April 2003 Archives

Great site offering a photo assignment, and a week to post a photo. This weeks topic "shadows".

I have noticed many anti-war bloggers who point towards a conspiracy in the defense establishment, who orchestrated the war in Iraq. Some bloggers barely skirt calling it a jewish conspiracy. Here is an article refuting this thoughtfully.

Why is is that most conspiracy theories end at a dark place where either jews or aliens control the world? I mean I like a good conspiracy as much as anyone else, but I have never been able to make the leap to actually believing in one. I am even less likely to believe in one where an ethnic/religious group controls the world.

One other thing that always stops me from believing in vast government conspiracies.

Competence. At it's core conspiracy implies a certain competence. The cabal can create a plan, carry it out effectively, and most importantly keep it a secret perfectly. While some people are conpetent, most big conspiracies would require hundreds of people to participate, many of whom would be government workers not reknowned for competence, imagination, or creativity.

I came across a new word today, while waiting in a doctors office.

This word seems at the moment to have been used in rather random ways on the web. Citations I found ranged from strange new agey religions, to people talking about hair, to people complaining about rock and rolls afro-carib roots. In fact as much as I like the sound of the word, I probably won't use it much as I don't like the company this word seems to keep at the moment.

Perhaps, I'll use this one instead.

Interesting article suggesting that those opposed to war under any circumstance come face to face with the mind numbing reality of how opposing war in all circumstances has the effect of allowing cruel dictatorships to continue brutal oppression.

While sometimes I still can't fully grasp the rationale for the war in Iraq. I am glad the people have been "liberated" from Saddam, but the reason we went in there still seems muddy to me.

Even as much as I don't like the inhumanity of war sometimes it the only thing that can stop greater inhumanity. I believe this is sympathetic to "just war" theology.

Personally, I wish that people living in countries run by third world thugs would overthrow their own dictatorships on their own, without the loss of U.S. service people.

Of course, the John Stewart Mill quote was talking about slavery in the U.S. That's a case where I wonder if there were any routes other than war to have accomplished the end of slavery. After all many nations gave up human slavery without civil war. In these cases the slave owners were compensated for there losses.

The interesting bit about that is that we, the U.S. enabled Iraq in the early 80's by befriending the enemy of our enemy.

In the event of an actual blog entry you would have something more interesting to read.

After taking some time to think about the ethics of blogging as written about in my last post, I have come the following conclusions.

Blogging as a form of expression does not neatly fit into an existing category like journalism, editorial, fiction, diary, or non-fiction

Blogging is a super category or container for all other forms of expression, but with the attribute of linking and often an attraction to a sense of nowness.

If a blog is a written by a professional journalist and purports to be an accurate account of the facts it should be held up to the same cannon of ethics used by journalists.

If the blog is fiction, it should be held up to the same ethical conventions regarding fictional writing.

To regard blogging as a form unto itself with it's own conventions, i.e. don't edit later, always be perfectly self revealing is to limit the possibility of expression.

To make rules for blogs seems about as useful to me as making rules about what can be put on paper. We declare that all words published on wood pulp must follow journalistic ethics. Seems silly doesn't it.

Perhaps this diagram explains what I am trying to get across better.

Lately, I have been interested in the subject of the ethics of blogging specifically whether it is ethical to edit material after submission, how self revealing one must be, whether it is ethical to have an online persona, etc..

The first thing I realized is that people take this much more seriously that I thought.

• Essay on blogging ethics. This essay suggests that you shouldn't edit material later. This is fine if you want to be a journalist instead of a diarist.
• OnePotMeal: Learning to Read. Examines some of the boundaries between truth and fiction.
• Jonathan Delacou: Art's Emotional charge.
• mamamusings: honesty of a different nature
• Blogging, ethics, and moolah
• Washington Post takes on ethics and blogging.

Does it matter if the blog entry is true? To me, the answer is sometimes not.

For instance,these confessions are hilarious, entertaining and instructive even if not true.

