We’re about to enter our 19th consecutive year of Truman-envy. Ever since the Berlin Wall fell, people have looked at the way Harry Truman, George C. Marshall, Dean Acheson and others created forward-looking global institutions after World War II, and they’ve asked: Why can’t we rally that kind of international cooperation to confront terrorism, global warming, nuclear proliferation and the rest of today’s problems?
...
Groups with a strong narrow interest are able to block larger groups with a diffuse but generalized interest. The narrow Chinese interest in Sudanese oil blocks the world’s general interest in preventing genocide. Iran’s narrow interest in nuclear weapons trumps the world’s general interest in preventing a Middle East arms race. Diplomacy goes asymmetric and the small defeat the large.

Moreover, in a multipolar world, there is no way to referee disagreements among competing factions. In a democratic nation, the majority rules and members of the minority understand that they must accede to the wishes of those who win elections.

But globally, people have no sense of shared citizenship. Everybody feels they have the right to say no, and in a multipolar world, many people have the power to do so. There is no mechanism to wield authority. There are few shared values on which to base a mechanism. The autocrats of the world don’t even want a mechanism because they are afraid that it would be used to interfere with their autocracy.

i'm not convinced a League of Democracies is the answer because it is not remotely apparent how that would be any different from another talking shop
the main problem is as the article points out small groups having a veto power

the example of the Irish No vote is a good example -- we have many many shared values across Europe and have a League of European Democracies but that didn't stop the Irish blowing progress out of the water by taking a very narrow blinkered approach

finding consensus in a multipolar world is a fundamentally difficult problem and unless and until we have a global government will remain so
the only way forward is through pooling sovereignty and by surrendering the right to veto and nation states are notoriously loath to do so
(after all you Americans ended up having a civil war over the issue of federal rights versus state rights -- centralization v decentralization )

Op-Ed Columnist - Missing Dean Acheson - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

From my meeting about reports today:

Joe: This is too much of one color for an executive summary. They needs lots of colors or they think the report is worthless

And the oddest exchange:

Joe: So you want multiple "Trend By" reports?
Ray: Yeah, like "Trend by Severity," "Trend by Risk Score," Trend by anything.... "Trend by Sheep" even.
Billy: Wow, I want to see a "Trend by Sheep" report.
Ray: Yeah! Sheep! But with Velcro gloves. Otherwise they can get away!

...

[awkward silence]

...

Billy: I'm posting this to Memestreams.

Quotes from work: Trend by sheep

Three weeks after the disclosure of a serious flaw within the Domain Name System (DNS), Apple has yet to patch its MAC OS X operating system, but the company may be able to look to a third party in defense.

-snip-
In an e-mail to CNET News, Mogull said "Apple may be stuck between a rock and a hard place on this one, but they've chosen the worst possible option--remaining silent."

Say it isn't so?!!!? Apple has a problem with security? They can't figure out the patch?

Staying silent??? Wow, that's NEW!

Come on Apple, act like a thought leader, not some has-been wanna be, who can't admit that there are flaws in ALL software...

The time for arrogance is over, get with the program.

The current fix, is to forward all DNS requests to a patched system, from a DIFFERENT vendor, such as Microsoft, Linux, or Unix. How long until the corporations realize that Apple doesn't care if they're vulnerable, as long as Apple doesn't admit the vulnerabilities?

Apple in a bind over its DNS patch? | News - Security - CNET News.com

After covering a war, a friend said, buy yourself a house. I did. I came to this French village where church bells chime the rhythm of the days, married here, raised children and parked Bosnia somewhere in a corner of my mind.
...
Nermin Tulic, an actor, his legs blown off by a Serbian shell on June 10, 1992, telling me how he wanted to die until his wife gave birth to their second daughter and his dad told him a child needs his father even if he just sits in the corner.

I took that away from the war: the stubbornness of love.

Amra Dzaferovic, beautiful Amra, telling me in the desperate Sarajevo summer of 1995 that: “Here things are black and white, they are. There is evil and there is good, and the evil is up in the hills. So when you say you are just a journalist, an observer, I understand you, but I still hate you. Yes, I hate you.”

I took that away from the war: the fierceness of moral clarity.

Pale Faruk Sabanovic watching a video of the moment he was shot in Sarajevo and saying: “If I remain a paraplegic, I will be better, anyhow, than the Serb who shot me. I will be clean in my mind, clean with respect to others, and clean with respect to this dirty world.”

I took that away from the war: the quietness of courage.

Ron Neitzke, noblest of American diplomats, handing me his excoriation of the U.S. government and State Department for “repeatedly and gratuitously dishonoring the Bosnians in the very hour of their genocide” and urging future Foreign Service officers to be “guided by the belief that a policy fundamentally at odds with our national conscience cannot endure indefinitely — if that conscience is well and truthfully informed.”

I took that away from the war: the indivisibility of integrity and the importance of a single dissenting voice.

Roger Cohen is da man

Op-Ed Columnist - ROGER COHEN - Karadzic and War’s Lessons - Op-Ed - NYTimes.com

There's been a lot of astronomy news lately. Anyway, 2005 FY9 is now Makemake. It's a shame... "2005 FY9" had such a nice ring to it.

