One of the things that disturbed me most about the President’s press conference yesterday is the outright fearmongering that he engaged in throughout. Obviously, September 11, 2001 was invoked when he talked about the capture of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, but he went on to refer to it many more times in reference to going to war with Iraq, by basically stating that going to war with Iraq would prevent future attacks of that kind. He also bluntly preyed upon our fears with this statement:

We are determined to confront threats wherever they arise. I will not leave the American people at the mercy of the Iraqi dictator and his weapons.

If you break that second sentence down, it states unequivocally that we are currently at the mercy of Saddam Hussein. Think about that for a minute. Right now, we have hundreds of thousands of troops on the border of Iraq, and we use the excuse of patrolling the no fly zones to bomb targets in Iraq with impunity and have been doing so for years. We have subjected Iraq to brutal economic sanctions for over a decade. Yet our President would have us believe that we are at the mercy of Iraq. Does that make any sense to you? Further consider how well people who have relied upon Saddam Hussein’s mercy have fared in the past. The real question in my mind is whether Bush believes this himself or whether it’s just a bill of goods he’s trying to sell the rest of us.

Yesterday, President Bush said flat out in his press conference that North Korea’s drive to build as many nuclear weapons as possible is a “regional issue.” In the meantime Donald Rumsfeld is increasingly making noise about reducing troop levels in South Korea. None of this seems to indicate that we’re going to take a strong stand in trying to resolve this crisis.

Rumsfeld said that South Korea has an economy 25 to 35 times the size of North Korea’s and that they have all the capability they need to deter North Korea themselves. As we already know, North Korea is probably the most militarized country in the world. If the new US stance is that North Korea’s neighbors need to solve this problem themselves, then what we could be looking at is increased militarization of South Korea and possibly even militarization in Japan. Is that something we really want? Either of those two countries could also start seeking nuclear capability themselves to offset North Korea, which would join China as the only nuclear power in the region.

We know that the troops we have in South Korea could not protect it from an all out assault by North Korea, our troops are there to show South Korea and North Korea that we have skin in the game. Going to war with South Korea means going to war with the United States. It’s impossible to predict what sort of response this would provoke from North Korea, but we need to think long and hard about what kind of message this sends to every country where US troops are currently stationed.

Despite the fact that there are other good reasons to reduce the number of US troops in South Korea (one of which is the general resentment toward them there thanks to bad behavior on our part), pulling them out when they’re under the gun does send a message of weakness to the rest of the world.

Fred Kaplan clearly lays out how the worst President of the twenty first century has utterly botched his attempts at foreign policy. Honestly I am filled with revulsion when I think about just how badly this administration is doing when it comes to working with every other country in the world. Belligerence toward Iraq is the least of our problems. It seems that there is no country in the world that we hesitate to bully, or betray, or dismiss. Makes me sick.

Dave Hyatt has a lot of things to say about designing a tabbed browsing system.

You know, sometimes I like it when other people take care of my light work for me. For example, Lyn over at Medley smacks down the arrogance, no, presumptuousness of certain other webloggers with style. That “10 Habits of Highly Annoying Bloggers” post was just crying out to be flamed, but it was an obvious troll, so I didn’t go there. I mean, writing such a post is voluntary self-identification as a highly annoying person, so not much more needs to be said.

I rarely criticize other webloggers, but I certainly appreciate it when other people do it well. And, in truth, the reason I avoid it is that I try to avoid inter-weblog squabbles because I think they’re boring to be involved in. On the other hand, I often enjoy watching them from the sidelines. In any case, I wish I met up with likeminded folks from the weblog community more often because I have a huge chest of vicious things to say stored up, and I never have an occasion to spill them out. I’ve often considered starting a weblog just for saying mean things about other webloggers, but that would be childish and petty.

When I was younger, I used to be obsessed with pointing out the annoying aspects of other people’s personalities, and basically making sure that everyone knew which people I thought were jerks. With age comes wisdom, and I’ve realized that the things that annoy me about a particular person annoy most other people as well. So I don’t feel the need to rush back to my cube from meetings and kvetch with everyone about how so and so talks too damn much or how that other person always tries to suck up to their superiors. Everybody knows, except for the other annoying people. Having come to that conclusion, I find myself more at peace.

Somebody tell me how this works.

Update: I have lots of smart readers, or at least readers who are more clever than I am. The trick to the puzzle is that when you add the digits of a two digit number together and subtract them from the original number, you always wind up with a multiple of 9. The person who created the puzzle just assigns the same symbol to all multiples of 9, so it always shows the symbol for the number you’re “concentrating on.” The creator of the puzzle wisely shuffles the symbols every time you try again, so it’s not obvious what’s going on. Thanks to the many people who sent me the solution.

This is the ultimate geek gift.

Everyone has probably already seen How To Write Unmaintainable Code, but if you haven’t (and you’re a software developer), it’s worth reading.

The Register is reporting that Microsoft is going to offer a cheap ($399) version of Windows Server 2003 to be used as a Web server. It’s limited in various ways, of course, to provide people with an incentive to buy the more expensive versions. Cheap is, of course, a relative term here when compared with Linux, and I think the goal here is strictly to avoid losing customers to Linux and to provide an affordable upgrade path for people who wouldn’t otherwise upgrade from whatever they’re running now (NT 4.0 or Windows 2000). If you’re just serving up Web content, there’s not much reason to upgrade your OS, especially if it’s going to be expensive.

Awhile back I mentioned OLED (organic LED) displays, which could very well provide a cheaper and all around better alternative to LCDs. It looks like OLED is moving beyond the hype phase: Kodak is shipping a digital camera featuring an OLED display in April. The display is 2.2″ (pretty large for a digital camera), and should feature battery life due to the lower power requirements of OLED. For more info on OLED, check out Kodak’s OLED site.