• Hannah's confession
• Andrew's confession

However, if the BBC "blog" entries were false I would be peeved. It's all about context to me.

However, I think that really the issue is people want to understand the author's intent when they read. They don't want to get emotionally wound up over fiction, for instance.

On the other hand many blogs have the tone of an annual Christmas letter. Does anyone really argue over whether the Christmas letter account of the previous year is an accurate and faithful recording of the years events?

I have a solution to propose. I propose that people adopt a standard way of tagging their content. Here are some categories that people could use sort of like the Creative Commons license.

• Readers choice (Reader decides veracity)
• Author Editorial opinion
• First Hand Account
• News Commentary
• For Fun
• Self Revelation
• Speculation
• Fiction
• Plagiarism

Each of the categories above would exist in a "signed" and "unsigned" author state. The "signed" state would indicate that the author would be willing to swear in a court of law, stake their online reputation, or be willing to provide evidence of the "truthfulness" of the blog entry. The unsigned state would be less rigourous. For instance a "Self Revelation" entry that did not completely bare the soul and all the nuances would be "unsigned".

The readers would also be able to sign the material. In this way a web of trust" could be developed, so that others might have a frame of reference for the material.

Perhaps this would prevent a "journalist" in China from mistaking the onion for a real source of news.

I suppose some of the heat in this discussion is generated by people who see blogging as a means to creating a world dominated by peace, love, freedom, and democracy through a connected informed public.

I recently finished up "The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference", by Malcom Gladwell.

It was extremely interesting. It tied together a diverse set of ideas about social diseases, memes, athletic shoes, advertising, childrens programming and the spread of ideas in a really fascinating framework. The basic question the author was trying to answer IMHO was why ideas seem to suddenly become popular. His answers were not trite and they seemed to have some good research behind them.

I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to better understand some of the whys of human behaviour, especially in groups.

One thing I found missing in the book was myself. He describes certain actors that have outsize roles, connectors, salespeople, and mavens. I don't comfortably fit into any of those roles yet I feel like I can be a meme spreader under certain circumstances. Namely, I often synthesize information from several disciplines with a new application. Then I spread it around to individuals. Sort of like a "typhoid mary" of ideas.

I came away from the read with my head spinning with new ideas. Frankly, I also wondered of the author had cherry picked research that agreed with his hypothesis. His examples really made the book for me. The best contained the image of a seminary student prepping a devotional on the parable of the "Good Samaritan" and stepping over a sick guy on his way across the quad to deliver the devotional.

I give the book four stars out of four possible. No qualms about suggesting it to others.

I would be curious how people with a more rigorous academic bent look at this material, would they think it is overblown or lightweight or what. If so what other similiar books would be suggested as better?

As of today, I am the number one entry on google for the term "militant wilsonianism", if you quote the words.

To celebrate I thought I would list a few links, that discuss this concept also known as "hard wilsonianism" or "neo wilsonianism."

• Nickels worth of free advice
• Good Definition
• Conservatism, Labels, and American Foreign Policy, Part II -- adds term "hard wilsonian"
• What the Heck Is a 'Neocon'? -- much ballyhooed Max Boot op-ed piece
• principled pragmatism -- adds the term neo-wilsonian

My favorite, albeit broad, definition is this one.

The neocons, in the famous formulation of one of their leaders, Irving Kristol, were "liberals mugged by reality."

Collection of other Irving Kristol quotations. One of my favorites is this one.

"[Conservatism] Our revolutionary message ... is that a self-disciplined people can create a political community in which an ordered liberty will promote both economic prosperity and political participation."

... followed by ...

"Democracy does not guarantee equality of conditions - it only guarantees equality of opportunity."

mamamusings: stories i won't tell

Like liz, I find some events in my diary are not fit for public consumption, as described in "stories I won't tell." I have considered setting up a private MT server for these private entries, but that seems like overkill.

I find for myself that blogging allows me to journal events in a way that is much more comfortable than with pen and paper. I think that is because I can edit the entries (although that creates an ethical dilemma for some), I can use a keyboard & spellchecker(if I want to), and the result is just plain easy to navigate (no hyperlinks in a leather bound volume).

