Category: Uncategorized

In playing with ‘s camera’s movie recording capacity, I recorded a snippet of Rice being Rice and me being me, which Rice is convinced will entertain people who know me well.

A reply to a one url entry:

Yeah, I had read a misleading account that suggested it was more scripted than it was (ie, the answers weren’t practiced). The transcripts of the “damning evidence” did more to convince me than the blog in question. The calls I had with my dad while he was in Bagdad leave me further aware that trying to have a conversation with 10 people in Bagdad in real time requires scripting due to delay. At least if you want to make it coherent. So, yeah, I do believe the guy is genuine, but it still leads to a “so what” for me.

It was a publicity stunt like an ugly guy who posts a picture of himself with his handsome buddy in his personals ad. They picked people, including a public relations officer, for him to talk with. Undoubtedly they selected people with the right views. Again, no shocks here. I suspect it wasn’t hard to find supportive troops (finding unqualifiedly positive troops might have been trickier, I dunno). I don’t have the backing for Scott McClellan billing it as “just typical troops.” It’s obvious to me that this does not mean “pull names out of a hat and let them say whatever they want to,” though it’s equally obvious that that is what they are trying to imply.

I’m not one of the people your post is primarily targeted at. My response to the whole situation was an eyeroll, not outrage.

You have seen some part of Iraq, and probably have access to more reports (and I’d imagine they’re higher priority reads for you) than I do about what’s going on in the rest. I think the success hinges on building local support and knitting it together into a greater whole. I’m skeptical of the top down approach going anywhere good. Though it could work out to be a stable, repressive democracy. Still much of what the author wrote was clearly rhetoric without (even counter to) factual support. Given that he was picked for the pr event, his views are unsurprising.

We’ve chosen to advance the agenda of the largest subset of the population. That is good politics and good strategy. It’s also democracy in action. But this democracy seems likely to be a tyranny of the majority. Our constitution is designed to prevent that. I don’t personally subscribe to the notion that whatever someone wants is what’s best for them. My philosophy here is similar to my philosphy when it comes to giving money to the homeless. I don’t give money to the homeless, but I will give it to charities for the homeless, because I don’t spend money on the homeless to make them happy, I spend it to improve the situation for everyone. I support care not cash. I support human rights before voting rights, see also my recent post on voting.

It just doesn’t seem worth the human lives, massive financial investment, the opportunity cost in disaster response capacity at home, the unrest, or the social displacement of the troops to replace a secular dictatorship with a theocracy. Still, if Allah wills it who are we to gainsay it…

It’s a piece of accepted wisdom that every vote counts, and that voting is important, and perhaps the citizen’s most important contribution to their governance. I claim that if voting is the way you express your political will, then you aren’t expressing much political will.

Voting is only as significant as the options being voted on. Whether it’s a student org electing the only person who would volunteer for the position, a national political party voting on the presidential nominee, or a referendum on constitutional approval, the most important decisions were made long before that point. More important than the vote is what options are being voted on.

This is not to encourage despair. This is to encourage strategy, leverage and thought. Don’t invest great significance into checking a box. Something should signal that change doesn’t come so easy, because change doesn’t come so easy.

So, I made it, I’m in SF. I did more reading on the plane than I typically do all weekend, which is good because I probably won’t be doing much more for the rest of the trip before I fly back. =)

I still need to get my assignment for noon on monday done and turned in. My instructor (WAA) will have a heart attack, because she’s noticed that I turn stuff in at 5 minutes before the deadline all the time.

I’m also resisting the temptation to download an emulator that would let me play dragon warrior iii or wizardry or the like, so that I can shut myself in with my laptop away from a net connection and actually get work done. There are only so many times I can take the computer decimating me in chess before I give up. =)

Back to question-writing. =)

… Forgot to post this…

My weekend thus far has been great (barring a guy on the plane who was watching his kid play college football on ESPN and couldn’t quite shut the fuck up).

going to SF.

And now for the hurry part of the process.

Also is a vile tempter who actually checks airline prices.

Who could possibly put me up in the Bay Area this weekend, the notice, it is too short.

I could read on the plane though. Hell, I’d probably get _more_ reading done that way… It’d also be kinda funny if I flew back to mpls on the same flight as Dan Kammen.

[ETA: DC is cheaper, and if I’m willing to wait, West Palm Beach and Atlanta are both cheaper, and Cancun is not much more expensive. And I’m going to the Bay Area for 5 days in about a month anyway…]

So, We have a 4-port wireless router at home. Except one of the ports doesn’t work at all. So, really, we have a 3-port wireless router. Except the wireless is pretty flakey. Okay, so we have a 3-port router at home. Except my port was being flaky. I swapped it with ‘s this morning, and performance improved dramatically. Make that a 2-port router. in a 3 person household.

Time to go hardware shopping. Does linksys usually suck this much? Who makes better routers?

[ETA: Woohoo! 19″ lcd monitors for less than $300? Who cares about the absence of flying cars, yay for teh future.]

This quote happened at a talk on carbon sequestration today. They were specifically talking about storing CO2 under the earth’s crust dissolved in huge aquifers. When this hypothetical carbon storage breaks out, it’s bad. The participants are Charismatic Guest-Lecturer from Princeton (CGP) and World’s Awesomest Advisor (WAA).

CGP (salesman voice): Of course, if this were in an inhabited area, maybe it would break through at a little girl’s slumber party and kill everyone.
WAA (in a tone of attentive interest): I was thinking a day care in West Virginia, but go on.

Maybe you had to be there. But I thought it was great. These sorts of exchanges really warm my heart. On the bus ride back to my campus, I was chatting with a fellow humphrey lecture attendee, and I told her about the Kansas City Hotel Disaster (and got it partially wrong; I placed it at least 3 decades before it actually happened and overestimated the death toll) where 114 people died and over two hundred were injured because some guy too “smart” for anyone’s good decided on a last minute design modification which actually left the structure insecure. Maybe I just have a woodie for the macabre.

Okay, so our upstairs neighbors have dogs. The dogs take dumps in the backyard. Our neighbors do not reliably pick these dumps up. I bike. I often come in after the sun has set. The easy way to bike involves taking the alley and coming in through the back door. I’m guessing you see the connection here. This makes twice that I’ve unknowingly tracked bits of dogshit into the house. I’ve already mentioned that I’d really appreciate it if they quit leaving the dog shit in the back yard. I’m thinking next time of picking it up in a bag and leaving it right at their doorstep with a note saying something to the effect of “I really don’t like accidentally stepping in this, nor do I appreciate having to guess where it might be when I come home after dark. Please pick up after your pets.” Only if they really piss me off will I start emptying the bag at their doorstep. (And tonight on passive-aggressive theater…)

So, we’ve already seen the “Oh my gawd, I love my teacher so much, I mean she’s just so COOL,” post and the “There’s this boy, and he’s so sweet, but he’s gone and I’m sad,” post. Now it’s time for the confused, empathetic, angry 14yo girl scu to pop her head out.

Before I get into this, I want to point out that my public policy education has not been focused on international interest issues. My focuses are economic development (where I’ve had about a 2/3 slant towards domestic issues) and science, tech, and environmental policy, which has also had a pretty developed world slant. So, when it comes to international political stuff, world history, foreign relations, etc, I’m no genius. I’m just a schmo with some public decision making, economics, and stats courses, and a more than passing interest in the subject matter.

International Politics Things