East Asia Roundup by Winds of Change is up, talking about events in China, Korea, Japan and other countries.

The Uygurs.
One thing in the east Asia roundup that caught my eye was the holding of some Uygurs at Guantanamo Bay. Uygurs are people of Turkish decent, practicing Muslims, who reside in the eastern reaches of China. They have no friends in central Asia, as China suppresses them brutally and the surrounding countries are afraid of losing Chinese economic trade if they intervene.
(Note: by Turkish decent I am refering to the same band of Turks that originated in Northern China/Manchuria that eventually made their way over to what is now modern Turkey. They have resided there for probably over 1500 years)

The real Quagmire.

Sixty years after Paris was seized by the "Allies," and the beginning of the American occupation, France remains a failed nation, mired in political corruption and beset by vast pockets of Muslim extremism, into which the gendarmerie fear to tread. The economy continues to struggle under economic policies driven by failed ideologies, and many of its best and brightest continue to flow out of the country, with only ex-dictators and their families, and hysterical movie stars willing to move there.

Sadly, history has born out the predictions of those who warned against invading in the spring of 1944. Many had pointed out what a poor prospect the region was for any kind of democracy, with its long history of belligerence and arrogance, and failed republics.

Ha! (hat tip: Instapundit.)

Voting methods
Speaking of high tech voting programs, such as the one used in the Venezuelan recall election, lets take a look at the United states and how we vote. Voting methods got lots of thought after the last presidential election when lots of people found they had voted wrongly because of what they perceived was a flawed system. Then there was the hanging chad thing. My opinion is that we should all go back to the big ugly lever system voting machine with curtain and all. No more voting from home. Come on down and participate like a good American.
Here is some data from Election Data Services showing stats on total usage of methods over the country as a whole. I was excited to see that there are still places that use the old mechanical lever systems. Election Data Services has maps of election methods and the results of the last several elections, but they are printed, and they charge for them.
ESRI (GIS software company) has both a voting method map and the result of the 2000 elections map by county. The interface to view them is a little cumbersome. Note how few states have only one method.

I also found one on USA Today but it's way out of date. 2001 I believe.
I generally don't like "prediction" maps, but this one is a good example of a thematic map where the polygons size reflects some value. Princeton University put this up. The states size is proportional to the number of electoral votes.

In other news, Boulder Colorado decided to replace its punch card voting system with an 8.5 x 11 sheet of paper with the candidates listed, and told to fill in the boxes with a ball point pen.
I also found this groovy picture of Bush on Corporatism.tripod.com while I was looking for maps:

People are so creative.

Rogue of the Month
I don't have a regular running thing where I pick someone every month who just completely drops the ball, but this month I thought I would single out someone who made life more difficult for millions of people, who sat back and allowed the freedoms of those people drop to the ground like so much lint in his pocket.
Am I talking about Michael Moore? George Bush? Kofi Annan? No.
I'm talking about Jimmy Carter. Mr. Carter was supposed to monitor the election in Venezuela this month, where the votes were being cast to recall Hugo Chavez and take the government back for the people. Instead, contrary to what political observers down there said was a 58% to 41% margin at the exit polls to regect the current government, Chavez won by the same margin.
Enter this article by Thor Halvorssen, who was there.

Later that morning the most important observer, former President Jimmy Carter, declared that he was shown the computer tally by government supporters and that everything seemed in order. Mr. Carter then left Venezuela, and the opposition groups that had put their faith in him to facilitate a peaceful resolution to the crisis. Mr. Carter, who was vociferous and insistent about patience, transparency and hand-tallies during the Florida recount, left Venezuela to attend Mrs. Carter's birthday party.

I'm sure the people of Venezuela are gratefull to all Mr. Carter's help in the matter. It's becoming pretty obvious now that Chavez pulled every trick in the book to alter the vote, from denying some people, importing non-citizens, to using computer voting software from a company that the government owned 28% of.
Shame on you Jimmy.

Country of the week.

When I started thinking about getting one of these out, after several weeks of no CotW columns, I was thinking about countries more on the forefront of peoples minds, like Greece or Venezuela. But instead I’m going to choose another one. This one is related to Greece, in that their histories have been inter-twined for thousands of years.

Turkey is a country resting in the fuzzy borderline of two continents. It is often called Asia-minor, in reference to it’s location east of the major western civilizations and that it’s mostly surrounded by water except on the Asia side. It is also a part of Europe economically and socially, and even politically as of late. One could argue that Turkey is the crossroads of civilization, not the middle east.

Turkey’s history starts about 9,000 years ago, when an early civilization, only discovered recently, inhabited the south central part of the country. It’s not certain how long it lasted, but was most likely ended by invading tribes from Europe. Later, around 2000 BC the Hittites were the dominant culture of Asia Minor, known before the Turks got there as Anatolia. After the Hittites, Anatolia entered another age where there were numerous competing tribes throughout the region.

I’m going to simplify this now, for brevity. From the end of the Hittite era, the cultures of Anatolia didn’t worry too much about unity, preferring the city-state, which was most notable on the western coast where Greeks and Greek culture began to settle and build cities. About 500 BC the Persians rose from the east and defeated the Lydians, one of the largest civilizations of Anatolia, and then went into Greece. The Greeks didn’t like this much and began to push back, in notable battles like Marathon and the Peloponnesian war. The Greeks didn’t care much for unity either, and were continually defeated until Alexander the Great united the city-states and drove the Persians back to the east. Alexander’s rule didn’t last long, and the entirety of the Greek empire lasted about 20 years. Greek culture in Anatolia lasted much longer.

