What is there to do on a rainy Memorial Day weekend? After getting rained out of climbing at Eldo, I sat on my couch and watched all three episodes of the Lord of the Ring while eating pepperoni pizza from Dominoes.
I am a fat lazy bastard.
Apologies for the long delay, but I’ve been sick as hell lately. Also, quite honestly, writing about this subject really isn’t that fun, but I promised I would, so here we go.
First, to address Dave’s comment, all the alternate possibilities for influence he listed, I count as diplomacy.
Matt’s comment is one that I agree with, and it’s the reason why I find myself struggling with my thoughts on the war. Remember, my initial post in this series was that: even though the original premise of the war was wrong, are our current goals for the region worth it? In other words, do the ends justify the means?
Ok, I just decided that I’m tired of writing about this subject. There are more interesting things out there in the world, and I’m far from being a political pundit. In other news, I just setup my brother with his own blog and found out that he got an invite to audition for Jeopardy!.
After reading the comments I received for yesterday’s entry, I felt that they deserved a response. I’ll try demonstrate how a “thinking person” can also be a hawk.
Matt makes one important point (among a few snarky comments), which is, to what extent should America be the world’s police force? The easy flip answer to that question is, “to the extent that our nation is safe”. The real answer takes a bit more thought, which I’ll try to explore in the next few days.
The point from yesterday’s post is that it’s not easy to use great power wisely in order to exert influence in a group wherein the members have conflicting goals.
That in mind, there are multiple ways to exert influence, and it would do well to remind ourselves that the military is a *political* tool. If and when diplomacy fails, the only other resort to exert your influence is military action. Again, the rub is that it takes immense wisdom to decide when diplomacy has truly failed and that you need military action in order to get what you want.
So let’s ask ourselves a few questions and attempt to frame the argument. First, who are the threats to America’s security? To make this a meaningful question, you also need to sort them in rank order, most dangerous to least. Second, once the threats have been identified, what are their capabilities? Third, after you’ve identified the threats and capabilities, what is the intent or likelihood that they will exercise their capabilities to effect their threats?
That’s enough for today. Tomorrow, we’ll try and flesh out the framing a bit.
For those of you who haven’t read the Downing Street memo, go ahead and take a look. It’s been described as a “smoking gun” that proves that the war in Iraq was based on a whole lot of nothing. The CS Monitor has an article that wonders why no one in the US is upset about this revealation.
Me, I don’t know what to believe. I read The Threatening Storm a while back and was rather convinced by its premise that if Saddam didn’t have WMD at the time, he was trying his damndest to get them. As such, I supported the initial invasion of Iraq, even if the pretenses given to the American public were false. To my mind, the end here of removing Saddam did justify the means.
Now, after having read this memo, the most disturbing line is about ” the intelligence and facts were being fixed around the policy.” What does that mean? Did Pollack get it completely wrong? Or does this line refer to lying about certain specific facts at the time in order to justify an invasion?
My interpretation is the latter, since I have a hard time believing that a former CIA intelligence officer whose specialty was Iraq would write an entire book that was completely off. Should the Bush administration be held accountable for lying to the public? Yes. The key question, though, is: was Saddam dangerous enough to the world where any means necessary was justified to oust him? I don’t know. Pollack posited that it was a matter of when and not if Saddam got nukes, and that when he got them, he was definitely going to use them.
Of course, it’s a bit silly to base an entire worldview around one book, but still, I believe the man had a point. And it’s because of his conclusion that I’m conflicted now. I suppose the point of my rambling in this entry is to show you that international politics is most emphatically not black and white and that it’s not easy to use power wisely. Anyone who wishes to cast holier-than-thou moral aspersions on Bush’s administration for this war is naive, in my opinion.
One of my biggest pet peeves is the “cute” moniker Itanic for Itanium. Using it pretty much means you don’t know shit about shit. To a lesser extent, I’m annoyed by linux zealots who think that proprietary unix is dead. It ain’t (not yet at least).
HP reported its quarterly results today.
