An odd parallel

Has anyone noticed that the descriptions of Barack Obama are similar to the descriptions of George Bush in 1999 and early 2000? The whole people-person, good listener, polite meme that's been going around the Blogsphere lately was said about Bush as well.

Maybe we're better off with massive egos who care far too much about their legacy (and Newt's running in 08!). Food for thought.

Monday rapid fire

• An interesting John Robb post - check out the map
• Solar powered home fueling station
• "I'm proud to pay taxes in America, but I could be just as proud for about half the money." by Arthur Godfrey
  

Sunday quotes

"Each new generation born is in effect an invasion of civilization by little barbarians, who must be civilized before it is too late."

and

"One of the most fashionable notions of our times is that social problems like poverty and oppression breed wars. Most wars, however, are started by well-fed people with time on their hands to dream up half-baked ideologies or grandiose ambitions, and to nurse real or imagined grievances."

Thomas Sowell

Ajax.net nugget of wisdom

Here's something I've just spend 90 minutes discovering - if you use inline code containing a Request.Querystring that screws up the Microsoft Ajax.net code causing it to do a full postback.

A rise in crime

Personally I think Katrina and meth have something to do with it but Tom Barnett might have it, specifically

the three-strikes and other harsh-penalty laws of the previous decade had surged the prison population, but soon the number of ex-cons being released (about 600k, if I remember) would surpass the number of new cons going in (about 500k). A simple prediction: urban crime was going to go up all across America.

Food for thought.

Christmas 2006

This is a bit late, but here are the photos I took on Christmas Eve and Christmas Day of 2006. Some of them turned out very well. The heat lamps allowed the shadows and the colors to do very nice things. Most of the photos were taken with the lovely new prime lens Mike and Erin got me for Christmas.

I overdid the flash, which made many of them fit for conversion to black and white.

Thursday rapid fire

• Hitchens reviews Stein - personally I don't think the demographic argument carries much weight - look at the performance of Japan vs China and Germany vs Russia in WWII. A productive culture beats a backward one in a life or death struggle. It's an interesting read though. To clarify - the reason that Japan and Germany lost was American material and military support. While they could die bravely, that doesn't lead to many wins.
• Toddler's Temper Ousts Family From Plane -

  She was removed because "she was climbing under the seat and hitting the parents and wouldn't get in her seat" during boarding, Graham-Weaver said.

• Police in Tijuana Issued Sling Shots -

  The police department has issued about 60 slingshots to officers in the violent border city of Tijuana, where soldiers confiscated police weapons two weeks ago on allegations of collusion with drug traffickers.

  Yet the war on drugs continues. This time for sure!
  
• Battery Breakthrough - Well worth reading. If true, this changes American society for the better in ten years or less. Sadly, most scientific breakthroughs tend to be either false or meaningless
• Diane Feinstein and conflicts of interest
• Winning the battle for freedom - RTWT - from the founder of Whole Foods no less.
  

Cool post on Coming Anarchy

Specifically about the Milton County secession movement. Eric and I have been commenting on the post.

Beat this for raw weirdness

'12-year-old' is 29-year-old sex offender

Stiffler and Robert James Snow, 43, "were very upset when the detectives told them they had been having a sexual relationship with a 29-year-old man and not a pre-teen boy," Quayle said.

I think the next step is raining frogs. We live in a very strange world. I'm going to put on my tin foil hat now.

3 very cool links

• The Gap Minder - From Google, it tracks life expectancy, income, population in a very cool graphical use of flash
• "Things My Boyfriend Says" - pretty funny
• Apple Dei - the cult of the mac
  

Put very succinctly

From the Ethical Spectacle

However, I suspect that the real reason we haven't gone after Bin Laden is because we know he is living in the lawless part of Pakistan near the Afghan border, where the resurgent Taliban are also based. This has rapidly become a new rogue state, not really under any kind of Pakistani military or political control. In addition, Al Qaeda and the Taliban are allegedly sheltered and supported by renegade elements of Pakistani intelligence who originally worked with them on the anti-Soviet effort and haven't given them up in the post-9/11 world.

If this part of Pakistan had been a completely independent state, it would have made a lot of sense to invade it instead of Iraq (I believe we don't have a large enough military to do both). I suspect that the reason we can't do this is that the minute US troops land on Pakistani territory (even such independent and lawless territory) there would be a huge popular uprising in Pakistan, overthrowing our nominal ally the weak dictator-president Musharraf. The result of the incursion would be to drive a huge country with nuclear weapons over to the other side, giving Al Qaeda a large powerful playground instead of a small weak one.

Government temerity

From this CNN article

The bill would bar companies from future lease sales unless they agree to renegotiate flawed leases issued in 1998-99 for deep-water drilling in the Gulf of Mexico.