On interesting event after that, but before the Romans, was that Celts came in, defeated a few tribes, and settled in northern-mid Anatolia. To this day red hair and other Celtic features can be seen in many Turkish people.

The Roman era was good for the people of Anatolia. The Romans extracted taxes, but generally left the region alone. However, their rule had an astounding affect on the Greeks, who developed a passion for finding meaning in things, art became wilder and imported gods became plentiful. It was this environment that led to the rapid expansion of Christianity throughout the region after Paul’s journeys.

When the Roman empire split up, the western part dissolved into semi-anarchy, but the eastern part continued to flourish, and was centered in Constantinople. The Byzantine empire was a Greek speaking, Christian culture. The empire lasted until the turn of the millennium, but only just. By then it had been beaten back to just Constantinople by invading cultures, the Persians, the Slavs, and the more recent Arab Muslims. The weight of bureaucratic government, with its crippling taxes and heavy church-centered authority didn’t help either. (Constantinople actually didn’t get taken until the 15^th century).

The Turks entered the region about 900 AD, originating in a region near Manchuria it is said. As they moved across Asia they converted to Islam. One of these tribes became the Ottomans, started by the sultan Osman, subjugated Constantinople, and took over the whole region. The Ottoman Empire lasted from the end of Constantinople until WWI, over 400 years. The glory years were definitely early on, with Mehmet the second and later Suleyman the Magnificent who in the mid 16^th century captured Egypt, North Africa and Hungary. From then on the empire was in decline. It took 300 years of Russian military pressure and European economic pressure, but the weight of the empire, the bureaucracy and immorality of the ruling class and their inability to keep up with Europe technologically led to their downfall. They lasted that long because the Europeans kept them alive in order to control the straits of Bosporus and impede the Russians from invading.

The empire finally expired during WWI, when they joined up with Germany to take on the world. The empire didn’t survive, but a military leader named Mustafa Kemal, who after the war somehow put an army together and drove the French and Russians out. Somehow he was able to negotiate a new treaty and the modern nation of Turkey was born. Kemal was given the name Ataturk by the people, and he started incredible reform and westernization. Turkey had a constitution, used the Roman alphabet, institutions were secularized, used the Christian calendar, adopted the Swiss Legal code, women had rights.

One interesting low point here was the part of the new treaty that “Exchanged populations” with Greece, where millions of Greeks were forced from Anatolia and thousands of Turks from Greece. We set the stage for ethnic cleansings of the 20^th century here I think.

The next several decades were of a democratic nation trying to grasp democracy. Each elected leader established what was a dictatorship in order to make reforms, all the while promising full democracy. The Democratic Party of the 60s attempted to create a one-party dictatorship, which was foiled with a coup by the army.

Until the late 80s, there were three coups and three constitutions. The last of which, under Turgut Ozal set the nation on a relatively smooth course ever since. Since then a radical Islamic party has tried to pry the nation away from it’s secular style government, but has not succeeded yet. The pressure is on to join the European Union, but the Earthquake in 1999 set the government back aways. Their inept handling of that event has caused much of the population to not trust that they can take care of the Turkish people.

Other national issues are the Kurds, who compose 20% of the population, mostly in the east. They have made their voices heard mostly through terrorism, and the Turkish government has been pretty heavy handed right back.

Turkey joined the UN in 1945 and NATO in 1952 (if you are a big MASH fan you may remember episodes where Turkish soldiers were brought to the unit for medical treatment).

The country is about as big as Texas, with about 69 million people.

The government is parliamentary republic, with a president who is elected by the National Assembly for 7 years, and a Prime Minister. The National Assembly has 550 members who are directly elected by the population. They have a court system as well.

The economy consists of modern industry, commerce, services and agriculture. Their largest exports are traditionally textiles and clothes. The currently is the Turkish Lira, which is about 1.5 million to the dollar. Inflation is out of control.

Their main international issues are Euro inclusion, Kurdish problems and the Cyprus conflict, which pits them protecting Turkish Cypriots against the southern Greek Cypriots. Relations with Greece are smoothing, especially since Greece helped them out a lot in the earthquake, but an election last year solidified the division of the island.

Their economic situation seems to be improving and the current prime minister, Erdogan, has instituted reforms, like it’s no longer a crime to admit you are a Kurd, that kind of thing.

<>Other news:
A Turk won gold lifting 380 pounds at the Olympics. They have 3 golds and one bronze medal. All of them are for weight lifting.
Turkey is being asked for observers to make sure the Afghan elections are fair.

Even bears are discerning in their beer choices.

They set a trap using as bait some doughnuts, honey and two cans of Rainier Beer. It worked, and the bear was captured for relocation.