My favorite paragraph:
Enterprise Storage and Servers (ESS) reported revenue of $4.2 billion, up 6% over the prior-year period. On a year-over-year basis, industry-standard server revenue increased 12%, business-critical systems (BCS) revenue grew 2% and networked storage revenue was down 6%. Within BCS, revenue in HP Integrity servers grew 37% year-over-year and HP-UX revenue grew 9%. ESS reported operating profit of $184 million, or 4.4% of revenue, up from a profit of $119 million in the prior-year period. Included in the quarterly results is $24 million in workforce reduction costs.
37% growth in Integrity (IA-64) and 9% growth in HP-UX doesn’t exactly sound like a death knell to me.
Yes, I suck because I haven’t been blogging much recently. In a desparate attempt to write something (anything), I am forced to pull up a week-old email and post it here while I try and get my writing brain back in order.
So last week, I went to go see The Shins, who were rocketed to fame after the movie Garden State came out. We drove down to the Fillmore in Denver which is a pretty cool venue.
I was scared at first that it was going to be a high school scream fest after seeing the kind of crowd developing outside, but it turns out that the older (read: over 21) crowd really showed up after the opener.
Speaking of which, The Brunettes opened, and they were really fun. Interesting sound, good stage presence with lots of silly goofing around, and having two hot girls in the band surely didn’t hurt. I actually ended up buying one of their cds, which is perhaps the first physical piece of music recording that I’ve purchased in about 3 years. You should buy it too (Mars Loves Venus).
The Shins were solid. Energetic, polished, and tight. You could tell that they’d been around the block a few times compared to the Brunettes (which is to be expected, natch). Still, I actually had more fun during the Brunettes.
Overall a great time, and the fact that I was home by midnight for bed was a bonus. (yes I’m getting old)
So I’ve blogged about creationism before, mostly talking about the framing fast one that creationists are trying to pull. I touched a bit on the point of science — testable hypotheses — but the main idea from before was controlling the framing battle.
A new article on creationism in the CSMonitor brings up some interesting points. From the article:
[...] critics of Charles Darwin’s theory of natural selection are equipping families with books, DVDs, and a list of “10 questions to ask your biology teacher.”
The intent is to plant seeds of doubt in the minds of students as to the veracity of Darwin’s theory of evolution.
To this, I say great! This is *exactly* the point of science. Incidentally, this is exactly the point of why “creationists” and “scientists” are talking past each other and cannot engage in rational debate.
First, as I’ve mentioned before, science is not some litany handed down from generation to generation to be memorized by rote and puked back out on some test. It’s a process where you pick an interesting question and try to find data that answers it. The groups of people who disagree with evolution are trying a new tactic that actually encourages students to become better scientists, as they point out holes in the traditional arguments, such as:
Why do textbooks use pictures of peppered moths camouflaged on tree trunks as evidence for natural selection - when biologists have known since the 1980s that the moths don’t normally rest on tree trunks, and all the pictures have been staged?
If their questions help weed out some bad science, fantastic! That’s exactly the point — to get rid of shoddy data and replace it with correct information.
Unfortunately, the problem with the creationists is twofold. First, they don’t go far enough after poking holes in the argument. They claim victory in merely pointing out the holes, and then declare that the theory of evolution is obviously wrong. What they don’t understand is that scientific theories are *meant* to change and get updated as new information becomes available. They seem to be trapped in the same mentality as if you were to debate the existence of God, wherein if one could point out a logical hole in the argument for God’s existence, then the whole structure would come crumbling down and there really wouldn’t be a reason to believe in God. Science, unfortunately, doesn’t work this way. You can get individual facts wrong (and correct them later, of course) but the overall big picture can still be correct.
The second problem with creationists is that they make the logical fallacy that after they have “disproved” evolution, that the only other solution must be creationism. This is a classic example of a false dilemma, and so having pointed that out, we don’t really need to discuss it further.
After all that’s said and done, the teachers are not blame-free either. They should look at their students’ questions as opportunities to learn more about what they are teaching, and not as a personal attack. It doesn’t hurt to be reminded every once in a while that science is not a litany and that not all the answers are known. The best quote from the story comes from Ralph Peterson:
“I teach the limits of science,” Mr. Peterson says. “Science does not discuss the existence of God because that’s outside the realm of science.”