a crack in the ice

10:23 pm - Today I have learned . . .

... there are no good PHP frameworks, lo, though there are many. I believe there is actually a law against substantially documenting one. And yet, I need one. Oh great gods of Olympos, deliver us!

Also, I thought this was nice:

07:28 pm - Work-a-hol-a-rama

Predictably enough I begin my new job as a total workaholic. Here it is, 7:30 PM, and I am installing Oracle Client on my workstation. Which reminds me of a funny story.

Earlier in the day I pointed another database management application at our database (at least, at what I thought was our database), and asked it to 'Reverse Engineer' the schema into an E/R diagram. You know, so that I could begin to grasp how things were laid out.

The number of tables that spilled out onto the screen was horrifying. I have a very large screen, and there were scrolling pages upon scrolling pages of tables all crunched together with hundreds of thousands of lines going all over the place. I spent an hour trying to pick out clusters; it was roughly like trying to re-reel a pound of fishing line you dragged up in a clot from the bottom of a lake.

I gave serious consideration to looking for a job again. There was no way I could comprehend such a schema. Clearly my co-workers, who have been here for a few years already, were *madmen*, who only seemed like reasonable people *on the surface*.

Turns out, I had pointed the application at the whole Oracle database -- not our own, us-defined database. So, I was looking at our tables PLUS all the tables that are built into Oracle. Ha, ha! My bad.

I investigated the Medical Center's food options today. There is a kind of food court where you can get your Taco Bell, and Pizza Hut. (There is a McDonalds right across the courtyard from my building.) All great food, consistent with the mission of a Medical Center. But there is also this wonderful cafeteria, where I can get, well, just lots of kinds of great food. Grill food, Asian food, salads and soups, sushi, actual real live fruits and vegetables... and, as Dale Cooper would add, at a reasonable price!

There is also this mysterious valet service, where adept Vanderbilt henchmen will take your clothes to be dry-cleaned, or take your car to have its oil changed, or whatever. I'll let you know the surcharge as soon as I find out. At Christmas time, you supposedly just drop off your presents, and they will wrap them for you. Crap, I might actually start buying presents, just to try this out! And I gather that there are places all over town where I can get discounts by flashing my VUNet ID.

"It feels a little like being in the Mafia," one of my co-workers admitted, and I have to agree. So far, there have been no real unpleasant surprises here -- when there are, you'll be the first to know.

08:44 am - Nashville!

City of Music! Home of the Grand Ol' Opry, the Parthenon, and the Pancake Pantry!

It is to this place that Fortune has taken me; moved in over the last week. Into a tiny little apartment on Music Row, half a mile from Vanderbilt Medical Center. I rid myself of about half my possessions before the move, but even so, squeezing everything into six hundred square feet was quite an undertaking.

Now I get to live -- for the most part -- an urban, walking life. In general, Nashville is a drivers' town, like most American cities. But I'm in a little pocket in the old downtown, which has coffee shops, restaurants, bars, a little independent movie theater, a great used book store, and various other shops and services. There is a good Harris Teeter within what will doubtless seem a long walk, with groceries in a backpack, but which isn't really all that far. I'll be walking to work, too: a hair over a mile, round trip.

Wouldn't you know, I got a head cold upon arrival. It is one of those pinball viruses: one day it's in your nose, then your throat, then your chest, then your nose, then your throat again...
For a couple of days it threatened to smite me with laryngitis, but my voice started returning yesterday. None of this is that big of a deal; my energy level has been at about 90% normal throughout. But brother, when you are moving you can really miss that 10 percent.

In this new chapter of life, I may post a bit more. Here's to resolutions, and a Happy New Year!

--

VOTE OBAMA OR RON PAUL, FOR THE LOVE OF GOD

09:20 pm - Who would do something like that?

Now this is disturbing.

05:30 pm - Poor woman...

Apparently a US soldier who had been compelled, but subsequently refused, to take part in interrogations in Iraq, committed suicide in protest:

http://www.azdailysun.com/articles/2006/11/02/news/20061102_news_30.txt

That is a side of the interrogation issue there hasn't been a lot of talk about. Setting aside what we may be doing to innocent people, and setting aside what we have done to the national reputation: what are we doing to all the servicepeople who are more or less forced to more or less torture people?

