Notre Dame athletic director Jack Swarbick on why he didn’t stay on the west coast:

I’m really all Bay Area at this point. I’m loving it out there. In the course of this dinner, Tom tells me that he’s moving back to Detroit. I said, ‘That’s crazy, why are you doing that?’ He said: ‘If you can live anywhere in the world, you ought to live here, because it’s fantastic. It has all this natural beauty, and the weather is great. As a consequence, so many people who live here don’t have a reason to be somewhere else. They’re attracted by those things as opposed to something else.’ He said, ‘I need to be someplace where there’s a sense of community because that’s what motivates me.’

Saddam lived in fear of a coup mounted by the Republican Guard. His solution was to create the Special Republican Guard, whose main remit was to protect him against coups particularly from the Republican Guard.    You would think that the head of this outfit would be a fearsome figure who would terrify any budding coup plotters.  Woods asked other leading figures if this was indeed the case and the answer was a resounding NO!  Why?  Saddam was well aware of the “who monitors the monitor problem” – what if the head of the Special Guard mounted a coup himself?  Saddam’s solution was not original: appoint a relative.  Make sure the appointee is a coward so he would not dream of mounting a coup.  Just in case he is tougher than you might think, choose someone stupid so he cannot mount a successful coup and is too stupid  to recognize someone else’s good ideas for a coup.

A couple of days ago, I posted a link to an essay about the Gervais Principle. Saddam Hussein had clearly internalized this principle, as he (a sociopath) promoted a member of the clueless class to a key position to mitigate personal risk.

Sunlight Labs on the good things about Recovery.gov:

See– we want to see both the information government has chosen to deliver and the recipe for it, alongside its ingredients. Imagine, for instance, if Recovery.gov launched, and the Obama Administration just outright claimed success, and cited through press release, millions of jobs and economic recovery. That, after all, is the alternative. Instead, Recovery.gov’s done exactly what it’s supposed to do– make it so that people can look at the data and make up their own minds as to what is really happening.

And yeah, the data’s bad. But that’s the way its supposed to be. Real-time, online, machine readable. In a politically charged debate over a controversial program, its easy to take pot-shots at the messenger (Recovery.gov), but what Recovery.gov is doing is shining some sunlight in some really interesting places, letting your average citizen see why data quality and real-time reporting really matter.

Tim O’Reilly reminds us that the price of interoperability on the Web is eternal vigilance. Let’s skip to the end:

It could be that everyone will figure out how to play nicely with each other, and we’ll see a continuation of the interoperable web model we’ve enjoyed for the past two decades. But I’m betting that things are going to get ugly. We’re heading into a war for control of the web. And in the end, it’s more than that, it’s a war against the web as an interoperable platform. Instead, we’re facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill.

And it’s time for developers to take a stand. If you don’t want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don’t wait till it’s too late.

Never let it be forgotten that it’s the Republican right in America who proudly and openly surrenders to terrorism at every opportunity. Glenn Greenwald:

This is literally true: the Right’s reaction to yesterday’s announcement — we’re too afraid to allow trials and due process in our country — is the textbook definition of “surrendering to terrorists.” It’s the same fear they’ve been spewing for years. As always, the Right’s tough-guy leaders wallow in a combination of pitiful fear and cynical manipulation of the fear of their followers. Indeed, it’s hard to find any group of people on the globe who exude this sort of weakness and fear more than the American Right.

People in capitals all over the world have hosted trials of high-level terrorist suspects using their normal justice system. They didn’t allow fear to drive them to build island-prisons or create special commissions to depart from their rules of justice. Spain held an open trial in Madrid for the individuals accused of that country’s 2004 train bombings. The British put those accused of perpetrating the London subway bombings on trial right in their normal courthouse in London. Indonesia gave public trials using standard court procedures to the individuals who bombed a nightclub in Bali. India used a Mumbai courtroom to try the sole surviving terrorist who participated in the 2008 massacre of hundreds of residents. In Argentina, the Israelis captured Adolf Eichmann, one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, and brought him to Jerusalem to stand trial for his crimes.