A rock and a hard place

It seems that Israel is caught between a rock and a hard place.

On the one hand, Israel dearly wants the Palestinians to have their own country. For the most part, this is not due to any altruistic feelings. The Jewish leadership in Israel have come to the realization that the Palestinian (muslim) population is growing faster than the Israeli (Jewish) population. They only have two (rational) choices: “allow” the Palestinians to set up their own government, or eventually turn over the government of Israel to the Palestinians (as happened in South Africa with the end of apartheid). Since there’s no way that their turning over the government, they have to allow the Palestinians to set up their own government and therefore stay out of Israeli politics.

On the other hand, Hamas is now running the Palestinian authority, and the Israeli government doesn’t deal with Hamas (except to fire missiles at their leaders).

So, Israel is now stuck. At this point, almost all of the cards are in Hamas’ hand. What a country.

2/2/2006 10:08:43 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  world affairs

The next great fuel?

digg pointed me to an article in CNN Money today on replacing gasoline with ethanol. It was an interesting read. For the record, I think we need a real replacement for oil as soon as possible. It was oil that drove the technological boom of the 20th century, and until we come up with a fuel source that tops it in what I call “energy density”, we’re never going to make the kind of jump we did before.

That being said, it seems that ethanol is poised to replace gasoline as an automobile fuel. This could be quite interesting, at least for the short term.

 

1/30/2006 11:04:41 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Wal-Mart and Academia

Via Instapundit (I do like that Instapundit ), James Joyner has an interesting article comparing Wal-Mart and academia. Part of the article noted that a new Wal-Mart store in the Chicago area attracted 25,000 applications for 325 openings. That’s 25 thousand. An interesting sideline to this bit is that, apparently, the Chicago city council recently turned down Wal-Mart’s request to build a store in the city limits due to public pressure. Instead, Wal-Mart built the store just outside the city limits, and the only real difference is the loss of tax revenues to the city of Chicago.

Back to the main point of all of this. The anti-Wal-Mart folks seem to fall into two groups: the union organizers (who dislike any non-union enterprises, especially successful ones) and high paid folks to think that “those people” (the ones who work at Wal-Mart and possibly shop at Wal-Mart) are being taken advantage of.

Now, I understand the issue of small companies being driven out of business by Wal-Marts moving in to an area. However, this is nothing new. Way back when (in Hawaii, we refer to this as our “small kid days”), we had meat markets, and fish markets, and produce markets. You literally shopped around to get everything that a family needed for daily living. Then along came the Super Markets (notice the name). They basically killed all of those specialty shops, mainly because they could leverage cost and offer the same goods at a lower price than the smaller stores. I don’t see anyone protesting against Safeway, Albertson’s, or Kroger’s (Fred Meyer up here in the Northwest).

So, why this ill feeling toward Wal-Mart? The trend is no different than the Super Market trend of the 1950’s, and as James Joyner says, no different than what people face in academia too.

 

 

1/27/2006 5:47:53 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Courting Alex...

It’s that time, the Spring TV season is starting, and one of the new shows is Courting Alex, with Jenna Elfman and Josh Randall. The only review I read for the show said that it was so-so; I wasn’t hoping for a lot.

Turns out, the show is pretty good. I’d say that it has the potential to be the best show in CBS’s Monday lineup, better than Two and a Half Men.

 

 

1/24/2006 8:30:27 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  TV

Honesty in journalism - What a concept!

Today, Joel Stein wrote a column titled Warriors and Wusses. In it he says something very honest: “… I’m not for the war. And being against the war and saying you support the troops is one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken…”.

Bravo (at least half-way) to Joel for telling it like it is. At last, someone on the anti-war side who tells it like it is. You can’t (honestly) be against the war, but for the people performing the war. Come on!

Now, let me be up front here. I’m for the war. Before the war started, I felt that we had worked ourselves into a “fish or cut bait” situation: We either had to accept that there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq (sound familiar? 20/20 hindsight out there?), pick up our toys, and go home… or we had to accept that we had to go to the next step and invade. To be honest, I never expected the President to invade. I expected what we saw during the 8 years of the Clinton administration (and to be honest, the end of Bush 43’s administration): lots of sabre rattling followed by us backing down. But, once the decision had been made, it can’t be unmade: we’re there for the duration.

Back to the central point of this rant: The armed forces in Iraq are doing what they believe their duty is. By and large, they believe that they are doing the right thing. If you think they aren’t, then you’re not supporting them! Be honest about it. As Joel says, this doesn’t mean that you need to spit on them when they come home (as happened way too much during Vietnam), just be honest with them about what they’re doing.

And I’ll continue to disagree with you about that, and support the war…

1/24/2006 11:09:19 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  politics | general

The new Low-Rent Huffington Post

By the way, I noticed that in many cases, The Huffington Post is now just linking to stories in other electronic news sites. Looks like they’re in a slide downward. Too bad.

1/23/2006 4:01:38 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general

Geese and ganders

Norman Solomon has an interesting article in the Huffington Post regarding leaks, the Plame case, and the NSA case.

He treats both cases as simply political issues and trivializes their legal impact.