Oil and Gas prices. OK there is going to be a lot of talk about high gas prices and how much the oil companies are gouging the consumers and what effect this will have on Bush's re-election chances in the next couple of months. Some people are confused as to why when oil prices are still high then why are gas prices falling at the moment. That's not too hard to explain when you look at the inventory of petrolium sitting around and oil companies trying to build a reserve of cash, by using a higher than usual profit margin, in case there is some sort of middle east, or Russian, or Venezuelan catastrophy.
Willamette week's (Portland local paper) headline story this week is about how all the evil oil companies are trying to stamp out competition and make deals with each other to get the greatest profit margin. The reason that oil prices are dropping is that consumers will alter their behavior eventually due to the higher prices and hurt the oil companies in the long run, so market to control themselves to a certain extent. WW's acusation is that gas prices could be even lower if certain dubious, but legal, methods of the oil companies were discouraged.
The problem with all that is that gas prices, as they relate to the spending power of consumers in 2004 dollars, are as cheep as they've every been. People just drive more and the gas bill takes up more of their paycheck. As late as 1999 the price of gas was 1.27 per gallon as opposed to 1919 when (in 2004 dollars) the price was 2.75 a gallon and in 1959 when it was 1.96 per gallon.
So who's taking the hit here? WW seems to insist that it's the local gas station operator, muscled by the major oil companies. You decide.
Really when I see a relatively liberal (but generally thoughtfull) paper complain about gas prices I would think they would be cheering for higher prices, as there is a threshold where consumers will begin to demand cars and other technology, which in some cases is already there, that consumes less oil. The technology is there for cars, but Americans tend to turn a blind eye to that in favor of more power and bigger vehicles.
Greg Easterbrook, of the New Republic, has been on this for a while now. His biggest grip, besides SUVs, is politicians and movie stars who spend lots of time talking about how bad SUVs are for the environment only to get into their private jets and scurry about the country sucking more petrolium than 1000 Hummers. I can't find the links at the moment though. I'll update this if I do.

New Zealand School system de-constructed. Here we have a nation realizing that pumping more money wasn't improving education, and discovered that almost 70% of the money was funding administration. In one fell blow they dissolved all the boards of education in the country and every school came under a board of trustees, directly elected by the parents, and all the per-student funding was given to each school without strings attached!
They also installed a voucher system. They thought that the public school enrollment would plummit, but it didn't. Instead teachers realized that if students left that the funding would fall and they would be out of a job, so the teaching got better and the students are performing better.
The percentage of students enrolled in public school was at 85%, fell to 84% and then rose to 87% three years later.
It's time for an education revolution people!

Update: There's been noise about a NY Times article siting stats that charter schools didn't do as well as public schools. Later it was found out that since charter schools serve more inner city kids and minorities, and the public schools stats used were for all demographics, the real stats showed that charters do about the same as public schools.
The real story here is that religious schools outpace both charters and public schools time and time again. Look at the Nations Report Card from the National Center for Education Statistics.

Winds of Change has their roundup of news from Central Asia. Check it out. In case you haven't viewed it before they talk about countries like Uzbekistan, Afghanistan all the way over to Georgia and Arminia. It's a very interesting place in light of it's location relative to the war on Terror.

I'm back!
I have been out of town, in San Diego, attending the ESRI user conference, which is a week long tour of geographic geekdom. ESRI makes ArcInfo, one of the most used GIS systems in the world. They are like the Microsoft of the GIS world, have quite a market share, and quite a spendy little program. I blogged about it while I was there.

Fantasy Ideology. This is a must read. I would quote some of it here, but I didn't know what to quote. I ended up wanting to quote most of the article. Lee Harris makes a compelling argument that the enemy we face does not have political or strategic goals, but lives in a fantasy where his ideals are everything and we all are just props in his fantasy. He ascribes this movement as not something we can overcome by politics, appeasement, or diplomacy. He goes even further and calls radical Islamism a disease that needs to be eradicated.
He thought that Bush's description of them not as the enemy, but as "evildoers" was on the mark.

There is one decisive advantage to the “evildoer” metaphor, and it is this: Combat with evildoers is not Clausewitzian war. You do not make treaties with evildoers or try to adjust your conduct to make them like you. You do not try to see the world from the evildoers’ point of view. You do not try to appease them, or persuade them, or reason with them. You try, on the contrary, to outwit them, to vanquish them, to kill them. You behave with them in the same manner that you would deal with a fatal epidemic — you try to wipe it out.

Here's the conclusion paragraph, but read the whole thing.

Let there be no doubt about it. The fantasy ideologies of the twentieth century were plagues, killing millions and millions of innocent men, women, and children. The only difference was that the victims and targets of such fantasy ideologies so frequently refused to see them for what they were, interpreting them as something quite different — as normal politics, as reasonable aspirations, as merely variations on the well-known theme of realpolitik, behaving — tragically enough — no differently from Montezuma when he attempted to decipher the inexplicable enigma posed by the appearance of the Spanish conquistadors. Nor did the fact that his response was entirely human make his fate any less terrible

.

Oh, THAT liberal media. This is a great site, answering the question, "What media bias? It seems that certain congress-persons have sent a letter to Fox and are threatening legislative action because they feel that Fox News is to biased toward the right.
I can't believe I'm seeing this kind of behavior from grown adults. Are they going to go after ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN and most of the print media next? How about the National Enquirer?
Instapundit calls this "Crushing of Dissent."

Gay Marriage. Missouri has voted, overwhelmingly, to define marriage as between a man and a woman. The vote passed with something like 74 percent for the measure.

Flip flops. This chart by Rep. Pete Hoekstra (MI) details what some Democrats were saying before the invasion of Iraq and after. Really, shame shame Kerry and company. I can't believe that they think people don't remember what they said two years ago.
With the Internet being as prolific as it is, it isn't too hard to collect what any politician has said at any time in history. I hope politicians learn that they now need to be consistant, or they will be found out.

Environmental Money Game. Environmental groups, like the Audobon society and the National Conservancy, as well as many others, are overwhelmingly against Bush in the coming election.
This stands in stark contrast to the increased funding these organizations are receiving from the Federal Government under the Bush administration.
After you ask yourselves why they would rally against their apparent cash cow, ask yourself why the federal government gives so much money to these organizations at all (the Nature Conservancy gets over $38 million in 2004, the NFWF got $37 Million).