Likely, I could come up with a software solution if I thought about it a bit more. Currently, the private thoughts go into a text file, with date entries. Some entries have XML/HTML like tags for semantic markup, like <RANT></RANT>.

What is a chiasmus? Glad you asked.
Ask not to whom you link,
but link to those who ask.

I saw the above op-ed piece written by Eason Jordan. It was a stunning indictment of the brutal torture used by the former Iraqi regime to keep it's people in line. It was also a confession that CNN had purposely censored the news, so that it could protect people on the ground. While it is possible that their motives were simply to protect people on the ground, it is also true they were complicit in creating a view of the regime that didn't include the brutal acts outlined in the op-ed piece.

Then the Washington Post reports that there may have been a lot more complicity going on behind the scenes.

" The day after one such meeting, I was on the roof of the Ministry of Information, preparing for my first "live shot" on CNN. A producer came up and handed me a sheet of paper with handwritten notes. "Tom Johnson wants you to read this on camera," he said. I glanced at the paper. It was an item-by-item summary of points made by Information Minister Latif Jassim in an interview that morning with Mr. Johnson and Mr. Jordan.

The list was so long that there was no time during the live shot to provide context. I read the information minister's points verbatim. Moments later, I was downstairs in the newsroom on the first floor of the Information Ministry. Mr. Johnson approached, having seen my performance on a TV monitor. "You were a bit flat there, Peter," he said. Again, I was astonished. The president of CNN was telling me I seemed less-than-enthusiastic reading Saddam Hussein's propaganda."

The accusation is that CNN bought access by broadcasting the regimes message and by censoring anti-regime information. I can't wait to see how this plays out.

Anyone who thinks media presents an unbiased view of the world needs their head examined.

Militant Wilsonianism

I am always on the lookout for interesting word combinations and changes in language. I ran across this phrase today in an review written by Ian Buruma about the book "Terror and Liberalism", written by Paul Berman.

The phrase implies to me that a "Militant Wilsonian" would go to war to end wars. That one could have a bloody revolution in world affairs in order to bring about a more peaceful world. Interesting notion. It seems to be the meme of the day.

Here is a good history lesson about Woodron Wilson and what Wilsonianism might represent.

There has been a lot of looting reported in Iraq. It appears tha government buildings have been hit the hardest, but that other places like museums, hotels, and ordinary businesses have been hit.

I was listening to a MPR on the way to work this morninig. The guest, Fawaz Gerges, who is chair of Middle Eastern and International Studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, seemed to be very well informed about Arab perceptions of the U.S. He is also the author of America and Political Islam: Clash of Interests or Clash of Cultures?

One bit he talked about confused me. He seemed to indicate the the Arab view, and by extension his view, was that the prevention of looting was the responsibility of the U.S. While I agree that we should provide security in Iraq and do our best to restore order (fulfilling our duties as described in the Geneva Convention), the responsibility for looting belongs squarely on the shoulders of the looters.

Let em say that again, more clearly. Looters are responsible for looting.

He also stated that Arabs very much want the U.S. out of Iraq and not to serve as a occupying force. Does anyone else see the coutradiction here. Get out of our country, but before you do be our police because we cannot restore order on our own. Seems like a no win situation to me.

If someone if familiar with Arab cultural practice or the typical interpretation of the Koran, what is normative Arab or Muslim behaviour in regards to looting? Is it acceptable in certain circumstances.

See subject. I am so happy, I have finally cleared this all important first hurdle. Next thing you know I'll be quoted in the NY Times as an outhority.

Here are a few links that provide some framework for discussing the term "social software."

• sylloge.com
• spiked-online.com
• radio.weblogs.com
• umontreal.c
• usemod.com
• Joel on Software

As I research the term, I am not sure I like it. Of course I didn't like the term blogging or weblog or weblication when I first heard them either. Some of the defintions try and make too much of "social software", turning it into a panacea that will spread democracy and peace on earth. I think that is asking too much of software.

