The Economist has a story on the big sham election in Pakistan. A lot of people were willing to cut Pervez Musharraf slack when he supported the United States over the Taliban and started reigning in the Islamist lunatics in Pakistan’s intelligence services, but I don’t see how we can continue to give him our unqualified support. He could have held out for another year or two before calling a legitimate general election, but he has chosen instead to go the “President for life” route and hold a referendum that allows Pakistanis to vote for or against another 5 year term for him. Bear in mind that there are no other candidates, the options are Musharraf or a president to be named later. I guess that whole “he’s a military dictator but he’s a good military dictator” line of reasoning is looking a bit naive now.

Here’s why I love K5. Today they published an article on cheap, healthy alternatives for making your own lunch. K5 is truly the ultimate site for the well-rounded geek.

First there was the 1900 House, and now there’s the Frontier House, another series that features modern people living in “the past.” In this case, it’s three families that were set up on Montana homesteads circa 1883. This series is fantastic … you’ll love to hate the rich, spoiled California family.

For some reason, I decided to start learning Python today. I think it has to do with some lingering dissatisfaction with Perl. For some reason the more I program in Java, the less motivated I feel to program in Perl. I’m not exactly sure why.

Bad news: IT salaries appear to be headed in the wrong direction.

Why is it that Republican foreign policy insists on remaining a caricature of itself? This weekend, forces working for Afghan warlord Bacha Khan launched several rocket attacks on Gardez, killing 50 civilians. Bacha Khan is also the guy who called in the US airstrike on the tribal elders heading to Kabul for the inauguration of the interim government that turned into a huge black eye for the US. And, more importantly, his troops took part in Operation Anaconda and received US weapons and training.

In the mean time, Donald Rumsfeld gave speeches to the troops this weekend, telling them:

You stand against an evil — an evil of mass murderers. It’s an evil that can’t be appeased, it can’t be ignored and it certainly cannot be allowed to prevail.

In other words, we stand with some mass murderers against other mass murderers. In the meantime, Rumsfeld refuses to expand the international peacekeeping force to areas outside Kabul. Instead, he says we’ll help Afghanistan build a national army. Never mind that creating an army strong enough to maintain peace in a country where everyone feels entitled to an assault rifle of their own will doubtlessly take years. Our troops are still in Afghanistan and we’re already leaving the Afghans out on a limb. I shudder to think of what the landscape there will look like in a year or so. I really hope the Bush administration proves me wrong.

I learned at Media News that the Wall Street Journal is auctioning off a bunch of “hedcuts” (the pen and ink portraits that the WSJ uses) for charity on eBay. I don’t want illustrations of any of the freaks that they’re selling on my wall, but I’d like to get one done of myself. An image of one on this site might make things a bit more distinguished around here.

Lev Grossman blurbed Mozilla for Time this week. Ignore the piss poor description of open source.

The EPA is considering changing clean water rules to make it legal to dump mining waste generated by mountaintop removal coal mining into streams and rivers.

OK, here’s another bill we all have to fight. Fortunately, it was introduced by South Carolina Senator Fritz Hollings, so we don’t have to do much analysis to know it’s bad news. It’s called the Online Personal Privacy Act (s.2201) and basically it legitimizes all existing spyware. Jerks.