Glenn Greenwald is bleating again about the mainstream press' unfair treatment of his weird, bizarre subculture.

Greenwald just doesn't understand that the nerds, freaks, and losers in this country who use telecommunications systems for information exchange are a tiny, tiny minority. With their "modems" and their slang ("l33t," "k-rad," and who knows what else) they are completely outside the mainstream of normal American society.

This "internet fringe" — the tiny percentage of Americans who use the "internet," as some are now calling the DARPAnet — is characterized by a vastly overstated sense of its numbers and importance as a cultural force. Those Americans who spend time "jacked" into "cyberspace" are so isolated and lost in their own worlds that they literally have no conception of how bizarre their strange habits appear to normal society.

Who else aside from these "net-heads" uses "electronic mail," or those bizarre messaging programs with strange names? ytalk? xyzzy? Can anyone imagine a more obscure jargon-laden form of communication? The idea that this stuff is somehow accessible to the mainstream — let alone that it ever could catch on — is a "hacker" fantasy.

So when the President leaks the news that his critics are just a bunch of disgruntled "internet" users, what that tells us is that he understands — as they do not — that this fad of sending and receiving information using the DARPAnet backbone routing structure has no long-term future.

The President's advisors are right to disdain these cyber-techno freaks, and he is right to listen to them when they do so. Hopefully Glenn Greenwald and the members of his "BBS crew" (or whatever it's called now) will soon come to grips with this reality, and learn to pipe down and set aside the strange electronic fringe world they've constructed.

It's for their own good, really.

The Nobel Committee does not award an "Is Not George W Bush Prize." Under the circumstances, Peace was the nearest thing, so they ran with that.

Obama has many faults, but it is hopefully clear that he is nowhere close to falling to the level of the Kissinger-Le prize a generation ago. (Le Duc Tho, feeling that he didn't deserve the prize either for a peace that had yet to be realized, declined. Kissinger, whore that he is, did not.)

The Nobel survived that. It can survive the flawed, but not incomprehensible, "faith-based" award to Obama.

Reckless risk-taking behavior may have been the proximate cause of the 2008 crash, but saying that it was the cause, in any substantial sort of way, is like saying that gravity is at fault for an airplane crash.

The whole point of society is to moderate and channel wild animal impulses into productive forms. In keeping with that purpose, we as a civilization once saw fit to impose on high finance a series of regulatory restrictions and frameworks for oversight so as to moderate and channel the risk-taking behaviors of financiers.

Then we as a civilization saw fit to remove those restrictions and oversight. The result was as foregone, and as predictable, as if we were stalling an aircraft and letting gravity take over.

To say that risk-prone neurology was the cause of the crisis is begging the question. It's like saying, "The financial crisis was due to the practice of lending money at interest." The statement is true, but only in the dumbest possible sense.

Figuring out how to win in Afghanistan is not that hard. The solution is based on a basic and universal principle of human social organization.

Give people a chance to prosper in peace and they will fight to preserve the civil society that makes their way of life possible.

Make it impossible for them to prosper or find peace and they will join any movement that promises to upset the social order which constrains them — even one which will in the end only bring about more poverty and violence.

That is one of only two things Afghanistan has in common with Vietnam: both are cases of people making an essentially rational choice to join whichever side promises quiet prosperity.

When an entire society makes that choice, it literally does not matter what the opposing side does. It doesn't matter how many soldiers it has, or what they're armed with, or what tactics they use. In fact it doesn't even matter if the resistance is pacifistic and completely unarmed.

So that's one thing Afghanistan and Vietnam have in common.

The other thing — the one other thing — they have in common is that we are taking a situation where we have every advantage, and snatching defeat from the jaws of victory by faithfully following the same exact blueprint for failure.

When go into a country and articulate an agenda that will not lead to peace and prosperity for the people who live there, we will find ourselves winning every battle we fight and then losing the war.

The problem can be expressed in very simple terms. McChrystal sees his mission as establishing law and order and propping up the legitimacy of the central government. Nowhere in that mission statement are the words "peace" or "prosperity." Therefore, his mission will inevitably fail.

When the mission changes so that our own conditions for victory match those of the Afghan people, then we will be able to win.

The winning itself, there is no guarantee it will be easy. But figuring out what's going wrong and how to fix it is, in the big picture, sadly all too straightforward.

"Measured in euros, U.S. per capita GDP is down 25% since 2000."

Yes, and measured in gallons, a ton of feathers is heavier than a ton of lead.

When did Wall Street Journal editorials ever count as anything except big business lobbying?