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We're 12.5% done in Iraq. Though we need to pick up the pace a bit. At one province every 4 months, it would take us 4 years to leave.
Hat Tip: Murdoc Online which is also where I got the picture.
Technorati Tags: Iraq
From the C-Span Store you can buy a DVD of Thomas Barnett's “Pentagon's New Map” briefing. I don't agree with everything he says, but he's definitely on to something.
Why Mommy is a Democrat a children's book. Here's a couple of samples:
(pictures will “popup”)
That's right, Democrats will keep you safe from the evil rich guys, because we all know how many rich folk commit violent crimes. On the other hand, when that guy in the trenchcoat goes bezerk and tries to kill you, you'll be shit out of luck, since you won't have a gun to defend yourself. Or maybe the guy in the trenchcoat is a child molester released on early parole? Hard to say...
Wow, this is even more classic. Traditionally its been Republicans who've been for tax deductions for college, and Democrats who've been against. Note that Mom's a Vegan: her kids have to eat an apple and carrot for lunch.
Mom's a vegan, AND a communist. Mommy shares her toys with her kids? Hmmm... You could get arrested for that... Note that mom isn't giving the crazed homeless pedophile any help either...
This book is obviously a plot by Karl Rove. If I was a kid and I was forced to read this book, I'd be a confirmed capital-R-Republican...because the subtext of this book is that Democrats are pussies...
Hat Tip: Matt
Anyone who's read both:
The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-first Century
Freakonomics : A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of EverythingAnd manages to tie them together! Deserves a link. It's kind of about how crack gangs are like the insurgency in Iraq.
These are the tools I'm using on MacOSX.
For my to-do list, I'm using OmniOutliner with Kinkless GTD. The nice thing about this system is that I can hierarchically organize my projects/tasks, then easily switch to just seeing the appropriate context.
For email, I'm using a set of things. First I'm using Act-On a plugin for Apple Mail. I have the standard GTD folders in mail: @Action, @Archives, @Read, @Reference, @Someday, @WaitingFor. I've set Act-On so that if I hit the space bar and then another key, that it shoves the email into that folder. Act-On's default setting was the ` key, but that was too hard to use. I've made one tweak, as a friend of mine gave me this AppleScript which I put in ~/Library/Scripts/Mail Scripts. What this does is store emails in folders by year/month. So I have that wired to the “archive” action in Act-On. That makes my archive folders a little more manageable. One addition that's unique to me is that I have a “Registration” folder where I file usernames/passwords from websites.
This morning I added a new AppleScript to mail, found here. I then added an action to iCal to run this script every morning. This lets me do email ticklers, which is something I was trying to figure out how to do. Annoyingly, it puts it in a folder named @INBOX instead of my main inbox, and I haven't figured out how to fix that. So now I can send emails to myself in the future. Write an email: save it, which puts it in “Drafts”, then drag it to the appropriate ticker folder.
Other things I've figured out: For capturing things, I've scattered a stacks of 3x5 cards with a mini-binder clip throughout the house, and I carry one. When a thought occurs to me (and with the whole Mind Like Water thing it happens a lot now), I scribble it on the card and dump it in my inbox, which is a physical tray. The next day I collect them all when doing my daily review and enter them into kGTD.
This is where there's some synergy between Qi Gong and GTD. When I'm doing Qi Gong, I often get “mindplay”, usually relating to projects/tasks. Now I write them down on a 3x5 card and I can forget about them. This turns out to be a good way to empty my mind into my collection basket, because my mind can get bored doing Qi Gong, and will dredge up anything I still have floating around. You don't have to learn Qi Gong to do this. Try counting your exhales up to 100. As things occur to you, write them down on a 3x5 card, then start over. If you can get to 100 (you'll find this is amazingly hard), your mind is empty.
For those “@home” items, I've made two contexts. One is called “Morning” and the other “Evening”. That's how I'm dealing with the issue most people have where GTD for work is easy, but more of a problem for @home stuff.