02:17 pm - "Ship it!" as Chthonic Form

Plato had something. At least in some sense, there are eternal and intangible forms that underly the universe we perceive. A few of these we can articulate quite clearly in mathematics, while more we can apprehend by intuition. It is too bad that Idealism has spawned so much flim-flam, so much, er,"hocus pocus". Because there is a lot of stuff in the world that cannot but put you in mind of that thing you hopefully had to read in high school, about the cave with the fires in the back.

Take Parasitism for example. Roughly: parasitism seems to emerge spontaneously in any evolutionary system whose members compete for resources. Parasitism has arisen independently many times in the evolution of Earth's biosphere. It has arisen in human markets and political systems. It has arisen in computing systems and information networks. You and I and the whole world could come and go, and this recurring principle of Parasitism will still be unchanged. Parasitism is like a pure ray of applied math from the mind of the Demiurge, a blind Deist archangel automatically evoked anywhere the right words are spoken.

Perhaps a more rational and modern (yawn) way is to think of Parasitism as merely an extended adjective or metaphor. But not only is there a passing resemblance of Parasitism-in-people and Parasitism-in-computers, there are deep commonalities that you can count on, that you can work with. For example, where parasitism occurs in an evolutionary system it seeks a level just barely insufficient to provoke some kind of anti-parasite adaptation or behavior in the host. It just sorta falls out of the timeless logic of the related concepts. It is a chthonic version of "don't bite the hand that feeds you".

You could probably model parasitism in the abstract with mathematics, probably with game theory and come up with something that fits not only already-observed instances of parasitism but that you can use to predict facts about new instances for which you have only partial information. For all I know, it's been done (if so, please point me to it)

One of my hobbies is to keep an eye out for these sorts of archetypal ideas: the ones you don't find in literature or in dreams, but through microscopes, telescopes, petri dishes and archaeological digs. (No, there is no money in it, unless you come to asinine conclusions which you sell in paperback.) I decided to call them 'Cthonic ideas', until I come up with something better. I want a word distinct from 'archetype', which I think is useful to designate hardwired psychological Ideas, a somewhat different thing.

I intuited (for me anyway) a new Chthonic Idea today, or at least, this is the first time I thought about it in this exact context. I am talking about The Rush Job: in which Something is assembled suboptimally because it is made for a competition in real time. By the way, it has been suggested that this principle is the reason we have evolved to age and die -- that is, in a way that falls apart and eventually self-destructs. From the genes' point of view, why spend a lot of time repairing a body if you can just make it good enough to create a few new ones?

As far as I know, it is still believed that all animals age, at least perceptibly: so it appears another evolutionary choice is possible. Certainly it would be possible to make us so that we are much longer lived. This is possible, but or so it seems so far for most creatures, not viable in the competitive sense. The influence of Saturn may be too strong, or something, I don't know.

Anyway, the Rush Job *clearly* shows up in human activities, in markets, and (oh boy) in software. Calling it the Rush Job, of course, reflects my impulses as a programmer who wants to be cautious. But as all such programmers are reminded innumerable times, you can 'polish the apple forever'. Anything that is a product of Design (evolutionary or no) could stand improvement; improvement always takes time; and time is a master factor in virtually any competition.

Speaking of which, my own rush job du jour is calling . . .

12:45 pm - Damn Skippy, Dr. Hawking

Al Gore is getting a lot of attention for his movie, "An Inconvenient Truth", which probably (I haven't seen it) will happen to mention that the Earth may be in some kind of environmental danger.

Humanity's overall predicament is far worse than anything Gore has imagined, of course. Global Warming is only one of a number of extinction threats, and as such it is not the most likely to actually lead to extinction.