It reminds me of the hype people spread about the internet in 1996 or so, before the bubble really started. There was a myth that the world connected by IP addresses would suddenly link arms in one anarchic but peaceful demonstration of techno libertarianism that would cause the ultimate revolution in world affairs. It didn't quite happen that way.

I'll have to keep thinking about this.

"In the early 1950s, the Dayak people of Borneo suffered from malaria. The World Health Organization had a solution: it sprayed large amounts of DDT to kill the mosquitoes that carried the malaria. The mosquitoes died; the malaria declined; so far, so good. But there were side effects. Among the first was that the roofs of people's houses began to fall down on their heads. It seemed that the DDT was also killing a parasitic wasp that had previously controlled thatch-eating caterpillars. Worse, the DDT-poisoned insects were eaten by geckos, which were eaten by cats. The cats started to die, the rats flourished, and the people were threatened by potential outbreaks of typhus and plague. To cope with these problems, which it had itself created, the World Health Organization was obliged to parachute 14,000 live cats into Borneo."
--The Pursuit of Interconnections(PDF)

This is an excellent story about unintended consequences.

Unintended consequence stories abound. Consider the following.

• Iraq was our ally in the Iran versus Iraq war. We (the U.S.) gave weapons, aid, and expertise to Saddam Hussein. I don't think we intended for him to brutally mistreat his own people, form networks with terror organizations, invade Kuwait, burn his own oil wells, murder his own people, but he did.
• We supported the Mujahedeen in Afghanistan to force out the Russian invasion of Afghanistan. Unfortunately, they turned into the Taliban, who we later went to Afghanistan to destroy.
• Central American, need I say more.
• Introducing mongoose(s) to kill rats, when rats threaten non-native sugar cane fields. Then the mongoose(s) kill native bird species. This has happened in Hawaii and other tropical islands.
• Propping up the Shaw of Iran, probably caused to some degree the Islamic revolution in Iran along with the anti-American sentiments.
• The creation of a weak, divided Iraq by the British in the post WWI era, probably set up conditions for a dictatorship run by an iron fist.

What is the point of that list? The point is that the next few steps in Iraq may have large unintended consequences. Decision need to be made with the future in mind, rather than simply the problem at hand. If not, there way well be large negative unintended side effects.

The problem is how can we predict the future? We can't. What can we do? We can make a commitment to mop up our own messes.

Interesting Links

• Alternet Too liberal for my taste but examines similar issues in the middle east.
• Great definition and essay
• Sanctions versus war -- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientist
• Cato Institute -- Logical Conclusions: North Korea, Iran, and unintended consequences

peterme.com: In a Quaker State of Mind, or Why I Had Stopped Blogging

I wonder if my blog entries are better than silence. That's a pretty high bar to jump over in my mind.

The Story of Thomas More, John Farrow

Very cool online book.

Why Blog?

I have been mulling over the question "Why should I blog?"

If you look at my entries over the last month you would notice the primary subject was the War in Iraq. No one is pestering me for interviews or position paper. As far as I can tell no one has linked to anything I have written. Why do I bother to write it?

Here are the reasons I came up with for blogging.

1. I like the technology and it give me an excuse to learn some new things. I have learned how to parse RSS feeds in Perl and how to write MovableType plugin and use the MT libraries.
2. It's trendy. I like being in on web trends.
3. I like web surfing, and I want to share what I find as well as keep a record somewhere where I can access it later.
4. I like writing, but don't have time to write a novel and don't think it's likely my opinions will be picked up in the paper.
5. Blogging give me a way to connect with groups of people who are writing about the news in different ways from different perspectives.
6. I have always liked the idea of having a web page, because self-publishing is just neat. I mean if we have "Freedom of the Press" in the U.S. it is meaningless if you don't have a press. The web let's me have a press without all the expense of ink and distribution.
7. Self-expression is a deep part of my psyche. I want to know and understand myself and others. Blogging is a social activiy to some degree as you interact with a larger community of bloggers.
8. Blog aggregation is serving to detect memes very quickly. I would like my thoughts to be part of this. I want my vote to count in the chaos and millieu of other voices.
9. It's anti monopoly. As Larry Lessig points out media is incredibly concentrated into a few owners now.