Things I haven't figured out yet: How to do a weekly review. I have to re-read that section of the book as I actually either haven't done one yet, or have been doing it every 2 days...
One of the things that's helped me in all this is reading:
FIRST THINGS FIRSTbefore I read GTD, which helped me realize that I needed to do Important items before Urgent items. That helped when I had my own consulting business, and Franklin Covey organizers worked well for me then. When I became a worker bee for Marketocracy, it didn't help so much because I had a long list of things to do, rather then a list of things I needed to do on a certain date. That is, 90% of what you have to do involves doing a certain thing on a certain date, organizers are great because they're like a 12-month ticker file. When what you have to do every day is “work on my giant to-do list”, organizers don't help so much.
Of course, Covey would argue that once/week you schedule some of your to-do items into various days of the week, but that doesn't work for programming tasks that are “work on this until its done”. You end up just forwarding the to-do forward day after day, picking up others as you go. That's the problem with iCal too...
Rich Bloggy Goodness Right Here
Excerpt:
Now, see, Allah is definitively not down with gayness, but when you're chillin' in the garage with your fellow Jihadis, sometimes you get a little frisky. This is normal. The good news is, Mohammed never said anything specific about not jabbing each others' poo, if you know what I mean. Just remember, though; don't go falling in love with another man, because, well, that's totally gay.
Osama is the far right Geek. Notice how Osama doesn't have a girlfriend? Small wonder why he finds 72 virgins so attractive. Of course, his mother was a concubine Ho. Small wonder he has issues.
Hat Tip: Zarqawi's Blog
Over at Security Watchtower. He's taken the numbers from the Brookings report (that reminds me, have to do that today) and broken the insurgency into 4 phases:
Needs some charts though. :-)
My monthly analysis of the Brookings Institute Iraq Index report looking for trends. Enjoy.
Update: The DOD has commented that there will be 225,000 Iraqi troops available by December 15th for the election, so that means about 10,000 per month. So 10 months to get to 325,000 so perhaps October of 2006 to reach the target goal for Iraqi troops.
Technorati Tags: Iraq
Continue reading "Analysis of November's Brookings Report" »
Short and sweet, its a list of each coalition and their plusses and minuses.
Seems confusing, I wonder if the Iraqis will end up “voting for the man and not the party”?
Technorati Tags: Iraq
It's kind of scary that I scored higher on this then I did on the US (88% vs 80% for the US). Though mostly that's because it was a lot easier to match up coastlines then it was to do those square midwestern states exactly. :-)
I've used up the sample spool of label tape that came with my labelmaker.
Even worse, I used it up labeling the file cabinets in the garage where my wife “filed” the big tools like the drills and the saws because I was tired of having to search through each drawer to find stuff.
So I've gone from never making a label in my life to labeling stuff my wife does (who's generally more organized then me, she needs First Things First not Getting Things Done ).
Speaking of which, I got another friend of mine to join the cult. As he put it: "I've never felt so good about spending $200 on office supplies."
Technorati Tags: GTD
Here's a cooking tip:
Cut the onions first.
Why? Well, the real tip is that if you rub your hands with celery after cutting onions, it will remove the smell from your hands (which seems to be hard to wash off with regular soap).
Except that's much more complicated to remember, and it works for other vegetables besides celery.
So I just cut the onions first, because I rarely use onions alone so if I just cut them first by the time I've cut all the other vegetables, the onion smell has been driven away.
This is especially useful this time of year if you're making stuffing: cut the onions first, then the celery, then transfer the celery to the mixing bowl by scooping it off the cutting board with your hands rather then scraping.
Technorati Tags: lifehacks
Last Year I bought a printer from Epson and got a rebate for $20. Except instead of sending me a check, they sent me this weird debit card for www.myecount.com. So when I was cleaning out my office, I found the stupid thing and tried to use it. No go. So I went to their website.