Rogue Waves. Great article about rogue waves on the open ocean. Some waves get to 100 feet or more, even when the surrounding wave pattern is much smaller. These things have been known to sink large tanker ships. Hat tip to Winds of Change. Check this out:


The mast at right is 80 feet over the water on a normal day. The article goes on to talk about how scientists are using satalites with Synthetic Apature Radar (SAR) to track rogue waves and see if they can predict them with any certainty.

North Korea is out of the news right now. That's no big surprise seeing as there is a presidential election going on, but according to Steven den Beste that's pretty typical of foreign policy during times of change, and he makes a prediction:

The original reason the NK's began to kick up a fuss was the hope that they could get a sweet deal in order to shut them up while we were busy in Iraq. This year they're hoping to get bought off before the election. But Bush isn't going to do that.

The NK's hope that if they don't get bought off, they can make themselves an issue in the election campaign and help get Bush defeated. Then, perhaps, a Democratic administration might be more inclined to return to a policy of appeasement. Their potential to affect the campaign is the reason they hope Bush will capitulate and buy them off.

The only way the US can "make progress" in the short term is by making a particularly generous offer, but that isn't going to happen while Bush is president. Absent American capitulation, there will be "progress" only if the NK or the PRC want progress.

Thus nothing important will happen until after this presidential election is settled, one way or the other.

Diplomacy takes a breather, but oppression keeps on truckin'. Please don't forget to write your representative or senator and tell them to lead their chamber in the call to condemn NK for human rights violations.

Bush acting multilateral. The US has promoted their Caspian Guard, consisting of countries around Iran, to fence Iran in like they are doing to N. Korea.

Caspian Guard gives member states access to US training and tactical knowledge and the assurance of friendly relations with the world's sole superpower in exchange for assistance in dealing with some of the axis of evil's charter members.

The article has some links to maps of our new Guard allies. They include Kazakhstan and Azerbaijan. Or you can go to the CIA Factbook site and look up the countries there to see how they relate spatially to Iran.
Or get an atlas. I would recommend, with all that's happening in the world today, that everyone get an atlas and open it occasionally.

Conservative Pledge? For those of you sickened by the Liberal name calling and refusal to consider that Bush is actually their president here's a thought to consider. Glenn Reynolds links to Dean Esmay who challenges us thusly:

I don't want to hear why you think it won't happen. Indulge me: pretend it might. How many of you will have the patriotism to say, "I disagree with many of his policy directions, I do not think he is conducting our foreign policy in the right way, but I will do my best to get behind him and support him until elections come around next time?"

I'm genuinely curious. For that is the stance I intend to take. I will refuse to call him traitor, loser, liar, incompetent. He will be my President, my Commander In Chief, the Chief Executive of a great nation, elected by the will of a majority of the electors in these 50 great united States. So even if he does things I disagree with in conducting foreign policy, I will say, "I respectfully disagree with the President's directions, but I will do my best to express my dissent respectfully and hope that I am mistaken and that he has made the proper decisions after all."

OK. I can say that. If Kerry happens to beat the odds and wins in November, I promise that I will declare that he would be my Commander in Chief, elected by a majority of the electors. I will refuse to call him a traitor and a loser. I agree with the last sentence in the quoted paragraph above.
I do retain the right to call him a liar and incompetent if I can back it up, though.

Outsourcing Jobs. Daniel Drezner wrote this article for Foreign Affairs, arguing how outsourcing is not a threat, but a natural part of expanding to the global economy, and that fighting it with protectionism (as the Dems are threatening to do) is not a good thing. It's good, but long.

Update: Clay Risen of the New Republic also comments on this (hat tip Instapundit):
"In fact, the greatest threat from outsourcing is that its opponents will use it to force a new wave of protectionism."

Afghanistan is becoming a model of reconstruction and future democracy. Haven't heard? Perhaps you should stop listening to the nightly news and read more Blogs. Elections are coming and high percentages of those polled in Afghanistan feel safer and are hopeful for the future.
Money quote:

"In all, some 3.5 million Afghans have gone home since the UNHCR-organized return movements started in 2002, including more than two million from Pakistan, 900,000 from Iran and more than 440,000 displaced persons, while tens of thousands of other exiles have gone back on their own." This is surely the greatest humanitarian good news story of the last few decades.

Winds of Change has it's Iraq Report up. There's lots to be hopeful about, but lots to shake our heads and wonder about regarding the international community that John Kerry want's us to be more chummy with.

Lake Powell is the body of water held back by Glen Canyon Dam in northern Arizona. There are other lakes named Powell, but this is the largest and most well known. There is a group out there called the Coalition to Rename Lake Powell who wants to rename it to Glen Canyon Reservoir. They state that this is because it isn't really a lake, but a man made reservoir, and that there is another lake in Colorado and people will get confused.
As to the first point, some people are thinking that the real aim of this group is to get the reservoir drained and the dam taken down. Whatever, it certainly is not the only reservoir refered to as a lake; Lake Mead for instance. The second point is also unconvincing. I live here in Oregon where we have about 5 Eagle Creeks. Should we round up all the water bodies in the USA with matching names and rename them? People won't get confused.
The Arizona board of Geographic Names doesn't seem moved either and isn't planning to change anything.
Besides, the lake is named after John Westley Powell, who originally named Glen Canyon in the first place.
Hat tip to the GITC America GIS Monitor newsletter.

Was it God? Here in Oregon there has been a terrible incident where a woman was kidnapped, raped, choked and left for dead naked in the forest. What I haven't heard in the news stories is how she prayed through the whole ordeal and claims that while semi-unconscious, remembers feeling "hands" pick her up and gently set her down near the road where the truck driver found her. You decide, but those of us with faith have a different picture of this whole incident.

