Matthew Yglesias asks this question of members of Congress who vote for deficit-funded war appropriations but vote against any domestic programs that raise the deficit:

Is the performance of a Provincial Reconstruction Team in Khost Province more important to the long-term interests of American citizens than the performance of the Riverside County Public Schools?

The question becomes more pointed when you factor in the odds of success of each project. Given the same expenditure, the odds of stabilizing Afghanistan are very low while the odds of improving schools are very high.

• In a TED talk, marine toxicologist Susan Shaw talks about the likely effects of the BP oil spill. Depressing.
• Mahmoud Ahmadinejad denounces Paul the Octopus, the cephalopod that picked the winners of World Cup games.
• Two Mad Men links: Cityscapes talks about the new offices of Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce and the Wall Street Journal provides a Don Draper hedcut.
• This American Life looks at the origins of the state secrets privilege. Unsurprisingly, its original use was to protect the government from embarrassment, not to prevent secret information from being disclosed in court.
• Joe Nocera explains how lenders are misusing credit scores.
• Niall Ferguson is a partisan hack.
• Andrew Brown discusses research that shows that monogamous cultures vastly outperform polygamous cultures.
• GM seems to be figuring out how to connect with enthusiasts.
• Teresa Nielsen-Hayden expresses the fears of end users with regard to information sharing among social sites. (More here.)
• Ars Technica runs down the rulings by the Library of Congress on how the DMCA is enforced. The big news is that jailbreaking was ruled as legal.
• Stephen O’Grady: The State of Open Source: Startup, Growth, Maturity or Decline?

The big news yesterday was WikiLeaks’ release of a massive number of secret military documents on Afghanistan and Pakistan written between 2004 and 2009. Before releasing the documents, WikiLeaks allowed the New York Times, Der Spiegel, and the Guardian (UK) to review the documents and attest to their legitimacy.

Amy Davison, writing writes the following in response to the New York Times’ assertion that the documents do not contradict the official accounts of the war:

What does it mean to tell the truth about a war? Is it a lie, technically speaking, for the Administration to say that it has faith in Hamid Karzai’s government and regards him as a legitimate leader–or is it just absurd? Is it a lie to say that we have a plan for Afghanistan that makes any sense at all? If you put it that way, each of the WikiLeaks documents–from an account of an armed showdown between the Afghan police and the Afghan Army, to a few lines about a local interdiction official taking seventy-five-dollar bribes, to a sad exchange about an aid scam involving orphans–is a pixel in a picture that does, indeed, contradict official accounts of the war, and rather drastically so.

The contradiction between what we learn from the leaked documents or from the best reporting I read from Afghanistan reminds me of the story about Dell and Intel that I linked to yesterday. Dell got in trouble because they were taking kickbacks from Intel in exchange for not putting AMD chips in their servers, and then hiding that revenue and attributing their profits to other things. Dell wound up paying a $100 million fine for accounting fraud. The Intel-Dell deal was obviously good for Dell’s bottom line and, given that Intel freely entered into the arrangement and continued to pay Dell year after year, worked for them as well. But public corporations are required to disclose where they get and spend their money, so the secret deal got them in trouble.

On the other hand, the government is free to classify embarrassing or inconvenient information that doesn’t serve their goals, and of course, government officials leak that information off the record whenever it’s convenient to do so. When someone without authorization to do so leaks that information, as in this case, we hear lectures about the national interest and federal law. Is it too much for us to demand the same level of transparency from the government as we do from public corporations?

• The New York Times reports on Dell’s ugly business practices. They started taking money from Intel in exchange for not offering CPUs from other companies, and tried to hide that revenue from investors.
• Tim Bray talks about the state of Perl.
• WordPress is dropping support for PHP 4 and MySQL 4. Next year, they’re dropping support for PHP 5.1. I was going to take this opportunity to beat up on Red Hat Enterprise Linux and its horrible outdated packages, but I see that RHEL 6 will support PHP 5.3.2 and MySQL 5.1.47.
• The New York Times ran an insightful op-ed by Van Jones arguing that our culture is not mature enough to deal with the way the media works today.
• Finally got around to making this ricotta cheese from Serious Eats. It was easy to make and delicious.
• I’m not one of those people who sees income inequality as a huge problem unto itself, but I think it’s a sign that there may be problems. And it has been growing rapidly in the US for the past 30 years. One thing’s for sure, Republicans have done a great job of making sure rich people keep getting richer.
• Former CBS and NPR correspondent Daniel Schorr died last week. I love the anecdote about Richard Nixon retold in this article.
• Researchers trying to figure out whether working out using a Wii was dangerous learned that working out with a Wii isn’t very effective.

Everybody linked to Tom Taylor’s essay, You’ve either shipped or you haven’t. I didn’t, because it was trite and smug. Lots of people liked it because it made them feel good about themselves. He has since admitted that it was trite and smug, not in those exact words. Anyway, even trite, smug essays can provoke great responses. In this case, an essay from Paul Ford about how the skills of editors (who ship all the time, often on a daily basis) apply to the web.