It does now seem likely to most of the relevant experts, as far as I can tell, that human activities have probably contributed to global warming, and that the effects on the biosphere could be quite serious, and possibly grave. However, few are predicting Global Warming will cause the rapid extermination of the human race. Sure: massive crop failures; mass migrations by large chunks of the world population; deaths in the millions... but these are all things the very determined and hairless apes have bounced back from before. The climate change we are seeing is rapid -- but not 'The Day After Tomorrow' rapid, not even nuclear winter rapid. Chances are extremely good that plenty o' humans will survive the disaster Gore says we have but ten years to avert.

Not to rain on his parade, then, but I must point out that a number of countries still have plenty of atomic weapons sleeping in their silos, and any war where a bunch of those get chucked around is likely to create climate change on a different order altogether. If you take the historical record as a good indicator of the general frequency of major wars, well, things don't look so good.

It's possible that humanity would survive even a serious nuclear winter. Aside from the microscopic stuff and the cockroaches and so on, I personally vote this species of ours as Most Likely To Survive (Even If Survival Sucks). But could we survive a supervolcano? A comet impact? Given a long enough time frame, these events are as sure as the rising of the sun is apparent.

And so I have long believed in the overwhelming importance of creating stable and self-sufficient colonies in space. Indeed, one broad misgiving I continue to harbor about environmentalism in public policy is that badly-thought-out government environmental policies could compromise the development of the kind of scientific, industrial and economic power we will need to build giant ships capable of towing populations of people between stars. (And not JUST to build ships. That's just the first item on a long list of prerequisites for successful permanent space colonization...)

Anyway, I suspect most people think I am crazy when I rant about how humanity must escape the Earth. But today Stephen Hawking said the same thing, with a lot more reporters listening: http://apnews.myway.com/article/20060613/D8I7ADB81.html

I would like to thank him, on behalf of my great-great-great-grandchildren, the bioengineered-yeast-sucking dome-dwellers of Alpha Centauri B's second planet, 'Gurdjieff's Gulch'.

09:23 am - Watershed

Everyone knows that in the Foundation novels by Isaac Asimov, there is this character named Hari Seldon, who in the far future develops a science called 'psychohistory' that, in a very sort-of zoomed-out, big-picture way, predicts the political future. Not everyone knows that Hari Seldon is actually a real person; he also owns a time machine, and had lunch with Peggy Noonan yesterday.
(All this can be deduced from her article: http://www.opinionjournal.com/columnists/pnoonan/ )

All right, so you don't have to be Hari Seldon, or even Peggy Noonan, to sense that America approaches some kind of crossroads. I am not impressed by this Unity '08 entity. Their bid to slurp out the sweet vanilla filling of the American middle is nowhere, man, nowhere. But they have a Frogger knockoff, in which you navigate a suitably bland Everyman voter across four lanes of cars driven by bobble-head Republicans and Democrats, to a utopian "Democracyland". I hear that if you make your little video-game dude jump on Hillary Clinton's head just the right way, it triggers an embedded pornographic sequence!

Ah, if only Unity '08 had that much going for it.

What do you think? Will American disaffection provoke a positive change, from without or from within the present parties? Will it provoke a change to something even worse? Or will the Babel of special interests succeed in diverting general disgruntlement in the inane manner to which we have become accustomed (http://www.helpinganimals.com/animalsHome_hurricaneseason.asp)?

11:16 am - First simulation of a life form.

In the journal Structure (doi:10.1016/j.str.2005.11.014) five researchers from the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaigne report "the first all atom simulation of an entire life form, satellite tobacco mosaic virus, albeit an extremely primitive one with an artificial nucleotide sequence." This is an exciting announcement; my own simulations, however, predict this story will undergo rapid inflation when exposed to journalism.

Tobacco mosaic virus is the reason many gardeners who smoke do not smoke in their garden. Humans, even smokers, cannot 'get' tobacco mosaic virus, but in smoking and handling tobacco products, they can 'give' tobacco mosaic virus to their plants -- particularly to tomato plants (tobacco and tomato are both in the Solanaceae or nightshade family.) One reason many researchers study the virus is the big plus that the virus poses no threat to researchers (tomato gardens aside). Another is that it is really easy for researchers to make more of it, whenever they want, from some infected plants. It is an extremely simple 'life form', apparently made up of 61 proteins and a pamphlet-sized string of RNA.

