high, of a botched census in 2010. That would be a very expensive failure of a constitutionally mandated duty on Mr. Obama’s watch. The damage would be compounded in 2012, when the new census data will be used by state governments to redraw electoral districts. If the census is not accurate, the electoral map also would not be — for years to come.

High beer prices are on tap, and global warming could be to blame.

The environmental crisis has hit suds-lovers where it hurts most — at the bar and in the wallet — as prices of grains and hops soar, activists said yesterday.

“When we’re trying to deal with young people, you have to define issues that are attractive to them, and this is something that’s caught their attention,” said Matthew Silverstein, president of the Queens County Young Democrats, which was set to host a “Save the Ales” forum last night on the impact of global warming on beer prices.

As global temperatures rise, radical shifts in weather and more parched lands are making it harder to grow grains and hops, activists and beer makers agreed.

Kelly Taylor, brewmaster for Kelso of Brooklyn beers, said his customers have paid between 10 and 15 percent more in the past year. He warned that more hikes are inevitable.

“I think prices are going to be going up every year — steep price increases,” Taylor said. “My malt prices went up by 50 percent in one year.”

Taylor, whose brewery is in Clinton Hill, said hops and grains were in short supply worldwide.

“We saw a drought in Australia, a bad harvest in Europe, flooding in Germany and hailstorms in the Pacific Northwest. Across the board, we saw significant rises in the price of grains and hops,” he said.

The beer man chalked up the wild weather to global warming but said many of his customers don’t take the issue seriously enough.

“Some people are just calling it a bad year,” he said.

Ricardo Caraballo was having a familiar American experience at the filling station the other day, groaning as the pump clicked up, up, up. By the time he finished it read $505, and his tank was only half full.

A few years ago, “$500 would have kept me rolling for two weeks,” he said. “Now, I’ll be lucky to make it three days.”

Mr. Caraballo is a trucker, and instead of gasoline he was buying 143 gallons of diesel. While the price of gasoline may be on the verge of setting another record, diesel is already there.

According to AAA, the motor club, the average nationwide diesel price has set records on 18 of the past 19 days, including Monday, when it hit $3.83 a gallon.

In the nation’s tool and die plants, in the driver’s seats of farm tractors and in the cabs of the long-haul semis that ply America’s highways, people are feeling the pain.

“It’s killing us,” said Chad Beachler, co-owner of Beachler Trucking, which operates nine trucks in Loudonville, Ohio. “Every day, I come in here and wonder if I have enough money to buy fuel.”

. . .

When Tony Jarachovic bought his white Kenworth semi in 1998, diesel cost 88 cents a gallon. Today the truck’s odometer reads 1.1 million miles. It needs new front tires, which together cost $900, and a major overhaul, which will cost $8,500.

Spending $1,500 a week on fuel has depleted his maintenance budget, however. Now he avoids driving from his home base in Lodi, Ohio, into Pennsylvania because the hills strain his motor. Mr. Jarachovic used to buy Krispy Kreme doughnuts at truck stops, and treat his family to dinner at Applebee’s every Sunday. Now his wife cooks extra spaghetti so he can eat leftovers on the road.

“I have no expenses left to cut,” Mr. Jarachovic said.

Trucking companies are looking for efficiencies, as well. O & S Trucking of Springfield, Mo., recently installed electronic devices in each of its 350 trucks to kill the engines automatically after they idle for two minutes, said Jim Frieze, the equipment director. And all the company’s trucks have devices that limit roadway speeds; Mr. Frieze has dialed those down from 70 miles an hour to 65 to conserve fuel. He audits every truck’s computer every week, searching for wasteful habits.

“If a driver’s gear shifts take him over 1,800 r.p.m., he’s just blowing fuel out the stack,” Mr. Frieze said. “I take him aside and counsel him to shift faster.”

My evidence is strictly circumstantial, but I regard the Air Force slogan’s similarity to the results of a Youtube search for the phrase as…probably more than coincidental. Really, how much less subtle could this be?

To paraphrase Mitt Romney, who let the dog whistle out?

Boeing’s new 787 Dreamliner passenger jet may have a serious security vulnerability in its onboard computer networks that could allow passengers to access the plane’s control systems, according to the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration.

The computer network in the Dreamliner’s passenger compartment, designed to give passengers in-flight internet access, is connected to the plane’s control, navigation and communication systems, an FAA report reveals.

The metallic object – bigger than a golf ball and as heavy as a soup can – that crashed through a Freehold Township, N.J., home’s roof on Jan. 2 was not a meteorite after all, geologists said yesterday.

Instead, the scientists said, it was a stainless-steel alloy and likely “orbital debris,” or scrap iron.

Question remains: Where did it fall from?

“That’s the $64,000 question,” Rutgers University geologist Jeremy Delaney said. “And there’s probably no way to answer it.”

A previously undisclosed meeting last year of President Bush’s most senior national security advisers was the highest level discussion about how to rewrite the cold war rules. The existing approach to deterrence dates from the time when the nuclear attacks Washington worried about would be launched by missiles and bombers, which can be tracked back to a source by radar, and not carried in backpacks or hidden in cargo containers.

