Andrew Brown: A postcard from Jerusalem

Mark Schmitt has an informed post on the topic of the Senate stock profits story that’s getting lots of play pretty much everywhere. His conclusion is that the statistical anomaly between the returns on Senators’ investments and those of everybody else are the result of the study’s small sample size as much as anything else.

Phil Carter has a good post today about land mines and how the US military uses them, in light of the news that the Bush administration is reversing the Clinton plan to eliminate all use of anti-personnel mines by 2006. The Bush administration is going to continue to allow the use of smart mines (they turn off after a few hours or days), and is going to stop using all “dumb” mines, including anti-vehicle mines which were still allowed under the Clinton plan. Carter explains why smart mines are an important tool for the military, and makes the point that (currently, anyway), the US isn’t really the source of land mine trouble anyway. He may be right about all that, but I don’t think that the power of the United States to set an example for other countries can be overstated. When we pull out of these international agreements, it makes it much easier for other countries to ignore them as well.

Code Complete is one of those books that I’ve always intended to read, but I’ve never actually gotten around to buying it, much less reading it. Looks like I’ll be rewarded rather than punished for waiting, because Steve McConnell is posting drafts of the second edition online, so I can dip into it and see whether I want to read the whole thing.

Seth Ackerman has written a story for Mother Jones explaining how the Clinton administration was also complicit in willfully distorting Iraq’s weapons capabilities. On the whole, citizens are at the mercy of their government when it comes to topics like this, because the government really does have lots of information that we don’t, and can claim whatever it wants based on that information. That said, the level of due diligence that interested parties are performing and posting on the Web these days is just staggering. I’m not just talking about weblog triumphalism either. There are all sorts of non-governmental organizations and think tanks that are doing great work in dissecting the what the government tells us and what we can learn through regular reporting, and the easy avialability of this information enables individuals and groups to build on the work done by one another rapidly and effectively. That said, we’ll probably still get bamboozled regularly, but at least we can be more confident in our post mortems. The article also exposes Kenneth Pollack as a liar, or at least an omitter of key facts. That’s disappointing — it was Pollack’s book, The Threatening Storm, that made me certain that eventual war with Iraq was inevitable.

Paul Krugman’s column today is about free trade.

I confess to an interest in Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. For all the denials of the movie being anti-Semitic, it sure seems like people get the impression that it’s anti-Semitic. Here are some of the articles I’ve read:

• Nailed, David Denby in the New Yorker
• Jesus H. Christ, David Edelstein in Slate
• Why Is The Passion of the Christ So Controversial?, a Slate dialog between Robert Alter and Elaine Pagels
• Andrew Sullivan’s review
• Gregg Easterbrook’s review
• Ed Cone’s review

The New York Times is endorsing John Kerry in the Democratic primary.

IBM is donating some of the editors from their commercial IDE based on Eclipse to the Eclipse project. The upshot? Eclipse users won’t have to use plugins for editing JSPs, XML files, and other popular formats any more.

Microsoft’s security chief seems to suggest that patching holes is a bigger problem than having holes in your systems in the first place, due to laziness among hackers.