This is just downright bizarre. Spencer Ackerman has this to say, in his latest swipe at pubescent but powerful D.C. think tank, the Centre For a New American Security:

Army special-forces veteran and CNAS senior fellow Roger Carstens — a great guy to have a beer with, it must be noted — is going to be on an NBC reality show called ‘The Wanted‘, which apparently tracks a team hunting the ex-leader of the Kurdish terrorist group Ansar al-Islam, an individual named Mullah Krekar, who lives in Oslo and looks like he should be living under a bridge extorting money from goats. I’m not sure what to make of hunting accused terrorists on television, but this is great-if-bewildering news for Roger. CNAS’ next foray obviously has to be into the music industry, where its experts can contend that the only way to truly kill Autotune is to protect rappers from the pitch-correction software‘s merciless ravages.

There’s more. The cast, according to NBC:

The faces of “The Wanted” include Roger Carstens who is recognized as one of the world’s preeminent authorities on counter-terrorism and counter-insurgency; former Navy Seal Scott Tyler, an expert in urban reconnaissance and unconventional warfare; David Crane a decorated former US intelligence official and the first American to serve as Chief Prosecutor of an international war crimes tribunal since Justice Robert Jackson at Nuremberg; and Emmy award-winning investigative journalist Adam Ciralsky. Ciralsky also serves as co-executive producer of “The Wanted” with documentary filmmaker Charlie Ebersol.

I know David Crane. I’ve met him, been on a panel with him, and hold him in high regard. I have no idea what to think of this, beyond my already low opinion of reality television.

H/t Tom Ricks.

More good news, from Foreign Policy:

It is a sobering time for the world’s most fragile countries—virulent economic crisis, countless natural disasters, and government collapse. This year, we delve deeper than ever into just what went wrong—and who is to blame.

Yemen may not yet be front-page news, but it’s being watched intently these days in capitals worldwide. A perfect storm of state failure is now brewing there: disappearing oil and water reserves; a mob of migrants, some allegedly with al Qaeda ties, flooding in from Somalia, the failed state next door; and a weak government increasingly unable to keep things running. Many worry Yemen is the next Afghanistan: a global problem wrapped in a failed state.

It’s not just Yemen. The financial crisis was a near-death experience for insurgency-plagued Pakistan, which remains on imf life support. Cameroon has been rocked by economic contagion, which sparked riots, violence, and instability. Other countries dependent on the import and export of commodities—from Nigeria to Equatorial Guinea to Bangladesh—had a similarly rough go of it last year, suffering what economist Homi Kharas calls a “whiplash effect” as prices spiked sharply and then plummeted. All indications are that 2009 will bring little to no reprieve.

Read the full article.

From The Atlantic: Darwinism, redux, redux, redux…

Pandemics. Global warming. Food shortages. No more fossil fuels. What are humans to do? The same thing the species has done before: evolve to meet the challenge. But this time we don’t have to rely on natural evolution to make us smart enough to survive. We can do it ourselves, right now, by harnessing technology and pharmacology to boost our intelligence. Is Google actually making us smarter?