Among the subjects of the meeting last year was whether to issue a warning to all countries around the world that if a nuclear weapon was detonated on American soil and was traced back to any nation’s stockpiles, through nuclear forensics, the United States would hold that country “fully responsible” for the consequences of the explosion. The term “fully responsible” was left deliberately vague so that it would be unclear whether the United States would respond with a retaliatory nuclear attack, or, far more likely, a nonnuclear retaliation, whether military or diplomatic.

. . .

The weekly meeting of the interagency group dealing with nuclear attribution is just one part of a governmentwide effort to prepare for what might happen after a small nuclear device was detonated in an American city, just as Washington once gamed out a nuclear exchange with the Soviet Union.

But it is a subject Mr. Bush and his aides have rarely referred to in public. In private, officials say, the Department of Homeland Security is trying to plan for more than a dozen scenarios — including one in which a bomb goes off, and terrorist groups then claim to have planted others in cities around the country.

While most of that planning takes place behind locked doors, officials responsible for it appeared at a workshop last month sponsored by the Preventive Defense Project, a research collaboration sponsored by Harvard and Stanford Universities.

The daylong discussion revealed major gaps in the planning. But it also demonstrated that while the first instinct of government officials after an explosion would be to figure out retaliation, “that would probably give way to an effort to seek the cooperation of a Pakistan or Russia to figure out where the stuff came from, what else was lost, and to hunt down the remaining bombs rather than punish the government that lost them,” said one of the conference’s organizers, Ashton B. Carter of the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard.

Watch your head.

PS: no word yet on whether the passengers on the plane planned to crash land on a remote Pacific island only to be terrorized by smoke monsters and crazy people.

Here in Ohio, there are more than 200 vacant houses in Euclid, a suburb of Cleveland north of here. In the last two years more than 600 houses in Euclid have gone through foreclosure or started the process, many of them the homes of elderly people who refinanced with low two-year teaser rates, then saw their payments grow by 50 percent or more.

Euclid has installed alarm systems in some vacant houses to keep out people hoping to steal lights and other fixtures, drug users and squatters. The city has hired three new building inspectors, bringing the total to nine, to deal with troubled properties and is getting a $1 million loan from the county to cover the costs of rehabilitation, demolition and lawn care at the foreclosed houses. (When the properties are sold, such direct maintenance costs will be recovered through tax assessments.)

It’s pretty innovative on the part of the local government to try and spruce up the abandoned houses to prevent a snowball effect. But it looks like they’re trying to rake water up a hill. Good thing Alan Greenspan recommended sub-prime mortgages back in the day, otherwise we wouldn’t be in this wonderful situation. Better that we left it to the market, since obviously 80-year-old retirees who can’t read fine print are perfectly well-educated consumers.

For decades, space experts have worried that a speeding bit of orbital debris might one day smash a large spacecraft into hundreds of pieces and start a chain reaction, a slow cascade of collisions that would expand for centuries, spreading chaos through the heavens.

In the last decade or so, as scientists came to agree that the number of objects in orbit had surpassed a critical mass — or, in their terms, the critical spatial density, the point at which a chain reaction becomes inevitable — they grew more anxious.

Early this year, after a half-century of growth, the federal list of detectable objects (four inches wide or larger) reached 10,000, including dead satellites, spent rocket stages, a camera, a hand tool and junkyards of whirling debris left over from chance explosions and destructive tests.

Now, experts say, China’s test on Jan. 11 of an antisatellite rocket that shattered an old satellite into hundreds of large fragments means the chain reaction will most likely start sooner. If their predictions are right, the cascade could put billions of dollars’ worth of advanced satellites at risk and eventually threaten to limit humanity’s reach for the stars.

Federal and private experts say that early estimates of 800 pieces of detectable debris from the shattering of the satellite will grow to nearly 1,000 as observations continue by tracking radars and space cameras. At either number, it is the worst such episode in space history.

Today, next year or next decade, some piece of whirling debris will start the cascade, experts say.

“It’s inevitable,” said Nicholas L. Johnson, chief scientist for orbital debris at the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. “A significant piece of debris will run into an old rocket body, and that will create more debris. It’s a bad situation.”

Geoffrey E. Forden, an arms expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology who is analyzing the Chinese satellite debris, said China perhaps failed to realize the magnitude of the test’s indirect hazards.

Dr. Forden suggested that Chinese engineers might have understood the risks but failed to communicate them. In China, he said, “the decision process is still so opaque that maybe they didn’t know who to talk to. Maybe you have a disconnect between the engineers and the people who think about policy.”

China, experts note, has 39 satellites of its own — many of them now facing a heightened risk of destruction.

Iran’s ambassador to Baghdad outlined an ambitious plan on Sunday to greatly expand its economic and military ties with Iraq — including an Iranian national bank branch in the heart of the capital — just as the Bush administration has been warning the Iranians to stop meddling in Iraqi affairs.

Hey… at least they’re willing to help rebuild, right? Unlike The French…

I suppose the best we can hope for — geostrategically speaking, if course — is that they’re as incompetent with the reconstruction as the U.S. Perhaps we should loan out few dozen Heritage Foundation staffers who will help them teach the Iraqis that it’s more important to ban abortion than provide security and economic development. That’ll help.

Seriously though? We’re f**cked.