I’ve been generally fatigued by the Presidential campaigning lately (I’ll post more about that a bit later), and I’ve been trying to think about the real differences between the candidates and about how that would actually affect our lives over the next four years. I realized that one of the biggest differences between the two is the degree to which they are visionaries, and you’ll be surprised to learn that I think that of the two, President Bush is the visionary.

I don’t really agree with his vision for America, but President Bush does have a vision for the country that includes taxation, education, the legal system, and, obviously, foreign policy. I think his vision is utterly frightening, but the bigger problem is that he seems too incompetent to realize his vision. He’s gotten massive tax reform passed, but it hasn’t helped the economy as much as he would have thought, and it hasn’t helped out many Americans. He got his education reform through, but thanks to underfunding and poor conception, it has been a flop. He got his war with Iraq, but that has been a disaster. He talks about promoting democracy, but I don’t see many people around the world looking to America for direction in that regard these days.

That said, I think that many voters really connect with President Bush because he offers a vision for the country that he genuinely believes in and that sounds good on paper to about half of the voters. Probably even more than half, in fact. It’s just that many people know that Bush’s vision and reality don’t necessarily cross paths.

I think it’s hard for John Kerry to run against President Bush because he does not have a vision to offer, really. He has a number of specific policy proposals, most of which make sense. He’s obviously a smart guy, he’s shown physical courage in the past, and he’s won plenty of campaigns. But voters still say they don’t know where Kerry would take the country. I think that’s because Kerry doesn’t necessarily have somewhere he wants to take the country. People don’t hear a Kerry speech and think “I want to live in Kerry’s America.” This is also a sharp difference with his running mate. John Edwards has a vision for America and uses that vision to sharply critique the Republican platform with his “two Americas” theme.

One thing to remember, I think, is that the White House isn’t necessarily the best place for a visionary right now. We need a competent manager who is obsessed with identifying and fixing our country’s problems right now. The federal government is solely responsible for fixing the situation in Iraq, and the massive deficit spending that President Bush has introduced. The federal government can help to address the health insurance crisis in this country. The best President for America is a guy who can focus his administration on addressing these problems. In that sense, John Kerry might be the right guy for these times.

I’m revisiting IntelliJ IDEA this week. I haven’t used since version 3.0 (it’s up to version 4.5), for various reasions, including having worked for a company that not only made competing products but also once employed the original creators of IDEA and thus not being able to get authorization to buy it. I’m eager to see how much IDEA has improved since the last time I used it. In the intervening period, Eclipse has made massive improvements, so I can only imagine what the folks at IntelliJ have done.

Update: This experiment is over before it started. I tried to migrate the webapp I was working on from Eclipse/MyEclipseIDE to IDEA and ran into all sorts of weird problems. I was also put off by the ugly Swing interface and the fact that it seemed to screw up the screen fonts when it displayed them. Finally, it didn’t integrate as smoothly with Tomcat as MyEclipseIDE does. I’m certain that IDEA remains the best product for editing actual Java code, but the supporting infrastructure really disappointed me.

Remember when Arnold Schwarzenegger told voters in California that he was so rich he wouldn’t need to sell out to special interests?

I finally took the plunge and joined the wifi world this week. That tells you how late an adopter I am. I bought a laptop several years ago with the intention of buying a wifi hub and card for it, and I finally got the network set up last night. I haven’t actually used the computer anywhere but on the desk where it lives already, so wifi has not yet revolutionized my life, but I do want to give credit to NetGear for producing products that are easier to set up. I don’t think it took more more than 10 minutes to swap out my LinkSys router with the new NetGear router and get everything up and running, and the NetGear software is much better than the software for my old LinkSys box. I imagine a lot of that has to do with age, but I also suspect that NetGear just makes better stuff than LinkSys. Certainly the new router is much more aesthetically pleasing than the old LinkSys router that I have. The only question now is why my computers are connecting to the router at 54mpbs instead of the promised 108mbps. (The answer seems to be here.)

Andrew Brown points out that people who vote for Bush should know exactly what they’re voting for.

Here’s the whole article from the New York Review of Books on Abu Ghraib.