   "In 1992, 70% of prime time television was produced by independent producers; today, 75% is owned by networks. There are 91 "major" TV markets; 80% of them are owned by 6 companies. In 1947, 80% of newspapers were independent; that number is below 20% today. In the 1970s, 10% of first run films in theaters was foreign; that number today is less than .5%." Link

   My blogging is a voice of independant media, my voice.

But in the final analysis, does it really matter to anyone if I have a blog? I think the answer is no. It doesn't matter to anyone, except me.

Is this blog primarily driven by ego? I think the answer is yes. The only part missing for me is validation, that someone reads and actually cares about what I am writing. I mean, I can grep the Apache logs, but it's hard to know if someone simply crawled my site with a robot, ala google or whether a human stopped by to see what I was thinking.

What is a blgo anyway? Tom Coates has a pretty good explanation.

Here are other folks take on the why's of blogging.

• djuwudi.com
• PBS
• In a Dark Time

mamamusings

I mention this blog as it is one of a few sites using three column CSS with Movable Type and she makes the templates available on her blog.

She also seems to have an interest in "social software", formerly known as and/or "Computer Mediated Communication." Lots of good stuff.

I'll have to clean up my templates and make them available to the public. I sure think they would be more readable and editable with more includes.

Numerous news outlets are reporting the fall of Baghdad replete with looters, people tearing down statues and rejoicing in the streets.

While I don't think the war is over yet, the corrupt regime does seem to be falling apart. I love to see people tasting freedom. It brings back memories of the Berlin Wall coming down, and statues in Russia, Romania, and other Eastern European coutries being toppled. I believe self-determination is a basic human right we are endowed with by virtue of birth. I am so happy that people in Iraq are experiencing a taste of self determination and freedom. I hope it lasts, and I hope the war ends soon.

I wonder a lot about the future government of Iraq. It seems like it will take a lot to unite such a diverse populous. I hope they come up with a system of fairly autonmous states so that Shites, Sunni, and Kurds can all have societies where individual rights are respected without the abbrogation of others rights. For instance, I could see that in southern Iraq, they might want a state where there was Islamic law. In the north, they might want a semi-autonomous kurdish state. I believe it could work.

I am also hoping for a real and sustained peace, but I fear we are in for a longer fight in some of the outlying area's of Iraq.

Hamilton High School Milwaukee, Wisconsin has an information web page.

If only someone could explain why I have never been contacted about a reunion, I wasn't that bad was I?

I see they have posted the email addresses of some of my former teachers. Now I cam email my supercilious english teacher. I still have most of the books you lent to me in class, Ms. Prost! I won't be returning them, reading them, or writing about them. O.K., I do read them.

• Apocalypse Now
• Saving Private Ryan
• Star Wars -- Empire Strikes Back
• Good Will Hunting
• Twelve Monkeys
• The Matrix
• The Outlaw Josey Wales
• Das Boot
• Alien
• The Blues Brothers
• Independance Day
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington
• It's a Wonderful Life
• Laurence of Arabia
• 2001: A Space Odessey
• MASH
• Ben Hur
• The Planet of the Apes
• The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring
• The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers

These aren't in any special order, yet. I'll have to mull this list over more. Apocalypse Now is the number one by far, although I didn't care for Redux at all. You will also note, there are more than ten as well.

I love to read about the history of software. I have been bugging Dave Holm of CDC, openVision, and VERITAS fame to write some history down for some time. I hope he does.

Read these two pages.

Things Andrew Had No Intention of Telling Hannah

Things Hannah Had No Intention of Telling Andrew

The honesty in these two pages is so searing. The tragic fact is that if everyone made these kinds of lists before they got married, or after, they would probably be much, much longer. Even if they are not real, I enjoyed reading them for the sheer drama of it.