Incidently, I got this off a local blog on religion at the Oregonian's web site. There are several local blogs put on by the Oregonian and are worth looking into for a local view of local events. Perhaps this will replace the Oregonian's Metro section the way that regular blogs and Google have rendered the rest of print media (see post below). Maybe not.
Anyway Jim's site also had this post on how he researched whether or not "most" scholars believed that different individuals and groups experienced meeting Christ after his death. Jim didn't believe that, but after reasearching it found that even most Biblical scholars who didn't accept that Christ rose from the dead accept that many people experienced meeting him afterwards.

Mmmmmm. Beer. Tomorrow I'll be sifting through the tents at the annual Oregon Brewer's Festival downtown, so I probably won't get to this site much. My thoughts will be on friends, 100 degree days, and what the subtle difference is between the 7 or so IPAs available for tasting. My wife will be joining me as well for the first time in a long time, so I'm really looking forward to this. Perhaps I'll give a post-festival blog entry on how it all went.

James Lileks is near legend in the Blogosphere for some reason. He is a terrific writer, and he posts to his blog once a day every day. His post is an accumulation of his thought for the day and includes many personal items, like his daughter, whom he refers to as Gnat, endearingly. He also has many deep and interesting thoughts about politics and the blogosphere, which means he gets linked to a lot. Today's was super interesting, as he made a prediction of sorts, or perhaps a comment on where local papers SHOULD be heading, instead of where they currently are.
Here's the section:

A while ago I noted that I had ceased to rely on my paper for international and national news. The web’s competitive advantage is overwhelming. Now I turn straight to the Metro section, because the web can’t yet match the resources and reach of a newspaper. If I were king of the forest, I’d turn the A section into the Metro section. For most papers beside the big swingin’ Johnson dailies, the A section is a lost cause; its lunch has not only been eaten but digested and excreted, and most newspapers think it’s still on the plate with its garnish intact. Newspapers to me no longer look like great sober edifaces inscribing the details of history as the parade clatters past. They just look like group blogs. Without the honest admission of bias. I turn to the daily paper for the stories so elemental that bias has no place - fires, accidents, murders, jabberings of local officials, etc. I say amp up the local coverage, and spare me the edited wire copy about an Israeli incursion into Gaza. For that I'll read the original sources. (After all, I wouldn't trust the Jerusalem Post to accurately cover a double-stabbing in the Minneapolis club district after a rapper was nine hours late taking the stage.) Newspapers have one great strength: proximity. I think they'll realize this eventually. TV covers the world; radio is the new editorial page; the internet is both times ten. The future of newspapers will be intensely local.

Winds of Change has it's East Asia overview. There's a lot here, and getting the gist of most of the stories may involve following the links, so be prepared to spend some time here if you are really interested in what's going on over there. Otherwise you can just browse and follow a link if it looks interesting.

The Map Network is supplying on-line and other maps for the Democratic convention in Boston. Very interresting. You can view them online. Maps of the arena, the general vicinity and Boston as a whole. Interrestingly enough I don't see the protestor's internment area represented on any of these maps. Hmmmm.

Politics in the church. The Republican party has been sending people to churches in many states, including Oregon, to "get out the vote." Critics say that it endangers the church's tax exempt status, stating that it's pretty obvious that they are premoting the GOP and slamming the Dems during these talks.
It sounds to me like the speakers at these events are saying that churches should support voter registration efforts in a non-partisan way, while pointing out the differences in the two parties in a way that show that the GOP is more in line with most of the members of these churches.
But I don't see anything wrong with that. Isn't the NAACP a tax exempt organization? I don't think anyone would bat an eye if a Dem gave a talk to the NAACP and did the exact same thing.

Seems the ACLU is still willing to back conservatives when there is an obvious infringement of their right to protest. The area assigned to protestors at the Democratic Convention in Boston is being described as a "pen" and an "internment camp."

Winds of Change has their Latin American briefing. I'm going to link directly to the briefings when I get to them. They are informative and carry lots of links. In addition to the Latin American, they have an Asia, Africa and war on terror briefing. Enjoy.

This land is... ALL RIGHT. Here is that extremely funny cartoon parody of Bush and Kerry sung to the tune of "This land is your land." I was crying. Must watch, but have a quick connection.

Sensible Gun control. The Armed Liberal has a post citing Matt Yglesias, who is a liberal blogger, on gun control. The armed one said that the post was a "stunningly sensible post."
Matt argues that instead of controlling what guns get banned, we should be controlling who gets the guns.
I would have to agree. I have often felt that I would rather stand in a bus next to a responsible citizen with an M-16 than a convicted felon with a currently legal handgun.

First of all, let me say to all at Blogger, "Wahoooo!"

Thanks for all the really neat formatting tricks they have added.

• I was considering getting some software for adding blog entries, but now I'm content to sit and see what they come up with next.

Update: It seems we have traded new features for problems in updating. Will be trying to make new posts.

Michael Totten is in Tunisia and blogging his observations about the landscape and the people. It's very interesting and I highly recommend it. Just scroll down, or if you are reading this later in the week here are some permalinks:
His stuff so far: First day. The South. Tunis.