Turns out they charge you $3/month for every month you don't use the card.
I now have only $5 on the card, which is going to be almost impossible to use.
So let me get this straight. Instead of giving me $20, Epson has given these guys $15?
Idiots. Once burned, twice shy. I won't be trusting Epson for a while now. Don't these guys know it takes a long time to gain a customer's trust, but only an instant to lose it?
Those HP printers are looking better now...
Being a female suicide bomber is like being a black KKK member.
Technorati Tags: Iraq
So I was reading one of the Iraqi Blogs and came upon this post, linking to this article. The comment was:
Military autopsy reports provide indisputable proof that detainees are being tortured to death while in US military custody. Yet the US corporate media are covering it with the seriousness of a garage sale for the local Baptist Church.
Except I actually followed all the links over to the ACLU site here.
Out of these 44 supposed torture autopsies, 31 out of the 44 reports the cause of death is natural or an accident.
Some of the other deaths are caused by the fact that the person was actively fighting with the troops that captured them, then died later from those injuries.
Even some of the “homicides” happened during problems at the prison:
Iraqi male detainee in U.S custody was killed by a shotgun wound to the head. The shot was delivered by coalition force guards when a group of prisoners became unruly.
If you accept everything the American Left accepts as “truth” instead of “rhetoric” you're going to end up hating everything about America. Realize that the CounterPunch guy is trying to make a point, so recognize the point, but don't trust anything he says until you follow up.
I think the real point is that America actively investigates and autopsies these deaths instead of just dumping them in a mass grave. I think that speaks well of us. I'm sure that there have been problems with the US-run prisons. I see no reason why the US would get an exemption from the history of prisons in the world.
But don't get sucked into the hysteria of the screamers. That's one of the reasons I'm always looking for reports from Iraqis or Soldiers about Iraq, and why I have a whole section of my blog called Ground Truth.
So while this report is disturbing, I don't find the ACLU report that interesting. In fact, I'd take them more seriously if they weren't inflating the body count to 44 by including the deaths from natural causes.
The Black Iris of Jordan posts his list of 50 things he'd like to change in Jordanian society.
Here's a few:
The more people are different, the more they are the same.
Could he go back to obscurity already? Geesh.
A friend of mine gave me this tip: He always downloads the combo installers for Mac OS X rather then use System Update. He claims that the big installers update a little more than the incremental and they tend to fix any outstanding errors in his system.
It helped fix a machine I had that wasn't bringing up the login screen, so I think I'll be doing that as well from now on.
Technorati Tags: MacOSX
Donald Rumsfeld has an editorial in the Wall Street Journal about Iraq and the Media. It's a transcript of his speech for Monday at Johns Hopkins.
63% of people in the news media thought the enterprise would fail. So did 71% of people in the foreign affairs establishment and 71% in academic settings or think tanks. Interestingly, opinion leaders from the U.S. military are optimistic about Iraq by a margin of 64% to 32%. And so is the American public, by a margin of 56% to 37%.
Which view of Iraq is more accurate? The pessimistic view of so-called elites in our country--or the optimism expressed by millions of Iraqis and by the roughly 158,000 troops on the ground? But, most important is the question: why should Iraq's success or failure matter to the American people? I'd like to address these questions today.
Like everything the real Donald does, it's not rah-rah, but rather a fair assessment of the good and bad in Iraq. The Bad:
* Bursts of violence, including continued assassinations and attempts to intimidate Iraqi leaders and those supporting the legitimate Iraqi government.
* Continuing U.S. and Iraqi casualties.
* Iran and Syria continue to be notably unhelpful.
The Good:
* The political process is on schedule. Iraqis have a Constitution they wrote and voted for, and hundreds of candidates are politicking for the elections.
* There seem to be growing divisions among the enemies of the Iraqi people, particularly after the bombing of a wedding reception in Amman, Jordan.
* More of Iraq's neighbors now seem to believe this new democracy might succeed and are moving to get right with the Iraqi people by being more active in their support.