It appears that what they simulated was the structural properties of the viral body in water under different temperature conditions. You can think of it as being akin to a computational reconstruction of the collapse of the World Trade Center, that takes no account of the interactions of the people or stuff inside. Of course, this *is* a virus. Presumably there isn't a bunch of stuff inside, the virus's protein coat and RNA payload are pretty much all it has got. (There are illusions in the article to a single 'mystery protein', though; hopefully some reader expert in virology can tell us more about that.) And anything that helps us learn more about viruses is a good deal, because it certainly seems that most viruses are not on our side.

Still it should be recognized that the simulation of the internal workings of any whole organism -- all the activities and interactions of proteins and metabolites; all the internal work and signalling -- is still quite far off. According to one of the team members, Klaus Schulten, "it could still be a long time before scientists can simulate a digital dog wagging its tail." (quote from LiveScience.com) Understated humor. It will still be a long time before scientists can deeply simulate a protozoon wagging its flagellum...

02:45 am - Hurricanes and Right Reasons

A couple of weeks ago, the city of New Orleans was effectively destroyed by an reasonably powerful hurricane which retires the name Katrina. Another one, named Rita, is roaring into the Gulf of Mexico. There have been a lot of strong hurricanes lately. They have much to teach us.

First lesson: we should not be quick to chalk all this up to Global Warming. I do not say this because I disbelieve that Global Warming is happening, or that it is due to human activity. I think it is reasonable to conclude, from the weight of evidence and expert opinion, that the world is getting warmer, and that our activities have something to do with it. That is precisely *why* we should be cautious in ascribing every possible misfortune, or even patterns of misfortunes, to Global Warming. Say we persuade ourselves, and everyone else, that hurricanes are symptomatic of a Warming, yet we are wrong? One possible consequence, if hurricane season eases up for a number of years, is that we mistake the calm for evidence that Warming is not happening after all. If it is important to persuade people that Global Warming is happening, it is equally important that they be persuaded for the right reasons.

Second lesson: we should not be too quick to make political hay out of the hurricanes' fallout. I do not say this because I disbelieve that there has been a massive failure on the part of American government to respond appropriately, or that people should demand change. It is clear that there were completely unacceptable failures by the local, state, and federal authorities. I believe that the failures of the Bush Administration in this regard should put the entire 'neoconservative' wing of the Republican party into the historical dustbin (where, I admit, I have long thought it belonged.) But we must also remember a reason most Democrats are for gun control: this is because most Democrats, when handed a loaded gun, skillfully and automatically proceed to blow their own brains out. Having as they do no brains, they will completely fail to see that this is a metaphor explaining how they lost control of the Empire, and why they may never regain it.

There were three related but separable failures of the Administration, and it is no use whatsoever to talk about any others. The three failures were:

1) The failure to execute a truly rapid urban evacuation of the City of New Orleans. I don't mean to ignore other affected areas (rural and small-town); but the failure to evacuate one major city indicates that the Administration has failed BY THEIR OWN STANDARDS. They sold us on the idea that they were uniquely qualified to respond to great urban disasters -- this after all is the nightmare scenario underlying the so-called War on Terrorism -- and despite massive reorganization of government and astronomical spending, COMPLETELY failed to respond adequately to an urban disaster for which we had plenty of warning. If a Dirty Bomb goes off in a major American city, or if someone manages to release a virulent bioweapon in one, we need stronger (and smarter) action than we saw in New Orleans.

2) The allocation of many National Guardsmen (and transport equipment) to Iraq. To say the least this is an inconvenient place to locate our last line of defense of civil order. There are three other armed services to take romping around the world, if you feel you have to do that kind of thing. The National Guard is, or ought to be, reserved for action here.

3) The appointment of a supreme idiot to head FEMA. I don't really need to talk more about this one, do I? Almost everyone I know is more qualified to head FEMA than this Michael Brown. Every administration produces a certain amount of bogus appointments for flunky friends of the dealmakers. After 9/11, you wouldn't think the head of FEMA would be one of them.