Jack Shirazi posts a dialogue between he and an experienced Java developer on the subject of whether Java is cool or not. I don’t really agree with either side to any great extent. I think that the “uncool” side person exaggerates his claim that hackers are abandoning Java. I also think he’s completely wrong about the direction that Java is headed in. The new J2EE specs that are still being worked on are a lot more realistic than what we have now. The J2EE community has undergone a quiet revolution where many of the best developers have rejected EJB and application servers in favor of lightweight frameworks that enable faster and more flexible development. Sun seems to have come around that point of view as well. When I look at things like Hibernate and Spring (which is very young), I see the state of the art in Java development moving in the right direction. I don’t know how cool Java is, but I still enjoy doing Java development, and that’s something I can’t really say about Perl or PHP. (I still have yet to get serious about Python.)

Juan Cole wrote a timely post this morning about what it would be like in America if America were like Iraq. This post really hits home for me because the other day I was driving down the street in downtown Raleigh and started thinking about what it must be like to be in Baghdad. I pictured all of the buildings around me looking war damaged, of the constant fear of bombings, of military vehicles and people with guns being everywhere. It was sobering.

Cole also fails to ask perhaps the most important “What if?” question, which is: How would Americans react if, amid the chaos, there were 1,650,000 foreign, non-English speaking soldiers in our country.

The September National Geographic had a huge series of articles on global warming that I’m only now getting around to reading. Needless to say, the magazine paints a bleak picture of where we are, and where we’re headed. To me, there have always been three questions about global warming:

1. Is global warming a real phenomenon? (In other words, is it getting hotter?)
2. Does human activity contribute significantly to global warming?
3. Is there something we can do about it?

I’ve felt like #1 was true for years, but I never really had a whole lot of confidence in that belief. Now I do. I would at this point the idea that the earth is getting warmer is no longer subject to reasonable peculation. It’s true. So that moves us to #2. These days, it seems like most global warming doubters circle the wagons on this question and argue that while the earth is getting warmer, it’s just a part of cyclical climate change and human activity doesn’t contribute significantly. There was an article in the February 2004 National Geographic that convinced me that those people are wrong. It explained in simple terms how the carbon cycle works, and how burning massive amounts of fossil fuels disrupts that cycle by filling the atmosphere with greenhouse gasses (mainly carbon dioxide). Before I read this article, I would say that there’s room for disagreement on the human contribution to global warming. I no longer think so. If you don’t think that human activity is a huge contributing factor when it comes to climate change, you’re in denial.

That, of course, leads to the biggest question, #3. Clearly, in a theoretical sense, humans can do something about global warming. Americans doing something about it would be a big start. When you look at the amount of resources consumed by the average American compared to people of any other nation in the world, we’ve got a big lead. We’re the masters of burning fossil fuels. There’s no way the world could sustain a population of 6 billion people living the way Americans live. Given that, I’m forced to question the ethics of the American lifestyle, and I do believe that when consumption of resources by Americans peaks (this year, 5 years from now, or 50 years from now), that will be it. No group of people will ever consume resources the way Americans have again. That being said, I don’t think that we or anyone else will really change until there’s a disaster of truly epic proportions. Human beings suck at being proactive, and are even worse when it comes to assessing risk and contingency planning. So at this point I don’t believe that the human race will make the massive changes required to contain our contribution to global warming. But I’d love to be surprised.

The final question, then, is what we as individuals can do to limit our own exposure to risk from global warming. Given that scientists cannot reliably predict the pace of change or the results of that change, the final question is the toughest. I’m still thinking about that one.

I’ve been a happy customer of pair.com for Web hosting for 7 or 8 years, but I’m putting some thought into moving to dedicated hosting. The advantage is that I’d have root access so that I can run my own install of Apache and Tomcat. I’ve been working on a Java web application that I’d like to run somewhere other than my desktop, and so I’m going to need someplace to put it. The ability to manage my own email would be nice. I’m growing increasingly irritated by the spam that makes it through my filters, and I’d like to try some other strategies for managing it. On the other hand, managing my own email would be a downside as well. I’m not sure I have the system administration ability to manage an email server, and I don’t know jack about DNS and several other essential services. I’m not sure I want my hosting bill to go from around $30 a month to $100 per month. And I fear that the level of customer service would drop if I went from pair.com, a company with lots of expertise in running shared servers, to one of the companies offering affordable dedicated or virtual servers. pair.com charges $250 for their cheapest dedicated server. How can these other companies get away with charging $99 or less per month? I’ve created a QuickTopic to discuss hosting.

Today Slate answers a question that has been hounding me since the first time I saw Da Ali G Show — how they rope in the guests. The fact that “Borat” blazed a trail through Mississippi, Oklahoma, and othe red states told me that the show banks on there being parts of the country where most people aren’t HBO subscribers, but that didn’t explain the high profile guests that appear with Ali G himself. Slate has the details.