ON THE ROAD AGAIN... Botanical Gardens await me. Shopping, fine food. Friends. And it's only going to be in the lower 90s. It's August. Enjoy the lulls, embrace the warmth.

INTEL GEEK CHAT Frederick Thomas Martin spent four decades as a techno-spook and authored a book on the development of IntelLink, which is the intranet for spies. Basically. He now leads GETA -- the Government Emerging Technology Alliance. GETA is having a big get-together next week with the sliderule crowd from the NSA, CIA, FBI, ATF and assorted military intelligence groups. Today, Martin chats about the role of technology in homeland security.

COLD, WARM, WARMER So, Kate's back on the West Coast after a summer in Minneapolis princing it out. I've passed on a few of her posts recently -- they just lacked the flourish and passion for music and mood I'd come to expect from her. This one started wobbly for me. But I held on, and was rewarded with that little smidgeon of Kateness I've come to enjoy.

WHEN PEOPLE OF GOOD WILL WANT TO PUNCH EACH OTHER We're not so popular these days, we Americans. Apparently, the groundswell of affection and sympathy that swept the globe last September has been tempered by the El Nino-like effect of the Bush Administration's muddled, and often abrasively arrogant, foreign policy. And, you know, while it didn't really matter to me when some people hated the United States, it really sucks when you can just assume that the majority of Europeans, South Americans, Asians and Africans want to tell you how tiresome America's perceived attitude can be. I think we're still doing okay in Australia; things will be clearer after ANZAC Day.

ONE IF BY LAND, TWO IF BY SEA The CSMonitor surveys the regime-change landscape and finds it to be ever-shifting. Current thinking is that the U.S. will use as many as five aircraft carriers to launch naval, air and ground assaults on Iraq. The Monitor probes further with views from the opinions formerly known as "the Arab Street."

THE NAMES PROJECT Finding out just who has been arrested, detained or deported since September 11 continues to be a challenge for a variety of organizations interested in what's going on behind the Justice Department's closed doors. The Village Voice takes a gander at some recent developments.

EGYPTIAN AID ISSUE Finally, the Bush Administration attempts to link democracy, foreign aid and human rights in the Middle East with an announcement that future aid to Egypt is contingent on significant improvements on the human rights front there. This is apparently a result of Egypt's conviction of human rights campaigner Saad Eddin Ibrahim, as well as a long track record of clamping down on pro-democracy groups. It will be interesting to see if this changes the daily behavior of the Egyptian government. Of course, we can always call for a regime change and threaten to invade...

ORDER IN THE COURT The Post weighs in on the case of Yaser Esam Hamdi, the "battlefield detainee" currently being held in solitary confinement because he is a legal U.S. citizen and a former Taliban soldier. The Post's argument is basic: a two-page written memo from a contract advisor to the government saying Hamdi has no rights does not a case make. I don't care who Hamdi fought for -- the legal rights of citizens need to prevail in this case, not the government's right to secrecy and paranoia.

TIP TOP TIPS TOPPLING The ACLU, an organization I tend to admire more in concept than in practice (like oh so many things), has a nice update page on Operation TIPS, the Justice Department's ____________ (insert adjective) program that originally called for thousands of UPS truck drivers and amazon.com warehouse employees to turn me in for simultaneously ordering an Arabic textbook, a guide to our nation's monuments and the latest Star Trek paperback. You can also email a letter to your Senator telling them to step up for privacy rights.

WHEN A BEAR MEETS A WOOZLE A too-long, yet amusing and factually interesting, tale from LA Magazine about the ongoing lawsuit between Disney and Shirley Laswell, an 8-year-old woman known as "The Pooh Lady," as in the bear. It's written in meandering prose, as this snippet shows -- "Yet what has fallen out of many people's heads, even heads Very Worldly and Sophisticated, is the memory of What It Means to Be Pooh. Who would have thought that a bunch of Woozles with law degrees would be the ones to help us remember? But as Pooh has found out, sometimes when you've misplaced What Really Matters, facing who you're not leads you back to who you are."

A GENERATION LOST The number of HIV/AIDS orphans in Kenya alone has reached more than 1 million, while sexual activity among 15-24-year-olds could bring the daily death rate to 1,400, threatening an entire generation of African youth. AIDS may not be the plague we thought it would be in the United States, but it's decimating much of the rest of the world...

IRAQ, PAPER, SCISSORS Strategic Forecasting has an interesting paper on the Bush Administration's obsession with Iraq, that argues the defeat of Saddam Hussein's regime would help squash any ressurgent Arab/Muslim sense of global strength -- at least from the more radical wings. "On the one side, there has been a growing sense of the ability of the Islamic and Arab worlds to resist Western power. On the other side, there has been an ongoing sense of victimization," Stratfor argues. I can see how beating up the kid down the street sends a message that you're tougher than he is; I just don't see how beating him up diminishes any sense of victimization. It seems to me it would only bolster it...

IT'S A SQUIRREL'S WORLD There are few better reasons for the existence of the Internet than the ability of idle hands to be the Devil's playthings.

AS CLOSE TO GOOD SENSE AS YOU GET William Langewiesche's three-part piece The Atlantic on the collapse and excavation of the World Trade Center is an amazing, compelling piece of journalism, and the longest piece ever published in the magazine (in three parts in the July/August, September and October issues). The link is to an online interview with Langewiesche, where he makes one of the wisest statements I've read about current events and culture in some time: "The reaction to the collapse of those towers represented the healthiest strains and the strongest strains in the United States. The towers themselves, before they were attacked, represented something else about the United States, and probably not the most attractive thing... They represented Big Organization—the monolithic company or government. They were very much a totalitarian representation of centralized structure and control… the World Trade Center as a piece of city-building was pretty much a failure… What we saw in the cleanup and recovery effort was a more authentic slice of American life. And it was very encouraging. It was amazing, actually. I found that we were looking at a very, very healthy culture, an expression of cultural and political genius."

EGYPT UNBOUND P.J. O'Rourke wrote a satirical little ditty about Egypt in this month's issue of The Atlantic, and was pressured into this interview on The Atlantic Online. I point it out, really, because this month's issue is as good as last month's, and contains the second part of William Langewiesche's inside look at the de-building of the World Trade Center. And because sometimes O'Rourke is pretty amusing.

GVSB The Guardian has a nice little weblog special on gender issues and topics -- a series of links and descriptive text to articles scattered about the webisphere on the challenges and opportunities gender affords us.

SKY PICS An introduction to the aerial photography of Yann-Arthus Bertrand, courtesy of our friend in France. She politely includes links to her own photos of the outdoor exposition, as well as links to Yann-Arthus Bertrand's own site. Merci!