The Democrats, of course, cannot stick to the three issues that would suffice to turn the political tide. They must beat anything that even looks like a drum: the Global Warming drum, the Wetlands Protection Drum, the Neglected Infrastructure Drum, the Class Conflict Drum, and the Race Drum. Even if a drum is obviously rigged to explode when beaten, a Democrat will beat it: that after all is how CBS was tricked into throwing the last election.

Really, guys, if you stick to persuading people for the Right Reasons, you'll be a lot better off.

And truth be told, the Democrats deserve their share of the blame for Katrina. They held sway in Congress for almost sixty years: three times over long enough to have committed money to shoring up New Orleans' levies. They held sway too in New Orleans, and failed to do their part to implement the City Evacuation plan. I doubt they would have responded much better to the disaster (although admittedly it is hard to imagine anyone finding a bigger idiot than Michael Brown). It is probably lucky for them that they blew the last Presidential election: in its weakened state, I doubt their Party ever would have recovered from the political fallout of Katrina.

Poor Libertarians should just keep their heads down: there is little political capital they can hope to gain here. Big disasters like the one brought one by Katrina make people cry out for Big Government. This is unfortunate, as it is clear to me that centralization of disaster response is what made the disaster OF a response possible. How many aid resources were refused, turned away, delayed, or harried by a FEMA bent on protecting its turf? How many lives might have been saved if chaos -- including countless chaotic but capable efforts to help -- had been allowed to prevail? We may never know. But unfortunately, no matter how often centralized government abjectly fails, people ascribe the failures to the specific yahoos who are running the show that day. If their man was only in charge, they believe, everything would be different.

And this is why things in America are always the same.

11:42 pm - Millionaire grounded for violating secret law

From the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette...

The millionaire in question is John Gilmore, co-founder of the Electronic Frontier Foundation. He failed to show his id at an airport, as no one -- then or since -- was able to show him the law that requires it. Apparently there is actually a law: they just can't show it to ya.

09:43 am - Dylan Denies Modern Rockers Rock

Bob Dylan has something to say to the so-called musicians who stooge for the music industry these days:

http://www.nme.com/news/111454.htm

Snap! And man would it be groovy for Dylan to be a mathematician: "Erdos's in the basement / Mixing up the medicine / I'm on
the pavement / Thinking 'bout what the proof meant"...

10:34 pm - What we all bank on, part II.

My last entry questioned the wisdom of centralized banking: now let's consider the centralization of mortgage-finance, with a little help from Alan Greenspan and the London Economist.

10:22 pm - What we all bank on

Read this very readable article by Anthony P. Mueller on the economic drawbacks of our centralized banking system.

09:57 pm

A Reuters Science News article discussed the alleged discovery of living bacteria defrosted after 30,000 years frozen in ice. The upshot, indeed the title, of the article is: "Frozen Bacterium Has Implications for Mars".

It seems to me that some knowledgeable soul (not me) could write another article: "Frozen Bacterium Has Implications for Modern Humans Whose SUVs May Be Disinterring Ice Age Plagues We No Longer Have Antibodies For". Title needs work, but set enough journalists to 'think' about it and I'm sure they could come up with something catchier.

09:26 pm

A fun little article from EurekAlert! discussing present theories that the Permian extinction resulted from runaway climate change resulting from global warming (the Permian warming is not presumed to result from billions of automobiles but from the explosion of extremely large volcanoes in Siberia).

This was a hellish world, in which the "atmosphere becomes one of hydrogen sulfide, methane and ultra violet radiation".

In such a world, an SUV would not be enough. You'd need 'The Landmaster', from Damnation Alley (picture credit to ritilan.com):




You probably couldn't rely on a steady supply of oil from a world economy under such circumstances, but if you built it to burn methane I bet you'd be in business. What your business would be, I don't know: I doubt it will be delivering milk. Maybe newspapers?

10:28 am - State manipulation of science.

If we kept good files, we could put this this International Herald Tribune piece in the STATE MANIPULATION OF SCIENCE file as well as the RADICAL CLIMATE CHANGE file. Right now I would like to address the STATE MANIPULATION OF SCIENCE aspect, revealed in the last several paragraphs.