My son and I in the shadows.

My daughter and I enjoying the evening shadows.

We have now entered into the time of year known as Daylight Saving Time.

Contrary to popular opinion, no daylight is saved. No matter how we fiddle with our clocks we will have the same amount of sun per day.

Some folks thinks it saves energy. This NIST web page explains the history. I see a lot of hand waving but little in the way of proof for all the supposed savings. All I know is I don't like an hour of my sleep rudely wrested from me. Next thing you know, they'll want us to adopt the metric system.

I went to see The Core", last night. I chose the movie because it was the movie that my wife would least like to see and I wouldn't have to wait too long for it to start.

It was truly awful, almost as bad as "Maid in Mannhattan" or "How to Lose a Guys in Ten Days."

I give it one star of four possible.

The characters were not likeable, the effects weren't too great, the story was contrived and predictable. I might have enjoyed it more if I had paid matineee prices, but even then it wasn't very good.

Problems with the story included the following.

• The whole government project that caused the core problem was little more than an afterthought. It should have been an important part of the story or left out.
• it was far too easy to figure out why the strange magnetic events were occurring.
• Building the "Virgil" was way too easy, it should have been long and complicated like in "Contact."
• People should have been bursting in flames in a 9,000 degree environment.
• The space shuttle just can't land in an LA viaduct. That was just lame.

What worked?

• The wierd birds in Trafalgar Square were good.
• I like the way the Golden Gate bridge and the Roman Coleseum were wrecked by atmospheric anomalies.
• I liked the hacker guy, especially as he was running a non-windows OS. Too bad the tech job he was given was totally bogus.

There are a few things in life that bring my pleasure. Above note, there are six egg yolks. Yet, I only cracked five eggs. How can this be? Double yolks. I always feel lucky when I run into an egg with two yolks.

Other things that make me feel good.

• Buying a basket of items at the grocery store and having it come out even.
• Having enough money to buy 100 stamps at a time.
• Finding money in a pocket, when I did not expect the money to be there.

I was going to ask for some brave volunteer to test my alpha RSS scraper, but someone has beat me to creating the plugin and the namespace.

Hat's off to Tima for writing an excellent story on how to write plugins and for creating some really nice plugins.

You may notice some RSS scraping going on the right hand column.

It took me a few minutes to put the pieces together, but here is how it works.

I modified the Main Index for MovableType to have an MTInclude for a file.

The I pipe the output from a modified version of rss2html into the included file

That won't trigger a rebuild, so using the MT interface, I trigger a rebuild.

Since I don't want to do that be hand, I set it up in cron to happen once an hour. For now I scrape the CSM, SlashDot, and Todd's blog.

Of Paradise and Power: America Vs. Europe in the New World Order, by Robert Kagan.

I was so interested in Robert Kagan's essay, I didn't realize he had written a book on the topic. Looks interesting. I'll have to pick it up.

If you read the essay, by Robert Kagan, entitled "Power and Weakness" one could get the sense that the application of military force to settle a far flung conflict or threat of conflict was unused prior to the 20th century. Until the U.S. had enough power to exert itself.

While I agree with this mostly, I do think it ignores some facts. Namely our very early conflict with the Barbary Pirates. Here is a paper entitled "America and the Barbary Pirates: An International Battle Against an Unconventional Foe", by Gerard W. Gawalt, that talks about out very early conflict with the Barbary Pirates. Here is another article Terrorism In Early America,The U.S. Wages War Against The Barbary States To End International Blackmail and Terrorism, by Thomas Jewett.

The point is that the U.S. has been willing in the 18th and 19th centuries to wage war, regardless iof it's power structure, assumming the adversary was not a super-power itself. This is even more true if you consider our relentless expansion into Indian territory as an excercise in power against sovereign nations.

