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Sunday, November 09, 2003 |
 Wired. UN stops Bush push to stop theraputic stem cell research (theraputic cloning of cells) around the globe. Amazingly enough, Iran and the Islamic conference stopped the vote until 2005. Regardless, I think China would have thankfully stopped it in the end with a veto -- given their recent push to become the world's leader in biotech. The delay gives us time to get these wacko luddites out of office.
8:16:30 PM 
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Cost of the war in Iraq counter that you can embed into your own webpage. Here is what it looks like on Philip's page. The real damage is that the war in Iraq was a reach to link spending on conventional military forces and the war on terrorism. Just when we should be cutting spending on conventional forces sharply in order to better fund effective counters to terrorism and zoom the US economy, we aren't -- the US defense budget will zoom to over $400 b next year.
5:29:59 PM
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A pointer from the print version of the New Yorker. The Toledo Blade: Buried secrets, brutal truths. It was an elite fighting unit in Vietnam - small, mobile, trained to kill. Known as Tiger Force, the platoon was created by a U.S. Army engaged in a new kind of war - one defined by ambushes, booby traps, and a nearly invisible enemy. Frankly, in all types of warfare, opponents eventually begin to look like each other. Asymmetries eventually fade.
4:37:40 PM
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What Dave is working on sounds like something Dann and I built in 1998 at Gomez. A shared publishing system where our analysts used a set taxonomy to create "custom" newspages devoted to specific topics. Of course, we didn't call them weblogs back then, and the format wasn't open to different systems (via standards). The thinking behind that work was the reason I knew that weblogs were going to be big when I first saw them. Dave is definitely on the right track with this development.
Of course, the easiest way to boot this up would be for everyone to share the same taxonomy and let a taxonomy "master" manage the process. Perfect for a "instant" newsroom.
Now, here is a question: can I have a different taxonomy (one that fits my needs -- either more limited, more broad, or organized differently, etc.) and still share specific elements that are shared across taxonomies? The answer is probably yes, through transclusion... This in combination with a global directory of shared outline elements, with precise definitions as to what they are this would be great.
2:31:27 PM
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Rajesh has an outline of ten slides on why India is a great place to do business.
11:42:05 AM
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Ed Cone questions whether Bush's "build democracies" speech will be remembered in the same light as Reagan's "tear down this wall" speech. First, I think a better comparison is with Reagan's "evil empire" speech, as Bush mentioned himself. Both are calls to action. However, the similarities end there.
Reagan proposed active and relatively bloodless (at least for us) engagement against a totalitarian empire that was poised at the edge of collapse. Reagan only helped accelerate the inevitable in his years as president by growing the economies of the world in peace. The active confrontations with the dying Soviet Empire was limited to a spending war in defense and support for groups that opposed Soviet military encroachment (Afghanistan). In contrast, while Bush's call to action does identify the appropriate trend to support, his strategy for doing so is fatally flawed. The invasion of Iraq threw a bomb into the process of democratization in the ME and elsewhere. It created an unstable soil for the growth of democracy.
The contrast in vision is most evident in Reagan's reference to Winston Churchill:
Sir Winston Churchill refused to accept the inevitability of war or even that it was imminent. He said, "I do not believe that Soviet Russia desires war. What they desire is the fruits of war and the indefinite expansion of their power and doctrines. But what we have to consider here today while time remains is the permanent prevention of war and the establishment of conditions of freedom and democracy as rapidly as possible in all countries." Well, this is precisely our mission today: to preserve freedom as well as peace. It may not be easy to see; but I believe we live now at a turning point.
11:21:18 AM
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A major problem we are going to run into over the next five years is the attitude of people like McCain that think that if we had only tried a little harder in Vietnam -- backed our troops more at home, given more lattitude to commanders in the field, deployed more troops, and used more force -- we could have won. Realistically, Vietnam was neither culturally ready for democracy nor was our military of the type necessary to win a protracted engagement with guerrilla forces. A loss was inevitable. No amount of additional effort would have changed the outcome.
One question we must answer today is whether the forces we are confronting in Iraq are of sufficient organizational complexity to justify the name: guerilla army. I think we are starting to see that it is, at least in the Sunni triangle. Another question is whether Iraq is culturally ready for a secular democracy. The evidence is mounting that it is not ready -- at least not across the whole of Iraq.
If the answers above are true, what are our options?
10:42:48 AM
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Newsweek. McCain and Rumsfeld square off over "Iraqification." The problem is that the reserves/guard units that make this ongoing war possible may deplete and force "Iraqification."
“This is our Valley Forge,” says Lt. Gen. Roger Schultz, director of the Army National Guard, referring to the winter of the Continental Army’s near desertion. Schultz doesn’t see a “mass exodus” but thinks re-enlistments will drop. “To be straight up, we did a lousy job communicating the expectations to these folks on the time they’d spend in the field.”
10:28:30 AM
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© Copyright 2004 John Robb.
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