Check out Aron’s Israel Peace Weblog. It’s a blog maintained by an Israeli citizen who, among other things, writes first hand about his experience protecting settlements in Hebron as part of the Israeli army.

Who should be punished for the oil tanker Prestige breaking up and dumping a huge oil spill off the coast of Spain? Good luck figuring it out:

The Prestige is Liberian-owned, registered in the Bahamas, operated by a Greek company, chartered by a Swiss-based subsidiary of a Russian conglomerate and classed as seaworthy by an American shipping authority.

(From a New Zealand News story. ) No wonder so many big law firms have maritime law departments.

A Harvard expert on mergers and acquisitions has low expectations for the new Department of Homeland Security, and I agree with him. Here’s the core reason why this new department is a dumb idea, from the interview:

So if a claim to make is that by putting everything together in Homeland Security, some magic solution will be found to a short-term problem — such as that our war on terrorism will immediately show short-term success, I think that is a case of hubris. Because in the short term you are going to have a lot of dislocation, a lot of tension, a lot of jockeying for position, a lot of restructuring internal focus. So what one ought to say is that in the long run, perhaps, this will be a good organization. But if the logic given for a merger is short-term gain, then that’s probably not the right way to do it.

Does anyone feel any safer now that the same 170,000 people working in the same departments that they were in before the new agency was created are all together?

Adrian Holovaty reports that the new Reuters home page sports 125 tables. That’s what I call paleolithic markup.

Nothing captures my attention like a story about how ignorant Americans are. National Geographic tested 18-24 year olds from 9 countries about various topics related to geography, and America finished second to last, ahead of only Mexico. Many of them couldn’t identify the Pacific Ocean or New York state. 83% couldn’t find Afghanistan on a map. Only 25% could pick the population of the United States on a multiple choice test. (The most common answer given by Americans was 1-2 billion.) Needless to say, our woeful ignorance of geography probably explains why most Americans aren’t qualified to talk about international issues, much less consider them when voting.

I got 100% of the questions right on the sample test — it wasn’t particularly difficult.

I thought this paragraph from the conclusion of The Threatening Storm was worth posting in full:

The best way to think about sorting out the priorities between Iraq and al-Qa’eda is to imagine that the United States invades Iraq and that while we are doing so, al-Qa’eda conducts another terrorist attack that results in the death of several hundred Americans. In this hypothetical scenario, the president should be able to honestly tell the relatives of the victims killed that there was nothing else the US government could have done to prevent the attack and there was nothing about the operations in Iraq that distracted or diminished the nation’s vigilence against al-Qa’eda. Only when the administration can meet this standard should we embark on so large an additional endeavor as invading Iraq.

Salon has an interesting article today on political spam. The question at hand is whether it’s different than any other spam. I don’t think I recieved any political spam this election, although I did recieve a boatload of calls at home from campaign volunteers and with recordings of the candidates. My first thoughts on political spam is that it is distinct from commercial spam, but that doesn’t mean I want anyone to send me any. I’d have to guess though that the returns on it are good. Spam really only offends a small percentage of people, and if both sides spam, then there’ll be no reason to vote for one over the other due to their spamming. The nasty thing about political spam is that it’s closely tied to geography. Spamming Texans to vote for a Senate candidate in Michigan is obnoxious, and it’s not like making Texas voters angry affects how many votes you get in Michigan either. I’d prefer it if politicians didn’t spam, but I’ll be shocked if either the law or good sense gets them to stop.

I finally finished reading The Threatening Storm. Regular readers already know that this book is Kenneth M Pollack’s argument that the United States should launch a massive invasion of Iraq, remove Saddam Hussein from power, and then reconstruct Iraq. First, let me say that reading this book humbles me as a writer. I spend five minutes dashing off little arguments in favor of this or against that every day. Pollack wrote over 400 meticulously footnoted pages making a single argument. Not only does he make his argument exhaustively, but he also gives the alternatives to his argument a fair shake before ultimately rejecting them. Finally, he provides an enormous amoungt of background information. Even if you ultimately wind up disagreeing with Pollack, unless you’ve been spending the last 10 or 20 years studying the Middle East, you’ll wind up much better informed than you were when you started.

Pollack’s argument is far more complex and nuanced than a lot of the other pro-war arguments that you’ll see. Personally, I find Pollack’s argument to be quite compelling. The question we must ask ourselves is what Saddam will do once Iraq becomes a nuclear power. I don’t fear that Saddam will provide nuclear weapons to terrorists who will then use them America. I fear Saddam will assume that his nuclear weapon(s) will deter America and provide him with cover to invade Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, or any of his other neighbors. Whether we would be deterred or not, if Saddam believes that we will be, then he’ll attack another country.

Of course, Pollack also presents the fantasy invasion plan. He recommends that the US send in a massive force to quickly dispatch Saddam’s regime and secure the country. His plan also involves weakening Al Qaeda further and reaching a less violent status quo in the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians before launching an invasion. He also recommends spending the cash it takes to build a truly massive invasion force and reconstructing Iraq under the aegis of the UN the way Bosnia and Kosovo were rebuilt. Right now it looks like war is imminent, and that none of these recommendations will be heeded. There’s talk of the “Afghan Approach,” which Pollack succeeds in discrediting comprehensively, and the odds of a Republican administration signing up for a long term effort to rebuild Iraq seems slim to me. One thing you learn from Pollack that it’s possible to be open to invading Iraq without supporting the Bush administration’s agenda in any significant way.

In any case, I give this book my highest recommendation. Regardless of what you think we ought to do about the Iraq problem (and it is a huge problem), reading this book will increase your literacy on the issue. It also provides a pro-invasion perspective that I haven’t seen anywhere else.

So this morning I actually did manage to get up at 5:15 and look for the Leonids. Unfortunately, between haze, clouds, and suburban light pollution, I didn’t see any meteors. I did go outside at 12:30am before going to bed and see a few, though, including one particularly good meteor. For my last chance ever at seeing them, I would have preferred to see them laying on my back in the middle of the desert, but my driveway had to do.

Does anybody know why Oracle has never changed the name of the file containing its JDBC drivers from classes12.zip to something more modern (like a Jar file)? The generated documentation at the Oracle Web site is also like 1996-era JavaDoc. I’m curious as to whether there’s a good reason everything from Oracle appears to be outdated or whether they just don’t bother to update things. My best guess is that they fear breaking systems that list classes12.zip by name, but that seems like a stretch.