War is Politics

I was watching Charlie Rose the other day and Brent Scowcroft had an interesting comment:

"Military action almost never solves the problem for which you went to war for, it only decides who is the person who will solve the problem."

Interesting, eh? Think about it a bit.

Decision making in government and blogs

I just read the essay "Regime Change and its Limits" in the July/August issue of Foreign Affairs and I was pissed off that it didn't have a rebuttal from the Bush Administration. I've gotten so used to blogs and the comments below a blog entry that I just expect it in other situations. The article I mentioned was an excellent argument for using something other than force to get your way, without the stupid arguments that war is morally wrong. It was very critical of the Bush Administration but since there was no rebuttal I can't get a reading on why Bush does what he does. The lack of rebuttal means that I can't tell if he has a really good reason for using force without much provocation or that's he's just really stupid and was too lazy and decided to play GameCube instead of reading this morning's security briefing and/or the Foreign Affairs article I mentioned. If these very serious matters became an popular academic debate in the style of The Federalist where ideas were debated every day in the newspaper then I think the citizens of the United States would become much more engaged and smarted with respect to Internation Relations and I think better ideas on how to deal with these issues would come up.

It's in these situtation that I begin to think that our democracy has major faults built in. Presidents don't want to look stupid during their first term so they don't talk openly about issues so they can make sure they are reelected. And they don't talk openly about issues during their second term so they don't look stupid in the history books. What can we do about this? Maybe a 6 year one term max? And make sure to publish only crappy accounts of the presidents so they all look stupid? Arrrrg.

Seattle Bus Monster

I should have blogged about this before. It's the best bus interface I've ever seen. It's the Bus Monster.

Roberts Nomination

Here's an interesting blog by the same people who do SCOTUS Blog. It includes more than you'll ever want to know about Roberts. BTW, if you haven't checked out SCOTUS Blog while the Supreme Court is in session then you should add it to your RSS aggregator and get ready to read about some interesting stuff. You'll really gain a respect for at least some of the judges that are on the opposite idealogical side from you. Even Thomas has made some interesting disenting opinions that I agree with.

Israel's Fight From Within

A few months ago I saw an episode of Frontline that changed my view of the Israeli government. I've always thought of the Israeli government as just the same as the rest of the crappy governments in the Middle East. They've always seemed to do things that I can only imagine they'd do if they were: A. Completely retarded, or B. Wanting militant Palestinians to kill Israeli civilians. I couldn't understand how a government that has such a close relationship to the United States could act in such a retarded way.

Then I saw Frontline's Israel's Next War. I had no idea that the Israeli soldiers weren't all zionists that believed that they had a god given right to kill and rape Palestinians. I guess that when you're whole view of Palestine comes from your highly educated Palestinian friends who were kicked out of their house by Israeli soldiers, it's hard to believe anything else.

So it turns out that they aren't all bad people. A lot of soliders don't want to go into the Palestinian Territories and they don't believe that the Israeli Army should even be there. But the thing that surprised me the most was that one of Israel's biggest enemies was the far right Jewish Settlers. They are the people that I always associated with the Israeli government, I always assumed that the government was in cahoots with them.

Wow, I was wrong. I feel really stupid now because I always get pissed off when people from other countries associate crazy people on the far right, such as the President, with our government. But these people, even the President, aren't the whole government. And while they do have lots of power there is still a huge number of people who make up the government that don't change when the administrations change. That means that it can be difficult for crazy people, like Bush, to change everything to his liking.

It's the same thing in Israel. When the Likud holds office it doesn't mean that all of the sudden everyone in the military or intelligence agencies wants to kill Palestinians.

So, I've gained a new respect for the Israeli government.

If you don't agree with my views on mommentum in government and how the government isn't the same thing as the people in the White House or Capitol Building then please let me know. I can write a new essay explaining my views on that.

Mac Mini Six Months On

I was exactly six months ago that I bought the Mac Mini, my first Mac ever. When I first bought it I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. It was so frickin' tiny, even the box was tiny, and it was so quiet, which was actually the reason I bought it. And of course, there's OS X.

