A general comment I've wanted to post several places lately, especially after seeing this sort of thing:

I'm all for alternate suggestions on how to deal with the problems of the world right now. I'd be absolutely stunned if our government (including not just the Bush Administration but also Congress) was handling everything optimally, just on general principles. But I see so few suggestions that don't boil down to:

• Give all our enemies everything they want.
• Hope this is somehow interpreted as a sign of great strength rather than great weakness.
• Also, bask in the sudden loving adulation of the world.
• Retreat from any task in the world that is hard.
• Wait for our enemies to grow in strength until they can eliminate us. (In particularly advanced cases, change this to "help our enemies grow stronger until they eliminate us.")

I wish that last one was just rhetoric, I really do, but there are a lot of people who actually want to eliminate us.

Non-programmers should read this entire article to see the arguments presented in a neutral-to-you context. (Unless you have strong baseball opinions in which case the first bit may not be quite neutral.)

Programmers should read this because it's true, even if you're not a Perl programmer.

I've learned to be careful about the definitions for the words I use. Our lives have become more complicated and even as our vocabulary has grown by leaps and bounds it's still not enough. Ever finer and sharper distinctions must be drawn in order to convey the information; I can spend a good ten pages just defining "censorship" and "free speech".

Today's word that is bothering me is the word "mismanagement". Lately it seems to mean one of two things: "Less than absolutely perfect" and "crimes committed in the context of a large organization". This is as opposed to the "natural" meaning of "a failure to correctly organize and execute a plan to drive many people towards a given goal with effective resource use".

Leiberman Scenario watch: Lieberman said in an interview:

The fastest growing political party in America is no party, which is to say, that the fastest growing group of voters are unaffiliated with either party. That’s a market statement on the two major parties.

I read the declassified portions of the National Intelligence Estimate document.

My choice for the key paragraph, capturing both the opportunity and danger of our present course succinctly:

If democratic reform efforts in Muslim majority nations progress over the next five years, political participation probably would drive a wedge between intransigent extremists and groups willing to use the political process to achieve their local objectives. Nonetheless, attendant reforms and potentially destabilizing transitions will create new opportunities for jihadists to exploit.

It's a short document and I would recommend reading it, rather than waiting for people to digest it for you. The full report might be a bit much but this segment is the size of a long blog post.

Dear image spammers: If you're going to take the time to convert your text into an image, why oh why do you insist on using the ugliest fonts you own? Unantialiased Courier? Microsoft Terminal? That looked ugly when it came out somewhere around Windows 3.0!

You know you're doing badly with your font choice when the grossly-overused Times New Roman would be a step up.

This really struck me. A lot of the truly partisan division could have been avoided if we'd just all started from the premise that by golly, figuring out how to respond to the events of the world is really darned hard, and the fact that somebody disagrees with you is not prima facie proof that they are therefore blackest evil.

What would the past five years have been like, I couldn't help wondering, if debate and criticism had proceeded atop the civil platform of agreement that the President was really trying to do his best in a terrible crisis that almost no one had anticipated? Imagine that everyone had been sober and serious all along, as if the responsibility were theirs and not someone else's. Imagine that the opposition to the administration's policies had been more substantive than personal, focused on alternative proposals rather than autopsies of irrevocable decisions past. Imagine that all of us were dealing with today's reality instead of pet grievances from months or years ago. Isn't it possible that the critics might have had more impact on events, that the defenders of American policy might have listened and responded more thoughtfully?

My wife and I have watched every Survivor since the second American one. We TiVo it and tend to concentrate on the challenges over the politics, since the challenges on the show are often creative and unique. (The politics I find somewhat interesting, but I can never quite forget that I'm only seeing the barest fraction of what is actually going on, cherry-picked by the editors. The net effect is much the same as not being able to suspend disbelief while watching science fiction.)

In 2004, I asked my readers to consider an alternate universe where a 9/11 scale disaster is averted by Presidential action.

Nobody would ever know that 9/11 was averted, either, and even if they did notice the story would be played up as the Adminstration trying to take credit for preventing something that couldn't possibly have happened anyhow.

Like I said, you can't win.

Today, we get to see that played out in the real world. A 9/11 attack has been averted, and do the Powers That Be get any credit? Nope, silence at best, conspiracy theories at worst. If the attacks get through, it's Bush's fault. If the attacks are stopped, well, obviously, they don't exist, so the fact that anybody believes they did and may have become unduly concerned is Bush's fault.

den Beste at Chizumatic (likely permalink) is annoyed by this article about linguistics and pronunciation.

The researchers took the sounds of more than 3,000 words in English and subdivided each by its phonetic features — in other words, what a person does with his mouth, lungs and vocal cords to produce the sounds of each word.... About 65 percent of all nouns have another noun as its nearest neighbor, and about the same percentage of all verbs have another verb next door, Christiansen said.