* A vital and engaged media is emerging, with some 100 newspapers, 72 radio stations, and 44 television stations.
* Sunnis are increasingly taking part in the political process, further isolating those who still oppose the legitimate Iraqi government.
Perhaps he reads the Opinionated Bastard, because he's trying to define the victory conditions:
To be responsible, one needs to stop defining success in Iraq as the absence of terrorist attacks. As Sen. Joe Lieberman recently suggested, a better measure of success might be that a vast majority of Iraqis--tens of millions--are on the side of the democratic government, while a comparatively small number are opposed. This gives the Iraqi people an enormous advantage over time.
Anyways, read the whole thing.
Technorati Tags: Iraq
So if you see me recommending this article about the French Riots from a female point of view, you'll know its worth reading.
I liked Aeon Flux.
Looking at the movie reviews though, you'd think it was the worst movie ever...
It's not. In fact, its one of the best science fiction movies I've seen in that it doesn't talk down to the audience.
Of course, it's not really Aeon Flux, the movie. I didn't expect it to be, because the original Aeon Flux was sort of this oblique commentary on the whole Cold War. From the trailers, I knew that wasn't going to happen (the Monicans are no longer a separate country but “rebels”), so about 30 minutes into the movie, I decided to evaluate it as a regular science fiction movie. In that case, I found it pretty good.
It's fun, stylized, and makes you think. The future actually looks like the future, instead of “like the present only different”.
I found it to be like Gattaca, only entertaining...
Though, sure, the Original Aeon Flux was better (in an artsy sort of way), I still enjoyed the movie.
From Scott Adams of dilbert fame.
If you liked Zarqawi's Website you'll like this too.
Over at A Citizen of Mosul:
The convoy was coming toward the intersection with very laud warning horn, they usually come too fast expecting the police to open the street for them by blocking the movement in the other directions and keeping the way free for them. This poor policeman was either un aware of the convoy or he intentionally don't care,when they come to the intersection it wasn't completely free. And he deserve to be executed for his unforgivable sin.
When I went to the polling stations a little over a year ago, no one shot at me or beat me up.
Over at Opinion Journal, Peggy Noonan is trying to make some sort of point about Immigration policy:
What does it mean when your first act is to break the laws of your new country? What does it mean when you know you are implicitly supported in lawbreaking by that nation's ruling elite? What does it mean when you know your new country doesn't even enforce its own laws? What does it mean when you don't even have to become an American once you join America?
Her whole point is severely diluted by her opening anecdote:
I recently found out through one of her daughters that my grandmother spent her first night in America on a park bench in downtown Manhattan. She had made her way from Ireland to Ellis Island, and a cousin was to meet the ship. It was about 1920. The cousin didn't show. So Mary Dorian, age roughly 20, all alone, with no connections and no relatives interested enough to remember her arrival in the new world, spent her first night in America alone on a bench, in the dark, in a strange country. Later she found her way to Brooklyn and became a bathroom attendant at the big Abraham & Straus department store on Fulton Street.
Peggy, did you know that sleeping on a park bench in downtown Manhattan is illegal? Should I ask your grandmother the same questions you seem to be asking illegal immigrants?
I don't think you'd like the answers.
Peggy concludes with:
The problem with our elites as they make our immigration policy is not that they have compassion and open-mindedness. It is that they are unknowing and empty-headed. They don't know, most of them, what others had to earn, and how much they, and their descendents, prize it and want to protect it.
The problem with our elites is that they've never talked to an actual living immigrant, legal or illegal. That includes you Peggy.
A friend of mine from Australia is on his 5th year of living here on a visa. Each year he has to apply, and one year later, he gets the visa...in time for it to expire...
Our immigration system is totally broken, legal or illegal. Perhaps the real answer is not to worry about whether these “illegal immigrants” are breaking the law, but to look at the law itself. Perhaps what they're doing shouldn't be illegal?