After a few days I started to get disappointed in how slow it was. It was much slower than my old low end PC. I mostly care about "the snappy" for Firefox and I eventually got it when I switched to a G4 specific build of Firefox (I benchmarked it to be almost twice as fast).

But I was still disappointed in how slow it was compared to similarly priced PCs. People who think that Macs are just as fast as PCs are full of shit. The megahertz myth may have some validity, but a 1.2 GHz G4 isn't even in the same world as a 2.4 GHz P4.

So after Laurel bought her iMac G5 I was seriously thinking of upgrading to an iMac G5 right away. The iMac G5 still wasn't as fast as a low end PC but it ran iPhoto resonably well and it definitely had "the snappy" with Firefox. But I waited, I had only bought the Mac Mini a few weeks earlier.

The the Mac Mini grew on me. That little box sat there quietly on my desk and served up everything I wanted (except for iPhoto). Over the last few months I've been slowly doing more and more on it. I always have X running in the background. I run Firefox with scores of tabs open. I always have emacs running. I always have iTunes running. And I've just recently started using Photoshop Elements, which is slow, but it works. This computer works well for me. And I now get annoyed listening to the iMac when it awakes from sleep.

So I'm now happy that I didn't buy an iMac for myself. As long as you don't spend hours using Photoshop and you are willing to give up PC games, the Mac Mini will probably work well for you too.

Images from London

It's pretty amazing that within hours their were pictures from the London explosions on flickr. This photo is amazing. A lot has changed since 9/11, it's a lot easier to get our own pictures seen by millions on the internet when something like this happens.

The incident's wikipedia entry is becoming a central place for information that's updated as it comes in.

Wag the Dog

If politicians are only doing what their polling is telling them to do, then aren't they just doing what the public wants them to do? Isn't that more democratic? I'm not saying that it's better. It might be better that politicians have a backbone and do what they think is correct no matter what the public believes, but that isn't very democratic. That's just an extreme end of representative democracy where you elect someone and then no longer have a say in what they do.

And there's something to be said for keeping the ignorant masses out of the political process as they are many times far behind the politicians (I could be giving the politicians too much credit, maybe the credit should be given to the courts).

But if it's the case where politicians just do whatever the polls tell them to do then you still do have a way to get them to do what you want. You just change what the public believes in and cares about. That's probably not easy, but it's definitely possible. Maybe we should focus our energy more on what the public believes and less on who is getting elected. Could we have more of an effect on the direction of this country just by educating the uneducated masses?

How do you reach the type of people who don't read the Economist? Monday Night Football?

[Yes, I know I sound like an elitist asshole right now. It's just that there are so many stupid people. I can't stand it.]

Iraq War Fatalities

Here's an interesting dynamic map of Iraq War Fatalities. It's really interesting to see how the fatalities really are clustered into small spots. I wonder if that has anything to do with the density of the population in the places or the density of US forces there. It would be interesting to see this map with a map of US military density and a map of Iraqi population density superimposed.

Ubiquity of Other Languages

Whenever you do a web search for anything technical, or you look down the list of the latest bookmarks in del.icio.us you see languages other than English, and sometimes it's the majority of results. On the front page at del.icio.us right now I see quite a bit of Japanese, some Chinese, Russian, Spanish, French, and German.

Cybertech, or any Film Noir type of Sci Fi tends to show people speaking English most of the time but with lots of Japanese around, especially on signs (and this is from the American branch of it). The cities always look like either Tokyo or Chinatown in New York. I wonder when people started thinking of these particular Asian cultures as being the future. I've certainly felt that way since at least 1987. I guess it was that Japan was this mystical place that created videos games and new electronics.

I wonder if I'll ever start to recognize enough of these languages to have a basic understanding of it, enough to just get by. Could that happen just by seeing the context? That's how babies learn, right? I can already partially understand written French by pretending it's spanish and taking the context into account. I needed to read usenet postings in French while I was learning ocaml. My geek friends in Bolivia used to read the programming books in English even though they could barely hold a conversation with me in English.