Channel surfing while under the influence. In case you don't listen to any of the national or local conservative talk shows, here's the story about the guy who's license was revoked "for medical reasons related to substance abuse."
There is a state law in Pennsylvania and 6 other states, including Oregon where I live, that requires doctors to report physical or mental impairments that could prevent safe driving.
Put aside the issue of doctor patient confidentiality just being thrown out the window here, and think about how laws made by concerned legislatures get on the books without much thought to unintended consequences.
You mean all it takes to get someone's license revoked is some doctor calling up the DMV? There's no formal review?
Seems to me that alcohol abuse is bad for the guy, but it's not a permanent, chronic, or even a temporary "condition" of this guy, I'm sure he drives fine when he's not drinking.
Outrageous.

Gay Marriage not voted on. I saw yesterday that the Senate decided not to vote or hold any debate whatsoever on the Amendment to define marriage. I'm not sure how I feel about that. The liberal and libertarian pundits are happy and declaring that it will hurt the conservatives in congress, but I wonder if they decided not to vote on it because an actual defeat by vote would have been worse.
I agree with the President that the judicial decisions leading up to this moment have been over-reaching, but this statement from the San Jose Mercury News I also see as true:

But the Republican decision to focus on gay marriage could harm the party with moderate voters this November and put some moderate GOP lawmakers in an awkward situation, said Sherry Bebitch Jeffe, a political analyst at the University of Southern California.

I would note that 6 republicans crossed the line to vote this down at this point, and I wonder if not having the debate at all will be better for the Bush administration leading up to the election.

Instapundit has been on a roll about a few issues that I have been watching. His coverage has been non stop and thorough, so instead of laboring on myself you can just go to his site. Here are the issues.
Sudan genocide. Seems some democrat legislatures are staging civil disobedience protests, the old fashion kind, at the Sudanese embassy. They are having themselves arrested publicly as a part of the protest.
Also - the senate is going to propose a bill condemning the Sudanese government for not acting and requesting international intervention. It's truly bi-partisan. Everyone is behind this thing. Finally something we can all agree on.

Plame/Wilson scandal. Glenn Reynolds is gloating over the fact that Wilson is being discredited, as he predicted this last year. He also notes the irony that Joe Wilson's "Restore Honesty" website is like Milli Vanilli's Grammy award, mostly comical now.
Guess what? The "Restore Honesty" site is owned and paid for by John Kerry for President, Inc.
Very embarrassing.

Teen tracking with GPS. Found this interesting site on the web called Teen arrive Alive (TAA). The point is to use their service you get a cell phone for the kid, get a Nextel cell account, and the GPS location of you child can be downloaded at any time from the internet.
The lower cost option is a decal you get for your car and the cell phone. Instead of GPS the decal has a phone number concerned drivers can call and inform you of how your teen is driving (like "hows my driving? Call...").

US show of force in the Pacific. This is a show all for China's sake. The article says that the US is having a military exercise to determine how fast it could get aircraft carrier strike groups into position in the Pacific. They are estimating 30 days. It's the size of the force that is the impressive thing, 7 carrier strike groups, and China is expected to notice and evaluate the US's resolve in supporting the Taiwanese.

From past deployment patterns, the US usually dispatches one CSG to a trouble spot as a reminder of its presence.
It did so several times in the past when tension was high in the Taiwan Strait.
It sends two to indicate serious concern, as was the case when China test-fired missiles over the strait in 1996.
In a combat situation, it deploys three to four, which was what it did in the Gulf War in the early 1990s and the recent Iraqi war.
But never before has it sent in peace time seven CSGs to the same theatre.
The implications for China are grave.

Yes indeedy they are. China's navy would last about as long as it takes to bake an American Apple Pie against a force like that. Muchos Gracias to Instapundit for the link.

Country of the week.

Sudan is a country not getting enough notice these days, although the American press is now slowly waking up to the humanitarian crisis going on there. This country should be interesting to us on many fronts.

On the forefront, the government based in Khartoum is performing what some are calling ethnic cleansing of the residents of the Durfur area in western Sudan.

Second, that Scud missiles were discovered there belonging to the Syrians and Khartoum, fearing US attention, ordered Syria to take them back. I would like to say that I found links to stories about that, because I did, but I can’t find them now. The press is curiously quiet about it.