I don't mean opening the border completely, but if you make it easier to be legal then illegal, people will be legal. This is the “iTunes” lesson.
Our immigration policy is designed to make the unions and the population feel good, but as someone who lives in a border state I can say its all window dressing. 3,000 miles of border is always going to be a problem. This sort of editorial just points out to me the vacuousness of the debate: Peggy is comparing her grandmother's experience during the period when immigration was relatively open to the Latino experience now? If her grandmother was willing to cross an ocean, alone, and sleep on a park bench isn't it possible she would have been willing to sneak into the country as well?
Bah. I'm beginning to think that only California, Arizona, New Mexico, Florida and Texas should be allowed to set immigration policy. The other 45 states are just getting in the way.
Hat Tip: Terrorism Unveiled which had an interesting article pointing out that only 69 people voted for George Washington, etc.
M-A-Y-O-R of San Francisco needs to lighten up.
Hat tip: California Conservative
Nice to know the cops in San Francisco have a sense of humor even if the mayor doesn't.
Pajamas Media put me onto this poll of the Iraqis.
Here are some charts to explain the data a little more clearly:
Wow. 70.6% of the Iraqis say their life is good? Were things this good under Saddam? Guess not...
Life is better for most Iraqi's then it used to be under Saddam. Is this temporary?
Nope, 60% of Iraqis think things will be even better a year from now! (Inshallah means “god willing”, and is just me being funny, it really means “don't know” from the survey). Looks like the Iraqis are a victim of their own media though, while most of them are doing better, more of them think the the country isn't doing as well:
Though they are even more optimistic for the country as a whole a year from now:
The top 3 things Iraqis thought would be the best thing that could happen to Iraq would be:
A better life
The fourth choice was American forces leaving Iraq, but that was only 5.7% of the count (more people answered “not sure”). An Islamic government was .1% with only 2 people choosing that. Of the things people chose from their list, over 90% of them expected that “best thing” to happen would happen in the next year.
Iraqis think Democracy is best:
And they have high hopes for the elections:
There's lots of data in the survey, I just picked out the ones I thought needed graphs the most. Here's a fun one though:
In fact, overall, the Iraqis were pretty open-minded about women:
There was bad news in the survey as well, I just expect you can get that from the regular media. In a nutshell though, they think the coalition sucks, but they don't want us to leave quite yet.
Get your “Opinionated Bastard Coffee Mug” right here
T-Shirts buttons and some other fun stuff there as well too.
My wife asked me this morning, here was my answer:
Of course, I've said that before, in a more long-winded version here.
This morning, an inspiring story in the Wall Street Journal about a 31 year old journalist who just joined the Marines.
Consistently, the Wall Street Journal coverage of the war has been much better then the New York Times or the Washington Post. I think that's because while the NYT and WP are after ratings, the WSJ is trying to make their customers money.
So distortions and hype don't fly. Kudos to the WSJ.
While I found Blueprint for Action a work of staggering genius and naiveté, tdaxp has been making fun of it lately.
Here's episode 1
Here's episode 2
Thomas Barnett is best for making you think in new ways about foreign policy, but following his strategies blindly would be well, like turning over the world to the French...
Or in my case Kurdish
Take the test at the link above and see which parties you like in the Iraqi election!
This is my own version of a cake recipe I found on the internet one day looking for “espresso chocolate cake”. My main tweak is that I use Hershey's Cocoa powder and butter instead of the baking chocolate. That way there's nothing to melt, so this cake is even easier to make...
Sauce: 3 packages of Frozen raspberries in syrup 10 oz each
If you can't find the ones in syrup, you'll have to mix in a LOT of sugar.
Cake:
1.5 cups cocoa powder
5.5 sticks butter
1 cup white sugar
1 c Freshly brewed espresso
1 c Golden brown sugar; packed
8 lg Eggs; beaten to blend
Parchment Paper, Cake Pans with high walls
If you want to be fancy:
Some powder
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