Because of a government error, the current leases do not contain a trigger for royalties if prices soared, as they have in recent years. As a result, the companies have avoided paying $1 billion in royalties so far and stand to avoid an additional $9 billion over the life of the leases, the Interior Department says.

Isn't that why one signs a lease, to lock in a price? All government contracting is shady, but to pretend that anyone is owed anything is ridiculous. All the more reason to auction off the drilling rights and be done with it.

Happy, Happy

I won the open Mic at Limerick Junction last night, it was a decent performance on my part. I did the standard material.

Monday round up

• GM has built a plug-in hybrid
• I like this guy

  Indian Hill lawyer and former congressional candidate Paul Hackett -- armed with a loaded assault rifle -- chased down three men in a car after it crashed into a fence at his home in the early morning hours of Nov. 19.

• I'm going to order this and this
• Tamara de Lempicka made some beautiful art deco paintings
  

MLK day thoughts

Since it's his birthday, I guess I'll post my impression of MLK. I find it surprising that everyone misses his most singular accomplishment, namely that he he was able to manage a coalition of highly and disparately motivated parties and have them all (more or less) follow a strategy of nonviolence, which is the only strategy that would have worked. As a management endeavor that is staggering.

For more on that, see The Gandhi Game, which explains it all in a game theory sort of way. Put simply, it allows the opposing party to do what you want them to do (usually defined as "doing the right thing", though it doesn't have to be that way) and not suffer any violent consequences. If the Palestinians did that, they would be in a much better position than they are now.

Being insightful as I throw stones

Somehow I stumbled across this book The Enemy At Home: The Cultural Left and Its Responsibility for 9/11 on Amazon and it provoked two thoughts.

• First I thought of Eric Hoffer's adage, to wit, Americans can only hate Americans, they consider foreigners to be inferiors and feel sorry for them. That would make this book a sign of health, albeit an ugly one.
• Then I thought of the South Park episode "The Mystery of the Urinal Deuce" and the lines:

  Kyle: So who was responsible for 9-11?
  Stan: A bunch of pissed off Muslims. What are you, retarded!?

  
  

Atlanta cop update

See Report: Lies involved in no-knock warrant and Town hall meeting to discuss "no-knock" warrants. The systems seems to be working, albeit quite slowly. I'd assumed that since this feel out of the news for a month that it was being covered up, it's nice to see that I might be wrong about that.

Not surprising

Cop wounded in drug raid that killed woman to retire

Curiously, the name of the APD spokesman is James Polite, which is just kind of eerie. If that's your name, are you destined for some kind of PR occupation?

A lonely Monday post

I spend all day today debugging, which is also how I spend the early morning hours after I got home last night. It's been a strange day. There has been very little email and phone contact today. Combine that with the weather and listening to quiet singer-songwriter music and the day has a rare seamless quality.

Your link for the day is It’s time for a new International Brigade, which is about private armies and the crisis in Darfur.

Friday night in Alpharetta

At long last, a new gallery, with photos made with the new flash, the one below is my new favorite self portrait.

Three items of interest

• The UltraMarathon Man
• David Lee Roth Doing Bluegrass - sort of disturbing
• Not disturbing is Norman Blake in a rare YouTube appearance
  

Perfectly put

Don Boudreaux put it very well in his open letter to Lou Dobbs. Why he's taken more seriously than Bill O'Reilly or Cynthia McKinney I'll never know.

Quick round up to clear off some firefox tabs

• An interesting Interface
• Why Hawks Win - an interesting article
• A good deal on health insurance
• Dashboard Mohamed - I'm not that brave myself....
• ASP.net AJAX Cheatsheets
• The lives of the first web builders, in wacky Canadian form.
  

Best characterisation of Iraq

From Winston Churchill "An ungrateful volcano"

via Andrew Sullivan on BloggingHeads

Moon shadow

Taken quite late at night, under a nearly full moon.

Another article that is well worth reading

From John Robb who predicts a coming privatization of security and the basic functions of the modern state

Security will become a function of where you live and whom you work for, much as health care is allocated already. Wealthy individuals and multinational corporations will be the first to bail out of our collective system, opting instead to hire private military companies, such as Blackwater and Triple Canopy, to protect their homes and facilities and establish a protective perimeter around daily life.

Read the whole thing.

The funniest thing I've read all year

French marchers say 'non' to 2007

Parodying the French readiness to say "non", the demonstrators in the western city of Nantes waved banners reading: "No to 2007" and "Now is better!"

The marchers called on governments and the UN to stop time's "mad race" and declare a moratorium on the future.

Apocalyptic reading for the Tech Crowd

When Sysadmins Ruled the Earth

That's the fiction reading of the new year - for the disturbing nonfiction reading check out North Carolina Woman Charged With Malicious Castration After Attacking Man's Genitals. It's disturbing mostly in that there are other kinds of castration in North Carolina.