He ends by assuming that journalists will either be on the “side” of the “truth” or “powerful government officials”, and completely misses the “side” of the “large corporate interests” held by most media outlets. Let’s not forget that the New York Times sat on the NSA story until they could get the best monetary gain from it.

Frankly, I don’t buy the idea that newspaper writers (supposed “journalists”) and TV news writers are somehow entitled to special shielding from the government. IMHO, Freedom of the Press is a right shared by all americans, and grants all of us the freedom to publish, in print and otherwise.

1/23/2006 3:58:59 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  general | politics

American Idol hypocrisy

I know, most of you couldn’t give a flying fig about American Idol, and the idea of someone associated with the show being a “hypocrite” probably fills you with smug glee. But still, this torques me…

Kelly Clarkson, the first American Idol winner, has refused to allow any of the songs off her latest album used on American Idol. Now, her manager says that she doesn’t allow any outside use of these songs, so she’s not singling out American Idol for especially bad behavior.

As a result Simon Cowell, the American Idol judge, has publicly scolded her for this, saying “I think that by ignoring the show you're ignoring the audience who put you there”. Simon seems to have completely forgotten his own contractual dispute with American Idol, including his refusal to appear in the latest season (After negotiation, he changed his tune). What a hypocrite. Any opportunities that he’s had in the U.S. has been directly related to his appearance on the show, and he has more reason to be grateful for what the show has done for his career than Ms. Clarkson. Simon seems to be of the opinion that since he’s “stuck” with the show, everybody should be “stuck” with the show.

And, for the record, I agree with her alleged comments that the show stuck her with terrible songwriters. They did. The quality of the music on her first CD’s was nowhere as good as the quality of her singing, either on the CD’s or on the original show. It was a great disappointment for me, being a big fan of hers. Bo Bice (the latest runner-up) said something similar. He was happy that he didn’t win, because he hand more freedom to select his music by being the runner-up.

1/18/2006 12:15:20 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  general | TV

Who's Antonin Scalia trying to kid?

Today, the Supreme Court released its ruling on Gonzalez vs Oregon, John Ashcroft’s parting shot at Oregon’s assisted suicide law. The decision was 6–3, in favor of Oregon (yay). When I first heard about this (on the morning news), I wondered who the 6 were and who the 3 were.

First, I figured that Scalia was probably one of the three (and his buddy Thomas), but then I thought, Scalia says he’s an originalist, and the Founding Fathers had no intention that the Commerce Clause of the Constitution would allow Congress to regulate drugs. So, he had to be in the majority on this issue.

duh.

As it turns out, he was one of the three: Scalia, Thomas (what a surprise, he voted the same as Scalia), and Roberts (he showed signs of this during the testimony).

So, who’s Scalia trying to kid with this originalist nonsense? The only time he cares about what the Founding Fathers intended, is when that belief supports his own ideology.

1/17/2006 11:16:31 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  politics | general

The other (next?) shoe on warrantless wiretaps

Instapundit has an interesting reference related to Al Gore’s recent speech and history. It points to an interesting article at Gateway Pundit.

Apparently, George W. Bush isn’t the first president in recent history to use warrantless wiretaps. The Clinton administration is on the record as, not only using wiretaps for “agents of foreign governments”, but also expanding its use to warrantless searches in certain housing projects.

I wonder if the network media will (ever) report this…

And, I’m surprised that Republican Senators haven’t mentioned this.

1/17/2006 10:39:22 AM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [0]  politics

Name dropping, the geek version

As many of you know, I’m an MMORPG player. The game used to be Dark Age of Camelot (DAOC), but since it saw the light of day, I’ve been playing World of Warcraft (WoW). IMHO, WoW is a much better system than DAOC is. I’ve even convinced my DAOC guild (what was left of it after 6 months of WoW) to switch to WoW. We’re all having a ball over at WoW (free plug, Blizzard!). But this is just an intro, not what I wanted to blog about.

Recently, through my RSS news reader, I found a site called WoW Blogs. It’s a great touch, a site dedicated to blogs “by” characters on World of Warcraft. it give players a real outlet to fill in the “story lines” of their characters. Hey, I can’t wait to get my own series of blogs for my characters. But that’s not it either.

I got to this site via Kazpah’s blog. Her player has her own blog, and pointed me to this one. One character she writes about a lot is Jonkichi, so recently, I popped to his blog and read it. It was quite good. Less “in character” than Kazpah’s, which is fabulous (especially if you play a Warlock character, I play two ), but he gave a good feel for what it was like to be in on a really “large scale” adventure (40 characters!). I just clicked on a link from his WoW Blog to his “real life” blog, and got a shock: it was Joi Ito! Joi’s a long time blogger; I’ve been reading about him, as well as (at various times) his blog for years! I was completely taken aback by discovering that he’s playing WoW along with the rest of us “unwashed masses”. I’m constantly amazed at just who plays WoW, since I’m always running into this type of “cameo” mentions in my travels across the Internet.

BTW, if any of you readers out there are interested, my guild, KanakAttack, is on the Suramar server and always looking for new members . 

 

1/16/2006 5:13:47 PM (Pacific Standard Time, UTC-08:00)      Comments [2]  general