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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.

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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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 [...]

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