It looks obvious

I was reading today a fascinating article about the debate that shaped the US foreign policy after WWII. It is extremely interesting to note how relevant the different opinion are today, and how the warnings become reality. Watching the Presidential debates, and how dismissive are the GOP candidates to the policy of non-intervention, I can imagine the reaction toward those who criticized the Truman Doctrine:

In foreign policy, it was the extreme right-wing Republicans, who were particularly strong in the House of Representatives, who staunchly battled conscription, NATO, and the Truman Doctrine. Consider, for example, Omaha’s Representative Howard Buffett, Senator Taft’s midwestern campaign manager in 1952, one of the most "extreme" of the extremists, a man who consistently received a zero rating from such liberal raters of Congressmen as ADA and the New Republic, and whom the Nation characterized in that era as "an able young man whose ideas have tragically fossilized." I came to know Howard as a genuine, consistent, and thoughtful libertarian. Attacking the Truman Doctrine on the floor of Congress, Buffett declared:

"Even if it were desirable, America is not strong enough to police the world by military force. If that attempt is made, the blessings of liberty will be replaced by coercion and tyranny at home. Our Christian ideals cannot be exported to other lands by dollars and guns…. We cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home. We cannot talk world cooperation and practice power politics."

[...]

Even on Asia, Taft, in January 1950, opposed the Truman policy of supplying aid to the French army in suppressing the Indo-Chinese national revolution; he also warned that he would not support any commitment to back Chiang in a war against China, and he called for the removal of Chiang, his bureaucrats, and his army of occupation on Formosa in order to permit the Formosan people a free vote on their own self-determination:

"[A]s I understand it, the people of Formosa, if permitted to vote, would probably vote to set up an independent republic of Formosa…. If, at the peace conference, it is decided that Formosa be set up as an independent republic, we certainly have the means to force the Nationalists’ surrender of Formosa."

A careful examination of the superpowers policies since world war 2 will reveal that, for bot USSR and the US, they suffered dire looses whenever they were outmaneuvered to direct, long term, involvement. It took Eisenhower’s brilliancy to save the US from the mess in Korea, The Vietnam war was a disaster (although it will take some time until Giuliani will understand that) and the war in Iraq can be proved the most damaging war in the American history. Similarly the Soviet deployment of forces to protect Egypt during the war of attrition push them from the center stage and left the US as the only possible peace broker, and the involvement in Afghanistan was catalyst,among other, in the distraction of the USSR. Counterintuitive, most achievements gained when the Superpowers knew how not use their might.

I will add here one small remark, which I will have to expand on a later post - the argument that the US support is vital to Israel existence and that this support serve the Israeli interest need to be examine very carefully. Unlike this common believe I would argue that Israel position itself as a client state, a proxy for American interest - many times against its own interests. Israel survived without being a client state until 1967, and did fine. Obviously American non-intervention policy would force Israel to change its national security concepts - and maybe it will re-adopt Ben-Gurion’s strategy - but this is not a bad thing.

Watching the DNC Presidential debate leaving a very uneasy impression. The conventional wisdom of all the trailing candidates leads them to launch an all out attack on Hillary Clinton. However since she is, as should have been obvious to all of them, hold her own the results are the she is singled out as the clear DNC nominee.  

If I was one of the candidates I would fire the adviser that dragged me to this stupid tactic that sealed Clinton nomination. Maybe they should replace their advisors with some British bookies that have much better political sense to what is working…

And if we are on the issue of something that working, isn’t this beautiful?

During the campaign the different candidates trying to identify, and address, the issues that matter the most for voters. Through polls, focus groups and many other methods the candidates try to isolate the core issues - would it be the war in Iraq? or maybe what will rally the voters this time be universal health care? or maybe it is going to be something completely different:

The first big scandal confronting Rudy Giuliani in his presidential quest has nothing to do with his personal life, his governing style in New York City, or his associations with people such as Bernie Kerik, his police commissioner now under criminal investigation.

No, it has to do with Rudy’s heresy as a Yankees fan: In hot pursuit of votes in next January’s New Hampshire primary, Giuliani declared that, because of his preference for the American League, he was rooting for the Red Sox in the World Series. No doubt he will now claim credit for their sweep against the Colorado Rockies, which we giddy Sox fans will deny him.