Second Superpower

This interesting article makes the case that a super-national, diverse group of citizens (or smart mobs) who identify themselves more with people and the world than with nation states are becoming a super power in their own right. While perhaps this is a bit over blown as they don't have much of an army and are composed on individual with competing interests, I think it is very interesting conceptually. It certainly is interesting in the light of the still growing anti-globalization, environmental, and anti-war movements seen in the last few years. Some bits are a little preachy and sound like a call for action, replete with aging rock and rollers humming, "let's give peace a chance", but conceptually I think the author is on to something. I am not sure I want to cede my personal or national sovereignty to this mob / super-power.

Jim Moore, the author also has a blog with some interesting opinions. Among them, the notion that China will be the winner in Iraq, a notion I have floated to many people in private. I would go further and suggest China has a interest in keeping us busy outside of the far east and may be acting in their national interest by doing so.

The ideas floated in the essay are also sympathetic to the idea of a smart mobs. This concept is floated in a book by the same name, that I saw first on slashdot

For an alternate view of the essay mentioned above see this piece at the Register.

I was watching CNN as I was getting ready for work. They had the usual embedded reporter, now headed for Baghdad, talking about their movements and showing other tanks.

Then the bit that really stood out for me. Within 20 minutes they were talking live to the wife of the guy, previously pictured on the tank. The wife was obviously stunned. She indicated that she had not seen her husband since the end of January. CNN replayed the video while she was on the phone, so she was actually watching her husband, nearly live and seeing him on the outskirts of Baghdad. It was strange.

Reminds me of somthing I read somewhere. "Children won't have to ask their father's, "What did you do in Iraq?" They will know because they saw it on TV -- live."

I had noticed several references to the Polish contingent in Iraq. They have been publicly commended by Bush and Rumsfeld. Up until this conflict I had not given much thought to Polish military capabilities. I did a google search to see what information was available. Like any special forces group, little information is made public, but I did manage to find one really good web site.

Note, this web site is not available 24 hours a day. It seems like it is available several hours per day. I guess the state of free web hosting in Poland is a little behind the times. Not bad though, for a country that still has some problems with providing basic phone service.

For more information on Poland, check with the CIA Factbook.

The photo below was taken recently in Iraq. I believe it was controversial due to the prominence of the U.S. flag, no doubt the Poles would have rather seen a Polish flag, or keep the troops out of the media.

Did I mention I am Polish?

Note to self

When editing the style-sheet it is faster to edit the file directly and then simply touch the index.html file, then refresh in the browser. MT should probably have that option. It seems smarter than rebuilding. But, be sure and make a backup copy it seems like some rebuilding might cause the style sheet to get over-written. That would not be helpful.

Note I switched to a 3 column (all CSS) layout. I used glish.com for inspiration on how to do it so it would work in most browsers. BTW, this is a great CSS layout resouce.

In March I served on a civil jury in Anoka County.

While shopping in the Super Target last Saturday, I ran into the plaintiff.

She had been overjoyed that the jury had found in her favor, meaning that she could return the Newmar motor home. Unfortunately, Newmar had appealed and was requesting a new trial, so the plaintiffs were left with no resolution yet.

Again, the whole situation was unfortunate. I believe that Newmar would be able to fix the RV to everyone's satisfaction if given a chance. I also was left wondering if the plaintiff had an ulterior motive for wanting to return the RV, as she indicated she was recovering from a serious health issue.

"April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain."

These words have always been so poignant to me. It's kind of unfortunate the poem goes down hill from there. The web site referenced above is a fabulous exposition of the poem and includes translations and explains all the arcane allusions in this poem.

It makes a good April 1 entry. I found this link from First Monday in a paper entitled The Processed Book.

I notice more reader from .mil domains.

I just wanted to say thanks to the troops for doing the heavy lifting in Iraq.

I support the troops 100%. I want them to win the peace and come home in one piece.

Rejoice, Todd aka Alien Spore Bomb is blogging.

See also, the Orange of Grin.

Todd is (in)famous for his former association with the PressMate.

I was surprised to note that some take issue with Marines being asked to pray for the President.

What's the harm?