Today's Internets Mojo.

Brickbat: Neutering the Sheepdogs - Hit & Run : Reason.com: "Officials at Florida's Cypress Lake High School suspended three students who wrestled a loaded gun away from another student. The student with the gun was pointing it at a student and threatening to shoot him when the three grabbed him and took the gun away. A local TV station reports they were given an emergency suspension of three days because they were part of an "incident" with a gun."

The Inside Story of How the White House Let Diplomacy Fail in Afghanistan - By Vali Nasr | Foreign Policy: "Holbrooke encouraged the creative chaos. "I want you to learn nothing from government," he told me. "This place is dead intellectually. It does not produce any ideas; it is all about turf battles and checking the box. Your job is to break through all this. Anyone gives you trouble, come to me."

...But my time in the Obama administration turned out to be a deeply disillusioning experience. The truth is that his administration made it extremely difficult for its own foreign-policy experts to be heard. Both Clinton and Holbrooke, two incredibly dedicated and talented people, had to fight to have their voices count on major foreign-policy initiatives.

Holbrooke never succeeded. Clinton did -- but it was often a battle. It usually happened only when it finally became clear to a White House that jealously guarded all foreign policymaking -- and then relied heavily on the military and intelligence agencies to guide its decisions -- that these agencies' solutions were no substitute for the type of patient, credible diplomacy that garners the respect and support of allies. Time and again, when things seemed to be falling apart, the administration finally turned to Clinton because it knew she was the only person who could save the situation.

...the president had a truly disturbing habit of funneling major foreign-policy decisions through a small cabal of relatively inexperienced White House advisors whose turf was strictly politics. Their primary concern was how any action in Afghanistan or the Middle East would play on the nightly news, or which talking point it would give the Republicans. The Obama administration's reputation for competence on foreign policy has less to do with its accomplishments in Afghanistan or the Middle East than with how U.S. actions in that region have been reshaped to accommodate partisan political concerns.

...Early in the process, Holbrooke came back from a meeting at the White House. "You did a good job," he said. "The secretary [Clinton] was pleased with her material but wants her folders to be as big as [those of Defense Secretary Robert] Gates. She wants color maps, tables, and charts." Clinton, continued Holbrooke, "does not want Gates to dominate the conversation by waving his colorful maps and charts in front of everybody. No one reads this stuff, but they all look at the maps and color charts.""

Battle-Tested | Foreign Policy: "...we never went back to the fundamental choice about what do we really need to do. We hide choices. We never talk about choices because choices are hard and choices mean making a decision. Choices mean taking responsibility for who makes the choice and which choice they take.

...I spent a lot of time in places where we surged troops over the last several years. There is discrete impact. I've seen districts where security has improved. It's incontrovertible. When you send in additional numbers of U.S. troops, good things generally follow -- but for a discrete period of time. We didn't achieve the sort of aggregate impact that we saw in Iraq. And we all know the reasons why. Ultimately, I step back and say it was not a wise expenditure of resources. Stepping back even further, we fundamentally failed to grasp the politics of that country [Afghanistan]. Our solutions were simply not tailored to the environment. And ultimately I think in many parts of the country -- it's already happening -- things will essentially revert back to their natural order.

...We took some of the most decentralized people in the entire world and imposed one of the most centralized constitutions on them. It's ludicrous that President Karzai appoints a district governor and a district police chief. I'm telling you, the people where I come from -- Rome, Georgia -- would rise up if the president appointed the county commissioner. It's crazy."

What Went Wrong in Afghanistan? | Foreign Policy: "Many have argued that the problem with the Afghanistan intervention is that it "wasn't done right": If only we had not been distracted by Iraq, had tackled the right warlords, pursued the correct counterinsurgency strategy, and surged earlier, it would have been fine. But they are wrong. The problem was much more basic: The West was trying to do something it couldn't do, and it was trying to do something it didn't need to do. Its basic assumptions were wrong. Afghanistan did not pose an existential threat to international security; the problem was not that it was a "failed state." The truth is that the West always lacked the knowledge, power, or legitimacy to fundamentally transform Afghanistan. But policymakers were too afraid, too hypnotized by fashionable theories, too isolated from Afghan reality, and too laden with guilt to notice that the more ambitious Afghanistan mission was impossible and unnecessary."

Think Again: The Pentagon - By Thomas P.M. Barnett | Foreign Policy: "The military's Chicken Littles want you to think the sky is falling. Don't believe them: America has never been safer."

Fuck Mother Teresa, basically.  

Mother Teresa: Far from Saintly | ScienceBlog.com: "The problem is not a lack of money—the Foundation created by Mother Teresa has raised hundreds of millions of dollars—but rather a particular conception of suffering and death: “There is something beautiful in seeing the poor accept their lot, to suffer it like Christ’s Passion. The world gains much from their suffering,” was her reply to criticism..."

Yeah, he did.

Stefan Struve Reports He Incurred Broken Jaw in Bout With Mark Hunt | Full Contact Fighter

Cardinal Keith O’Brien Acknowledges Sexual Misconduct - NYTimes.com: "Britain’s most senior Roman Catholic cleric, Cardinal Keith O’Brien, acknowledged Sunday that he had been guilty of sexual misconduct, a week after he announced his resignation and said he would not attend the conclave to choose the next pope. The moves followed revelations that three current and one former priest had accused him of inappropriate sexual contact dating back decades."

Community of the Wrongly Accused: Prominent rape victims advocate doesn't want false rape accusers prosecuted: "Longstaff writes: "We are working with three [rape accusers] facing criminal charges. Several others were prosecuted for harassment after their rapists made counter allegations and were believed." Longstaff takes it as a given that any woman who makes a rape accusation should be believed -- even in those cases where police have overwhelming evidence to charge for making a false rape claim, and even when the false accuser is convicted. "Such prosecutions [of false accusers] must be stopped," she once declared. She called such prosecutions "a concerted witchhunt." Longstaff's coddling of rape liars is not something rape victims favor.  Every rape lie diminishes the integrity of every rape victim; every unpunished rape lie undermines the public's confidence in the way rape is handled and makes juries reluctant to convict even those who ought to be convicted. But Longstaff's grandstanding isn't for the benefit of rape victims, it's for Longstaff."