"There have been continuing disagreements between American officials and other participants over the report's contents and timetable.

Last year, for example, the State Department distributed a document to representatives from the other Arctic countries saying it opposed having the technical experts draw conclusions about policies on greenhouse gases or other related factors until the scientific findings had been reviewed by the eight participating governments.

A copy was provided to The New York Times by a person involved in the project who criticized the delay in considering the implications of the climate shifts.

The document said this was "a fundamental flaw" in the process.

The implications of the findings could not be legitimately considered before the scientific assessment was completed and governments needed to have the right to suggest changes."

08:57 pm - Darth Vader takes his rightful place in the National Cathedral

Oh yes, you know high weirdness is on the march when you find this on the National Cathedral website.

05:39 pm - T.D. Houfek endorses John Kerry for President

This announcement will come as some surprise to people who know me, and who thereby know I have not endorsed a political candidate from either of the Two Big Parties since my political Illumination, ca. 1990. For someone who believes as I do that both the economic and civil liberties of all people should be restricted as little as possible, the Two Big Parties have perennially proffered Two Bad Choices, election cycle after election cycle. It could be argued that I should have become active in the Libertarian Party, which -- there can be no doubt -- reflects my political beliefs better than any other party. But somehow I have always doubted that party politics could provoke a true libertarian shift; instead I preferred the bloodlessly-revolutionary idea that market institutions, and other voluntaristic institutions, would "overgrow" many state functions until they were vestigial, and ultimately expendable. The free-market version of "The Withering Away of the State", I guess you could say.

There is a big problem with this model. It is essentially the same big problem that you see in the "free markets" taking hold in China and Russia, where mafiosos, generals, and foreign profiteers exploit the political machinery to divvy up market share and to suppress honest competition. Here in America things are dressed up a little better, but come to essentially the same thing. The United States Government, on all levels, regularly uses legislation, regulations, and various forms of "corporate welfare" to give unfair advantage to corporations, whole industries... but not, by and large, to individuals (at least nobody you know. I've known a lot of people to characterize Ayn Rand's free market philosophy was "heartless", but no Randian hero or heroine would stoop to exploiting an elected government to unfair advantage. Unfortunately, the business world in our world seems to be run by the sort of heartless oligarch who will always do so, reflexively. "My competitors will do it," you can hear them complain, "so I have to." And the politicians, were they ever pressed on the matter, could say the same thing.

This is only one of the terrible binds that faces our Republic at the beginning of the 21st century. The looming Social Security crisis is going to hit hard; there is no longer much for anyone to do about that. The largest voting block in the U.S.A., the Boomer generation, is basically going to get to decide whether to sacrifice the economic health of the entire nation to service their own failing health. You can bet that Generation X will end up forking over a hefty share of each paycheck to support the ever-increasing medical expenses of their parents -- remember that bill all those Democrats and Republicans recently signed, extending prescription drug benefits to all elderly Americans, not just needy elderly Americans? How could a liberal or a conservative, in good conscience, sign a stupid bill like that with a massive fiscal crisis looming? Anyway, George W. Bush isn't going to do anything to solve the Social Security Crisis, and neither is John Kerry.

After a couple of decades of scientific investigation it does appear that the planet is undergoing fairly dramatic climate change, probably as a result of human activities. I was extremely skeptical of this proposition until fairly recently, and certainly the politically charged nature of this particular scientific debate makes it difficult to figure out what really is going on. I now believe enough lines of scientific evidence are converging, that serious attention must be given to the matter. Kerry might do something positive in this area, if he wasn't hamstrung by deadlock, which he is likely to be. Bush? The Atlantic will have to be slapping his ankles on his ranch in Texas before George W. Bush takes any action on the environment.

