The region stretching from Morocco to the border of India had almost no lights.

War of Ideas, Part 6

"2004 is not an ordinary election; it is a referendum on the Bush doctrine. The future of the world hangs in the balance. That is the other point that I want to make; it is not enough to defeat President Bush. We must also develop and adopt a more constructive vision."

You can read a transcript of the speech, or you can download an MP3 of the introduction, speech, and discussion.

George Soros, Bubble Book Boy

] Anyway, for this we also needed something moving or
] changing very fast, so we decided to build a bolt gun. Of
] course, bolt guns aren't very fun unless you can see, in
] great detail, the object they are hitting explode, so
] these two projects seemed like a match made in nerd
] heaven. With the aforementioned micro-controller, we
] simply had no choice but to build a flash timing
] mechanism to capture images of hot bolt-on-food action.

The tale of what evils can occur when 3 nerds from MIT are bored over winter break. They build a bolt gun power by a BASIC stamp, that takes cool bolt-traveling-through-fruit-at high-velocity photos

Fruit Killing bolt gun powered by BASIC!

] The Economist magazine, hardly an anti-American
] newsweekly, called Rumsfeld's remarks "unworthy of a
] nation which has cherished the rule of law from its very
] birth."

The Christian Science Monitor rounds up several articles on the military tribunal's in Cuba. In short, the precedent of giving the president this type of open ended power is bad. This administration doesn't seem to like any kind of civilian review or consent process for anything..

News round up on Cuba detainees

] Is that our productivity is up but we aren't producing enough.

Tom on deficits, labor and otherwise..

The Problem...

In a forceful preview of the Bush administration's expansionist military policies in this election year, Vice President Dick Cheney Wednesday painted a grim picture of what he said was the growing threat of a catastrophic terrorist attack in the United States and warned that the battle, like the Cold War, could last generations.

If a newspaper could have a soundtrack, you might expect to hear a bear growling on a windy, stormy night, with a wolf or two howling from the hills in the distance. Every few minutes, the rumble of an incoming mortar attack. And in between, the uncomortable silence of the things you can't hear.

Cheney's grim vision: decades of war

] global networks

] a traveling retrospective of 25 works by mark lombardi
] organized by independent curators international, new york
] curated by robert hobbs

] yerba buena center for the arts. san francisco,
] california - 17 january - 4 april, 2004

This opens up this Saturday.. I will most certainly check this out while it is in town.

mark lombardi @ pierogi 2000

] We would achieve this balance by issuing what I will call
] Import Certificates...

This was a lot of information to digest. I too, am not at all savvy with my knowledge of macroeconomics. The best I can say is that this sounds like a pretty reasonable method of constructing a tariff that is both country and product neutral. This would not have been a reasonable idea several years ago, but given electronic markets I could see lively trade of these ICs Buffet suggests creating.

Trade deficits are something to be worried about.. However, I also don't necessarily think everything we "export" is something that can be laid out in a spreadsheet.

Jeremy meme'd something recently about outsourcing where he made a suggestion that in come cases we are making the choice between wealth and security, and there is a balance. There are countries we may find desirable to have a deficit with in order to drive positive growth in their local economy, hence positive change in their society. We do export freedom and democracy, and it comes back in many forms. There is a degree to which this is a hard^Wimpossible thing to fully account for..

This also makes me think of another meme Jeremy recommended about counter-insurgency.. There is a degree to which we are spending our wealth to dry up support for ideals and groups which lead to our security problems. Our wealth is one of the few things we can toss around to confront these asymmetric threats.

Buffet: America's growing trade deficit is selling the nation out from under us.

] Some pictures of Brad Blines (aka CrankyMessiah)

I've been working on something for Brad. It should be online soon..

Brad Blines Pictures

] What is clear is that al Qaeda is at a crossroads and --
] like the United States in the spring of 2002 -- it does
] not have really good choices, and therefore, must choose
] the best of a bad lot. Al Qaeda's original war plan is
] obsolete. The straight line it drew from Sept. 11 to the
] Caliphate has hit a wall. Bin Laden knows it. He doesn't
] have a good Plan B, but he will have to cook one up
] anyway. The war is not over, but for the moment, it is al
] Qaeda's turn to sweat out a solution to a difficult
] strategic problem. If they can't do that, then the war
] could very well be over, at least for this generation.

If anyone ever wants to do anything blindly nice for me, get me a Stratfor Premium subscription. However, this might take MemeStreams development to a crawl.. No.. Don't do that.

Al Q might be cooked...