When Rudy came out for Boston, you’d have thought he had announced that Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad would be his running mate. The New York tabloids greeted the news with something less than tranquility.

"Traitor," shouted the New York Daily News. "Red Coat," opined the New York Post.

Now I have to wonder was the following Onion report a parody or a prediction

Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

We often read a strong criticism about user generated content, it is shallow badly written and its amateur approach compromises its credibility and reliability. Obviously in a world flooded with millions of blogs this criticism has high degree of accuracy. However, among the many "not worth it" sources (this blog included), one can find real gems - rewards for  careful looking. 

One of this sources is a blog name Climate Skeptic. In this blog Warren Meyer take a much more skeptic approach to the phenomena known as Global Warming, the science behind it and the actions we should take as a results. It is serious, creative and you wouldn’t be able to get any of it without blogs. Now, thanks to other means of user generated content, Warren summarize some of his arguments into a short documentary. Its production budget, along with the distribution ability, fall far behind rival movies - but its integrity is intact.

Like many other you might feel a little bit confused about the almost collapse of the sub-prime mortgages market. Many of the terms and processes, mostly those involve logic, might seems unclear. Here is a comprehensive explanation of the crisis, much clearer by the way than most of the usual news sources…

(Via QandO)

This post is a translation from Hebrew from a popular Israeli blog 

Is might seem as a technical problem, but I feel it may teach us something about the way Google behaves. 

Introduction: it started with a story in Israel’s channel 2 news, describing a Star of David that has been engraved into the Dahniye airport runway, now visible from space via Google Earth. The report stated that the Star of David was engraved “lately” by IDF tractors during Israeli operation in the area. I decided to check the issue and contacted Israeli Google PR, who directed me to the Digital-Globe layer in Google Earth that shows the date during which the picture was taken. But is it indeed so?

One of my editors in “Yedioth Ahronoth” newspaper was the first to notice something was wrong: he couldn’t recognize certain details in certain images. According to the date shown by the layer, those details should have already been visible. How could this be? He first asked himself and then me. His speculation was seemingly impossible: perhaps Digital-Globe, that takes the pictures for Google, uses this layer in order to offer their service. They sort of say: “we took a picture of this area in the date shown right here. You can’t see the newest picture, but we’ve got it. If you want to buy it, call us and we’ll be more than glad to sell you the picture for a thousand dollars or so.”

I told the editor it doesn’t sound right to me. I told him it can’t be that Google lets Digital-Globe use their platform in order to sell their service, and that there isn’t any other way to see a picture’s date using the program. I also told him this was the explanation given to me by Google representatives. Nevertheless, I contacted Israeli Google PR once more. They agreed that the editor’s idea wasn’t likely, but moved the question on to Google’s European PR. The Europeans agreed with Israeli PR that agreed with me that the idea wasn’t too likely, but they turned the question to Google Earth guys.

Google Earth guys said my editor was right.

Ladies and Gentlemen, there seems to be no way to know when was a Google Earth picture taken. Google doesn’t offer this information in the program itself. You might be seeing a picture taken during 2007, or perhaps during 1997. There is no way to know. The Digital-Globe date layer is a commercial having nothing to do with the visible picture you see – and if there is such a connection it is purely random and unverifiable (hence the Dahniye airport Star of David might have been engraved 5 years ago).

I believe this story is important for two reasons. The first is Google Earth: I can’t recall reading that there actually isn’t any way to know when was a picture taken. The second is Google itself: it’s obvious that the company knows exactly when was every picture taken, but it decides not to give it away, not to expose it. You’d better bear this in mind whenever dealing with a company whose ethos is “visibility and organization of information”.

Ethos my @#!*.

About a week ago we went to see Aaron Sorkin’s new play “The Farnsworth Invention”. It was amazing, and sad, to see how almost everybody, during the brake and obviously on the way out, couldn’t turn away from their cellphones. I’m sure that some people were waiting for an important message, and some were really important and had to be in contact with whatever organization they belong to. But everyone?

It reminded me how few years ago when they start to advertise WiFi they had a TV ad about someone that is working from the beach, pretending to be in the office. I remember watching it and thinking: “hell no! when I’m on the beach I don’t want to work”. But all these gadgets and devices that supposed to free us made us slave for connectivity and for the new god: Multi Tasking.