Weapons of mass destruction are proliferating. Personally I think this is ultimately impossible to prevent. Just as it is impossible to prevent as the proliferation of any other weapon, or drug, or operating system, or anything that a lot of people will find useful. Still, there is no doubt that we need to work to keep such weapons out of the hands of people who are likely to use them. Unfortunately, our goverment's insistence on innovating many new kinds of weapons of mass destruction on the one hand, while striving to keep other countries from obtaining the kind of weapon the U.S. obtained sixty years ago, doesn't help its worldwide credibility much. I do not expect either George W. Bush or John Kerry to do much about the proliferation of WMD. Knowing what I know, which is no more than anyone could glean from the news articles, I can only recommend that if you live in New York City or Washington D.C. -- the economic and political capitals of America -- to please move.

That brings me around to my reason for endorsing John Kerry. It is really quite simple: no single figure in modern American politics have directed so much international hatred at the United States than George W. Bush. You may or may not agree that America or even George W. Bush deserves this great upwelling of Anti-Americanism, which has sprung up across the globe roughly as fast as the Internet. But despite any injured feelings we may have on the matter, and despite the temptation to think that we do not need the rest of the world, that we can "go it alone", we must take heed of the tide. Not to even mention the completely-pissed-off Islamic world, we have
also sharply alienated most of our allies in Europe and the "developing world". The Bush administration hasn't just pissed off the leaders of these countries, it has thoroughly pissed off the populations of these countries. As a result, it has become politically impossible for the leaders of these countries to support the United States. This will have repercussions on international economic relations, and even more importantly, on intelligence-sharing in the effort to prevent a really serious use of WMD on American soil. There is only one chance to repair these crucial relations in the short term. John Kerry must be elected President, to send the following signal to the rest of the world: "Yeah, George W. pissed us off too. Wanna be friends again?"

Don't worry: John Kerry will get approximately zero percent of his Liberal Agenda through a Republican Congress. We will have four years of gridlock; not the worst that can happen. Just as with "W", probably no meaningful action will be taken on any of the half dozen or so major threats to world security, but with any luck we won't invent any new ones. If we keep on good terms with our allies and try real hard not to give people the idea that we are conducting a religious war, we might save some of our citizens the trouble of being nuked by some lucky band of dangerous fanatics. Thanks to our present entanglements, this is a very real danger in the years ahead no matter who is elected President this November. But the greater danger is the revision of American government that might come after a successful attack. As Pericles said, "I am more afraid of our own mistakes than our enemies' designs". If Pericles could see the kind of mistakes we make these days, someone would have to find him a new clean toga.

Whatever dangers we face, from without of from within, we will be better equipped to face them with as much friendship and support as we can reasonably get from the rest world. This isn't about "pandering" to the popular opinion of other countries: we never have had to agree with them on everything and we don't have to now. It is about putting someone in the White House who can restore some measure of stability to international relationships that have endured throughout our country's modern history. In an era where it will be deadly important to cultivate new relations (with China and Russia, for example) it is extremely important not to abandon the old alliances. To do so would indicate that we are the kind of country that lets alliances slip whenever expedient: which is exactly not the signal you want to send someone you are building relations with. Better to run George W. Bush out of Washington on a rail, resuscitate our relationship with our allies, and begin to really think about where we are headed.

If you can't bring yourself to vote for John Kerry, please consider the following appeal, from the New Conservative, to vote for the Libertarian Party's Michael Badnarik. Although the present national emergency forces me to endorse John Kerry, I still think the Two Big Parties are a dead end for America, and that the Libertarian Party offers the closest approximation to sanity. I cannot chastise anyone for voting for Badnarik. Their vote too is a vote against Bush; it does not take a vote from Kerry (because we are speaking here of those of you who can't bring themselves to vote for Kerry even under perilous circumstances); and if there is actually zero chance of your candidate winning, at least you won't have to wash your hands after pulling the lever, or touching the screen, or whatever.

10:52 am - "Fact Checks" all the rage

My friend Sheila just pointed out that many of the major news organizations now have some kind of "Fact Check" box accompanying the claims of the contestants in the American Presidential race... boxes they pointedly did not have, before Cheney's botched reference to www.factcheck.org. I guess their focus groups found that the idea of checking facts played well with viewers, and that it was time to give this great new idea a try.