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The other day I made a small change to this site – if an item has a title (and they all do since I created the RSS feed for the site), I print it in the page title on the permalink pages. The number of hits I get from Google to those pages has gone up a ton. I actually don’t know whether that’s a good thing, since people probably aren’t interested in one of my entries here when they’re looking for “pictures of starving people” or the documentary “Journeys with George,” but I’ll take the additional readership. If nothing else, they get a useful link out of it most of the time. ...

Does anyone else see the irony in Larry Ellison complaining about the complexity of IT products?

I imagine that the photographer who took this picture is quite pleased with himself, and is a fan of Gothic stained glass no doubt.

I find the accounts I’m reading of the capture and interview of the confessed Bali bomber, Amrozi, to be deeply unsettling. According to every story I’ve read, the terrorist laughed it up with Indonesia’s national police chief, and even congratulated the police on their cleverness in capturing him. He apologized for the trouble he’s caused his family, but seems completely unrepentent at having killed hundreds of people, and indeed seems to find it all quite humorous. All things considered, I prefer my terrorists sullen and bitter. ...

President Bush today renewed the nation’s national emergency status for another year. Being in a state of national emergency extends the power of the executive branch, so why not extend it, right? This, of course, is the same man who went around the country stumping for Republican candidates most of last month, and whose Chief of Staff told the New York Times that Bush held off on announcing his Iraq war plans to the UN until September because “you don’t launch a new product in August." Update: Umm, cancel the outrage. It turns out we’ve been in a state of emergency since 1994. It’s still lame, but it’s been lame for awhile. ...

The New Republic’s big story this week is about Abou El Fadl, a scholar of Islamic law who teaches at the UCLA School of Law. Because El Fadl chooses a different branch of Islamic scholarship than the Wahabbists endorse, he is subjected to constant harassment by the intolerant majority of modern Islamic scholars. El Fadl explains that Wahabbism has come to dominate Islamic scholarship because the Saudi Arabians have spent many millions of dollars to make it that way. I could summarize how El Fadl’s views differ from those of the Wahabbists, but I’d do a poor job of it. Read the article instead (even though it requires registration). El Fadl came to my attention last fall when I read an interview with him from The American Lawyer in which he explained how modern fundamentalist Islam is a radical departure from the Islamic legal tradition, which encouraged scholarship and critical interpretation of the Koran. When you read about El Fadl, you realize how radically Islam has to change in order to get away from its backward modern interpretation. With the Saudis spending bucketloads of money to shift the game in favor of the status quo, it’s not likely to start moving in a new direction anytime soon, either. ...

Al Jazeera is running a tape of someone purporting to be Osama bin Laden praising recent attacks (including the theater siege in Moscow). A couple of interesting notes: first, it’s not video. That could mean it’s faked, or that he’s too ill to show himself in front of a camera. The second is that bin Laden didn’t mention the recent sniper attacks in the Washington DC vicinity. That seems to confirm that there’s no al Qaeda/sniper connection, doesn’t it? (I never believed there was, but I know Ann Coulter, for one, disagrees.) ...

So, I was reading Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s blog entry the other day about ground level politics and it got me to thinking about something that’s been bugging me since election night. The thing that bugs me is that despite the fact that I cast my lot in the marketplace of ideas here every day, I really don’t do all that much to change this country or this world to be the place that I want it to be. For example, my next door neighbors are three guaranteed Democratic votes. They don’t know a whole lot about US politics, but they hate George W Bush with extreme passion. Unfortunately, they never registered to vote and so they didn’t get to cast their ballots on election night. Had I gotten off my duff back in October (the registration deadline was Oct 11) and gotten them voter registration cards, and then taken them to vote on election day, that would have been three more votes for our losing Democratic Senate candidate. The guy lost by about 200,000 votes – if 1/5 of the Democrats who voted could have found one other person to drag to the polls, he would have won. I could have picked up three without even trying very hard, and they have a lot of friends who probably didn’t vote either. It’s something to remember in 2004. More on this here. ...

One thing I really like is when lessons from the world of sports can be applied to real life. Gary Huckabay, one of the smartest baseball analysts anywhere, wrote a great piece about decision making in Major League Baseball. In the piece he explains that the decision makers in MLB don’t make what are percieved as poor decisions due to lack of information, but due to different analysis of the information available than you or I might make. ...

The IHT ran a fascinating article today about the feud that wasn’t between the United States and France over the UN resolution regarding Iraq. The story reports that the feud was in fact a cleverly constructed gambit that enabled France to regain some international standing at the expense of Germany (which took itself out of the game when Gerhard Schroeder announced his total opposition to war in Iraq during the campaign there) and enabled the United States to pick up some multilateral clout in its dispute with Iraq. The more attention I pay to world events, the more I realize that my understanding of what’s really going on is established at a level several times too high to be of much use. The conventional wisdom thusfar has been that France was staunchly opposed to war in Iraq because French businesses stood to lose a lot of business if we invaded. Maybe that’s not so. ...