When I’m not busy blogging I am working as a Program Manager and I learned to despise the term Multi-Tasking. It was probably developed by some MBA student and sound nice, but in reality it is one of the dumbest ideas. Whenever someone suggest that I will have rethink the way I’m assigning developers to projects more efficiently because the should multi-task I know that I’m dealing with an idiot. But now instead of getting upset, I’m just going to distribute this article to as many people as I can, maybe we can start killing this phenomena:

it isn’t working, it never has worked, and though we’re still pushing and driving to make it work and puzzled as to why we haven’t stopped yet, which makes us think we may go on forever, the stoppage or slowdown is coming nonetheless, and when it does, we’ll be startled for a moment, and then we’ll acknowledge that, way down deep inside ourselves (a place that we almost forgot even existed), we always knew it couldn’t work.

The scientists know this too, and they think they know why. Through a variety of experiments, many using functional magnetic resonance imaging to measure brain activity, they’ve torn the mask off multitasking and revealed its true face, which is blank and pale and drawn.

Multitasking messes with the brain in several ways. At the most basic level, the mental balancing acts that it requires—the constant switching and pivoting—energize regions of the brain that specialize in visual processing and physical coordination and simultaneously appear to shortchange some of the higher areas related to memory and learning. We concentrate on the act of concentration at the expense of whatever it is that we’re supposed to be concentrating on.

If we are dealing with god, an interesting debate about god and morality. It is about 90 minutes long, but it is worth it, if only because of Christopher Hitchens.

And last link for this post, another unforeseen effect of promoting ethanol.

I’m used for OS upgrade and pretty much loath them. I can’t recall even one Windows upgrade that went well, at the end I always needed to format the hard drive and install the new version of Windows on clean system. It is also took several months until everything that use to work in the previous version was fixed and worked again. Not for nothing it is common habit among Microsoft’s user to wait with new software until the first service pack is released and make the software usable. 

So it was no wonder that, despite the great reviews and the general enthusiasm, I took a cautious approach when I prepared to upgrade to OS X Leopard. Although, cautious or not, I’m an early adopter by nature and I rushed to upgrade on the release date. Before upgrading I backed up my entire hard drive and made a complete list of my applications and setting - ready for the unavoidable formatting and reinstalling as I’m used too.

Several hours of preparations and all for nothing! I started the installation, went to upstairs to get a cup of coffee and when I went back it was all done. And it was the cleanest installation I ever experienced. Since I was skeptic I performed a careful and extensive checking of the system and my applications and every thing is working perfectly. Even more surprisingly Leopard is all what the reviews promised. Unbelievable!

I am not familiar with this organization, and I don’t know how much budget they have to run this TV ad. It is very powerful TV ad, it doesn’t cost Ron Paul’s campaign anything, and I hope it will get a lot of exposure.

UPDATE: it seems like the movie isn’t available. I’m sorry about it

(via the LRC blog)

Earlier this week the congress passed, in overwhelming majority, a bill name the Violent Radicalization and Homegrown Terrorism Prevention Act of 2007. Reading the proposed Bill made me rather confused and worried.

The definitions sections defines Violent Radicalization as:

The term `violent radicalization’ means the process of adopting or promoting an extremist belief system for the purpose of facilitating ideologically based violence to advance political, religious, or social change.

Since many of the processes of adopting certain ideologies are internal (i.e. through thinking) and develop gradually I can only wonder, or mostly frightened from the implications of, how the legislator suggest to prevent these processes.   

Another interesting definition is the one of Ideology Based Violence:

The term `ideologically based violence’ means the use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence by a group or individual to promote the group or individual’s political, religious, or social beliefs.

Any law, by definition, contain the "use, planned use, or threatened use of force or violence" - otherwise it will have no effect. By omitting the term "legal force" the legislator defined any political advocacy as Ideology Based Violence. I’m careful from suggesting that what the congress aimed to prevent any political advocacy, but the definition is so vague that future act can.    

The  fact is that the legislature face a serious problem dealing with groups that taking advantage of the freedom of expression and tolerance to promote ideologies that aim at destroying the same liberties that protect them. But preventing these liberties, or setting bars for which ideology is permitted and which isn’t is obviously not an appropriate approach. After all we already have enough legal framework that handled with the fine line between freedom of speech and advocacy for violent, why do we need another one?