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Oh, another quick note on Zbigniew Brzezinski. I didn’t mention his manipulation of events in Afghanistan with approval. While the outcome he desired was obviously achieved, it was at the cost of literally millions of Afghan lives. When you take into consideration the fact that we knowingly and purposefully goaded the Soviet Union into invading Afghanistan, the fact fact that we failed to bail them out when the Soviets left in the eighties is an even more bitter pill to swallow. ...

In seeking to understand the world, perhaps the simplest rule of thumb that always applies is “Them that has, gets.” More evidence of this basic law of nature is found in this New York Times piece that explains that the IRS spends a lot more time rooting out tax cheats among the working poor than they do among the wealthy. Never mind that wealthy people have the opportunity to cheat the government out of a lot more money than poor people do, and that there are many more creative ways to do it. We have to be sure that the typical wage earner isn’t trying to put one over on us. ...

Advogato has a thread on Microsoft’s latest attack on Samba. Salon has a good piece of reportage today on an ongoing controversy between members of a mailing list and a supplier of plants for aquariums. After members of the list complained about service from a company called “Pets Warehouse,” the owner of the business sued them for $15,000,001, and keeps amending his complaint to include more and more defendants in the suit. The big problem is that while his suit is trivial, the expenses of fighting it are not. Harrassment through lawsuits is a really big problem, but I’m not sure of any obvious solutions. One good solution is getting as much publicity as possible so that the person (or, more often, company) that brought the suit is shamed into giving up. Here’s a link to the story. ...

Kuro5hin has an article on the evil plot by pork producers to include bacon in all our food. My comment: bacon good. President Bush gave a speech today on the conflict between Israel and the Palestinians, and I’ll be damned if it’s not the best speech he’s ever given. It’s reasonable, it demands appropriate actions from both sides, and holds both sides accountable for what’s going on. The New York Times has the full text. If it were my speech I might have come down harder on the Israelis, but Bush is a Republican after all, so I’m grading on a curve. ...

I have long thought that non-violent resistance and civil disobedience would serve the Palestinians much better than terrorism, assuming the goal of the Palestinians is to end the occupation, and not to destroy Israel. Apparently, Israel agrees with me. Back in the eighties during the first intifada, a peace activist named Mubarak Awad began organizing Palestinians for non-violent action against Israel, and was so successful that Israel expelled him from the country. (The article linked to above was written during the first intifada.) Awad’s Eight Steps to Israeli - Palestinian Peace is also worth reading, bearing in mind that it was written in 2000. He’s right about the things that need to happen, but I doubt he has any better ideas than anybody else about how they can come to happen. ...

Here’s a great answer from Bill Clinton in his interview in the latest issue of Newsweek: **Why do they still beat up on you when you If you watched Six Feet Under last night, the high functioning autistic David mentioned is Dr. Temple Grandin. Once again I’ve failed to come through with an April Fool’s prank. Kuro5hin/Metafilter came up with a pretty good one though. Not an April Fool’s joke: the anti-Unix Web site created as part of the UniSys/Microsoft FUD campaign runs on FreeBSD. ...

Thomas Friedman: Suicidal Lies Let’s be very clear: Palestinians have adopted suicide bombing as a strategic choice, not out of desperation. This threatens all civilization because if suicide bombing is allowed to work in Israel, then, like hijacking and airplane bombing, it will be copied and will eventually lead to a bomber strapped with a nuclear device threatening entire nations. That is why the whole world must see this Palestinian suicide strategy defeated. ...

So I finally got around to reading The Great Terror, a long article from the New Yorker by Jeffrey Goldberg. It’s a wide ranging article that covers Iraq’s chemical (and possibly biological) attacks on its Kurdish population back in 1988. It goes on to talk a bit about the miserable history of the Kurds (they’ve been betrayed by just about everybody, just like the Afghans), Iraq’s possible collaberation with Al Qaeda, and Iraq’s ongoing chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons programs. ...

NewsForge has a review of the bootable business card, a Linux distribution that fits on a business card sized CD. Bud Selig is the Jack Valenti of the sporting world – he’s the commissioner of Major League Baseball, and is utterly bent on alienating fans and destroying baseball. This man is so venal, and so stupid, and so incompetent that literally anyone reading this page could do his job better than he does. Never seen a baseball game before? You’re perfect. It’s that bad. Anyway, he did some sort of town hall meeting the other day on the Web, and Joe Sheehan rebuts his ridiculous utterings. ...

The New York Times assesses the lack of progress toward defusing the conflict in the Middle East by the Bush administration today. These paragraphs get to the heart of the matter: “The Bush administration finally has to get real,” said Henry Siegman, a Middle East expert at the Council on Foreign Relations. “It has avoided dealing with the most fundamental aspect of the conflict. There is no formulation under God’s sun that can get the parties to stop the violence, that can get the Palestinians to stop the violence, if this administration will not face up to the simple truth that stopping the violence and establishing the security of Israel is not something that serves any Palestinian goal whatsoever. ...