I’ll get to all that later. First a brief history. The area of Sudan has been inhabited for over 60,000 years, and studies have shown that contact and inter breeding occurred with the Egyptians all along this timeline. Trade with Egypt seems a given considering the opportunities for transport the Nile river offers.
Sudan is the largest country in Africa, situated on the south border of Egypt, north of Uganda, with Ethiopia and Chad on either side. The north is arid, except for the Nile valley, the West and Northeast, along the coast of the Red sea, is mountainous. The south is dry, but swampy, and area called the Sudd. The White Nile and the Blue Nile come together here in a vast flat expanse.
In the 6th century, the Byzantines began to introduce Christianity to the early Nubian kings of the south. Legend puts this around 540 AD. The Nubian Christian kingdoms lasted until the 9th and 10th centuries.
Arab pressure caused the nations to become one, called Dunqulah, but the Arabs found that reducing the Nubian culture by force was a losing prospect. But the Arab north cut off the Nubians from the Coptics in Egypt and therefore Southern Sudan was cut off from the rest of the Christian world.
The Nubian culture continued to decline until the coming of the Ottoman empire. The Ottomans didn’t micro-manage that part of the empire, holding only seaports for the most part, and ruled the interior with military leaders who ruled the interior in autonomous fifes, and were only concerned with taxes, slave trades, and terrorizing the population as well as fighting amongst themselves.
After the rule of Muhammad Ali (not the boxer), who was a strong Ottoman ruler, European pressure to end the slave trade came down on the region, until the British came in and under Charles George Gordon eradicated the slave trade.
The British control of this region continued until after WWII. During that time it was thought that the south of Sudan could not exist economically on it’s own, so it was administered with the north. Up to the point of independence, the British withdrew troops and support from the south, which made the south nervous, as they already felt oppressed by the more Arabic north.
The North-South civil war has its roots in the 1950s (earlier if you consider the early Christians and the Muslim invasions). Southern freedom fighters, supported from outside the country (the north was supported by Egypt and the USSR as well) fought a stubborn battle, but hundreds of thousands were killed by the late 60s. An agreement was reached with the help of Ethiopia in the early 70s, but Nimeiri, the Sudanese dictator, lost touch with his population and let things degrade back into civil war by the end of the 1980s.
During the 80s, Sadiq al Mahdi, who was the leader of the Umma party, won control of the country through elections, but in the ensuing years was never able to put together a government that the people would accept, and also was unable to stop the conflict with the south. In 1989 Colonel Umar Hassan Ahmad al Bashir overthrew Sadiq and has been the leader of Sudan ever since.
The government of Sudan has a constitution and a representative type government in theory, with Bashir as president and prime minister, and also a National Assembly and a Supreme Court. The President is theoretically elected by popular vote, but most people are skeptical that the last few elections have been fair. The Assembly is also mostly elected by popular vote, but 90 of them are elected by a group of special interests. The government does not represent the interests of the south, as many in the south boycott the elective process anyway, and control over the electoral process is in the north.
Recently, the civil war with southern Sudan has given way to an effort by extremists, not opposed by the government, to eradicate the residents of the Durfur area. The culture of Durfur is Islamic, but also non-Arabic and the Islam they practice is not the same, exactly, as the more Arabic population of the rest of the country.
Indeed this country is so divided culturally, religiously and ethnically that it would be a wonder if Sudan could ever remain one country and still live in peace.

Check out the Darfur Information Center.
Also this site is regularly updatd with happenings in Darfur.
This is a good comprehensive, but not too long, history of Sudan.
Powell was recently in Sudan viewing refugee camps.
This is a speech by him regarding that.
Also this.
The UN and Kofi Annan are finally hearing about this. Will he do anything constructive?
The government continues to deny that there is a crisis.
Rebels say they will not attend peace talks until the attackers (read government) stops attacking them.

French wine on the decline. The posting tells of the decline of French wine on the American market. It's an interesting phenomenon, but the article is lacking. The article reflects that these are the reasons for the decline:

Sales of French wine has been held back by confusion over the type of wine being sold, perceptions that the wine is over-priced, and an inability to distinguish between the hundreds of different brands on the market, said panelists during a seminar at Vinexpo Americas 2004, a wine trade fair being held in Chicago.

Also the article goes on to say that the Euro is performing poorly against the dollar and that is why the wine is being out sold by cheaper brands.
Now, I'll admit that buying French wine is more complicated that buying wine from other regions. I'll agree with this statement from the article:

"For the average consumer, the Appellation d'Origine Controllee doesn't mean a thing," Parker said.
"At the supermarket level, American consumers buy by grape varietals."

It's easier to identify a Pinot Noir from Oregon than a Burgundy red, which is the same thing.
But there are some other reasons the article ignores, perhaps on purpose. One is what Steven den Beste points out

The article doesn't contain any acknowledgement that some of the decline might be due to political backlash by ordinary Americans. It is apparently inconceivable that some American wine-drinkers might be consciously boycotting French wine because of France's foreign policy.

His readers apparently agree with him on that point, but also that while forsaking what they are calling "Surrender Juice" they have discovered something else: that other regions make just as good wine for much better prices.
Frankly I would agree. The burgundy made in France may be more refined they say, but I like the taste of the Pinot Noir here in Oregon much better. I've found that Washington, and for that matter Australia, makes Chardonnay much more to my taste than even California, much less France.
But the French would do well to open their eyes and admit that their politics have been detrimental to their economy. They don't have to give in to the nasty Capitalists pig dogs over here, but they should at least face facts.

Canadian Elections. The Liberals seem to have kept the majority up there. They don't have an official majority, but if they can create a nice coalition, then Paul Martin will remain the Prime Minister for the next term. Conservatives did pick up some steam, but only got 94 seats (liberals got 134).

A new frequency of radio is coming. Just like FM radio did, Digital Audio Broadcasting (DAB) is starting to take flight, and although you can't get it yet unless you buy a special receiver (just like when FM came out), time may be that it will push FM on to where AM currently is.
The DAB signals are currently free for anyone who can get them. But watch out. Recording industry is already taking action against piracy. Like regular radio, signals can be recorded and played back, and industry lobbyists requested that the FCC add copy protection to discourage piracy and illegal distribution.
This really boils me though. Is this the artists or the media moguls. I hate to sound like an anti-capitalists dog here, but when I was growing up we taped stuff off the radio sometimes, but mostly we taped off records, because records didn't last as long and didn't carry well.
So I kind of understand the hype about MP3s and CD copying, because CDs last long and are easy to carry around, although I think people are always going to want the official CD with the liner notes and all the songs and other media that they are putting on the CDs these days.
But radio is not like that. The major problem with copying from the radio was that you never knew when the song you wanted to copy was going to be on, and even if you did there was some DJ banter and station ID that overlapped the song, not to mention they often overlap one song with the next if there is a significant fade on the end of the previous song.
This made recording from the radio un-practical. Is this going to change in the digital age? I think it's still going to be un-practical to copy music this way. This sounds to me like money hungry executives who are too lazy or unwilling to change when the technology changes, too un-imaginative to think of a new way to make money that will use the technology and make everyone happy.
Instead they use the legal system and create a new criminal class. Thanks guys.