A dwarf planet circling the sun out beyond the orbit of Neptune has been rechristened Makemake after a Polynesian god and designated the third of the solar system's new class of plutoids, the International Astronomical Union (IAU) announced Saturday.

Makemake is a small, red-tinged world that ranks among the largest objects in the outer solar system. But it is still smaller and dimmer than the already demoted dwarf planet Pluto, which astronomers reclassified as a plutoid last month.

EDIT 1: I had assumed that last part (my bold) was a typo, as Pluto is still listed as a dwarf planet, going back to 2006. Apparently, that's not a typo: Pluto's Identity Crisis Hits Classrooms and Bookstores . Geez... I can't even keep up.

The Makemake article itself is rather matter-of-fact, but the comments below the article are amusing. There's still a lot of fighting over the reclassification of Pluto.

Current IAU definitions (Wikipedia):

A planet is a celestial body orbiting a star or stellar remnant that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity, not massive enough to cause thermonuclear fusion, and has cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals.

A dwarf planet is a celestial body orbiting the Sun that is massive enough to be rounded by its own gravity but which has not cleared its neighbouring region of planetesimals and is not a satellite. The body has to have sufficient mass for its self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces in order to assume a hydrostatic equilibrium and acquire a near-spherical shape.

All other objects orbiting the Sun shall be referred to collectively as Small Solar System Bodies. These currently include most of the Solar System asteroids, comets, the centaurs and Neptune Trojans, most Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNOs), and other small bodies. It is not presently clear whether a lower size bound will be established as part of the definition of Small Solar System Bodies in the future, or if it will encompass all material down to the level of meteoroids.

A natural satellite or moon is a celestial body that orbits a planet or smaller body, which is called the primary.

A meteoroid is a small sand to boulder-sized particle of debris in the Solar System.

EDIT 2: A plutoid is a trans-Neptunian dwarf planet. The IAU developed this category of astronomical objects as a consequence of its 2006 resolution defining the word "planet". The IAU's formal definition of 'plutoid,' announced 11 June 2008, is:

Plutoids are celestial bodies in orbit around the Sun at a semimajor axis greater than that of Neptune that have sufficient mass for their self-gravity to overcome rigid body forces so that they assume a hydrostatic equilibrium (near-spherical) shape, and that have not cleared the neighbourhood around their orbit. Satellites of plutoids are not plutoids themselves.

Makemake: Fourth Dwarf Planet Named For Polynesian God

Polish people in Britain are being told the weather is a good subject with which to strike up a conversation with a stranger. But is it? The Magazine's Tom Geoghegan puts the theory to the test.

BBC NEWS | Magazine | 'Nice day today, isn't it?'

http://www.ted.com Neuroanatomist Jill Bolte Taylor had an opportunity few brain scientists would wish for: One morning, she realized she was having a massive stroke. As it happened -- as she felt...

Very interesting.

YouTube - How it feels to have a stroke

COLLEGE PARK, Md. -- NASA's Deep Impact spacecraft has created a video of the moon transiting (passing in front of) Earth as seen from the spacecraft's point of view 31 million miles away. Scientists are using the video to develop techniques to study alien worlds.

NASA's Deep Impact Films Earth as an Alien World

When Israel swapped prisoners and corpses with Hezbollah this week, a flood of propaganda followed. Hezbollah's leader, Hassan Nasrallah, depicted the return of five prisoners and the remains of 199 Lebanese killed in the 2006 war as a way of achieving Hezbollah's original goal when it kidnapped two Israeli soldiers - an act that ignited the war.
...
But beyond all tactical and political considerations, there is something morally repulsive in the hero's welcome given the most famous - or notorious - of the Lebanese prisoners released by Israel. Samir Kuntar had been sentenced to 542 years in prison for killing four people during a raid in 1979. Kuntar executed a father, Danny Haran, in front of his 4-year-old daughter. Then he killed the little girl by smashing her head against a rock with a rifle butt.

This is the creature Nasrallah hailed as a resistance hero, the figure Hamas Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh called a "hero who sacrificed 30 years of his life for the Palestinian issue."

All wars are inhumane. But not all warriors lose their humanity.

absolutely

A strange kind of hero - International Herald Tribune

Consider the International Space Station, that marvel of incremental engineering. It has close to 15,000 cubic feet of livable space; 10 modules, or living and working areas; a Canadian robot arm that can repair the station from outside; and the capacity to keep five astronauts (including the occasional wealthy rubbernecking space tourist) in good health for long periods. It has gleaming, underused laboratories; its bathroom is fully repaired; and its exercycle is ready for vigorous mandatory workouts.
...
Send the ISS somewhere.

The ISS, you see, is already an interplanetary spacecraft -- at least potentially. It's missing a drive system and a steerage module, but those are technicalities. Although it's ungainly in appearance, it's designed to be boosted periodically to a higher altitude by a shuttle, a Russian Soyuz or one of the upcoming new Constellation program Orion spacecraft. It could fairly easily be retrofitted for operations beyond low-Earth orbit. In principle, we could fly it almost anywhere within the inner solar system -- to any place where it could still receive enough solar power to keep all its systems running.
...
Let's begin the process of turning the ISS from an Earth-orbiting caterpillar into an interplanetary butterfly.

It's All Decked Out. Give It Somewhere to Go. - washingtonpost.com