There is a new blog up that looks really cool. Keeping an eye on world events, but is collecting news that falls under even the blogosphere. It's called WorldChanging, here are some of the headlines:
Digital library of India: Having the written works of India on-line, in all languages of India.
Microbial Fuel cells: How scientists are producing electricity by cleaning water. Neat, but far from usefull yet.
Linux in Iraq: The spread of Linux user groups, who communicate mostly in English.

Michael Moore bashing. Christopher Hitchens, who's liberal credentials are well known, a former writer for The Nation and writing for Slate, totally trashes Moore's new movie. Money quote:

To describe this film as dishonest and demagogic would almost be to promote those terms to the level of respectability. To describe this film as a piece of crap would be to run the risk of a discourse that would never again rise above the excremental. To describe it as an exercise in facile crowd-pleasing would be too obvious. Fahrenheit 9/11 is a sinister exercise in moral frivolity, crudely disguised as an exercise in seriousness. It is also a spectacle of abject political cowardice masking itself as a demonstration of "dissenting" bravery.

The beating gets worse, as Hitchens picks the movie apart piece by piece.

England elections map. In my effort to find neat on-line maps I ran into this one offered by the BBC of the latest elections on June 10th. It's a great map using FLASH, which you don't see often. But it works out well.

Also: here's an interesting map showing power plants in the US and risks of polution, also using Flash, by an organization called "Clean the Air."

Sudan. All the reports lately of the conflict and oppression in Sudan have inspired me to do a country of the week on them. But in the mean time, Instapundit has been collecting stories for some time that I have just been breezing over. Here's one about how Sudanese troops are crossing international boundaries in order to harass their citizens.
Here's another report (all these are currently from Instapundit. Thanks, Glenn):

Over one million non-Arabs have been displaced within Darfur, predominantly by attacks conducted by Arab Janjawid militias, who are reportedly allied to the government. The government denies involvement in the attacks. Up to 200,000 people are estimated to have fled to neighboring Chad, while estimates of numbers killed vary from between 15,000 and 30,000.

The center for American Progress has collected articles concerning this. The American public is finally starting to take notice (despite the dismal performance by the usual news services).
Folks, this is more important than Iraq now. Not that Iraq is not important, or that we should leave, but we need to devote serious attention to this. This situation really underscores the failure of the UN. They have ignored it while the world watched it happen. They are wrapped up in the worlds largest corruption scandal and can't be expected to handle even the most mild of international issues, let alone a genocidal movement like we are seeing in Sudan presently. We need to lead the world in and clean this mess up too. But we can't do it alone, as we are stretched as it is in Iraq. Perhaps the Euros will bend a little bit and support an invasion where there is no oil and it isn't even Christians who are getting killed now. But that's too much to ask if the Americans are in charge.

Spaceship One is a success!! I noted a while back that there was a private movement to get into space. The Speculist has some additional links and reports. The did reach the 100km barrier. They will have to have a subsequent launch to 100km and then do it again within two weeks to get the $10Million prize. But anyway it's official. This is the first fully private funded space flight.

Euro Cup. Light blogging lately has been due to several things. One: the stories haven't changed much. Election, Bush, Kerry, Iraq, War on Terror, Economy upturn, untrusted press.
Two: My family and I have moved to a new house. It's our first house, and the work involved has been monumental, and will continue to be.
Third: My internet time has been distracted by the European Cup, which is almost as exciting as the World Cup, and just as big over the pond. Italy just crashed out, which was unexpected. The Czechs are in the next round, which is cool and unexpected. England looks strong.

World Magazine's Blog has lots of goodies today. Namely:

Evidence of WMD transported by Iraq out of the country during the war last year has now surfaced. Air photos have been analyzed. Missiles and fuel have been found in Jorday, Holland and Turkey.

Record low turnout for the EU elections this week. The parties that won the most seats in the young European Parliament are parties that oppose the EU.

The Supreme Court shot down the challenge to the words "under God" in the pledge of allegiance on a technicality. The atheist father who filed the lawsuit is not a legal guardian of the girl he filed it for, so they didn't even hear the case. The mother is a Christian and has said she doesn't mind the phrase.

Does more money really matter? This article about Utah's education spending offers some points to think about if your state is demanding more money for education. Hat tip Random Jottings.

Utah continues to rank last in the nation, according to a new U.S. Census Bureau report.
Utah would have to boost its state spending by more than $300 million just to bump itself off the bottom of the list, said Mark Petersen, spokesman for the State Office of Education.
However, Utah holds steady on its test scores — well above the national average in science, and is slightly above average in reading and math, Petersen said.

Mt Everest record disputed. Seems that those wiley sherpas have been competing lately to see who can get up the big mountain the fastest. The record, which was set last year, is 10 hours and 56 minutes by Lakpa Gyelu. The dispute is that this year another sherpa said that he did it in 8 hours and 10 minutes. Last years winner is disputing the result.
The sherpas prove it by taking pictures and radioing to the base camp describing items on the top.
Just stop and think about that. 10 hours. 29,000 feet above sea level. Wow.

Who's in the house? We are hoping to be. If any of you are looking at my blog more than once a week, I apologize for the lack of material over the last week. We are buying a house and this is supposed to be closing week. Life is ever hectic and nerve-wracking. I'm not saying I'll be better about posts after we are settled, but it's my best excuse this week.

Country of the week.

It's time to pick a South American country. And I'm picking Uruguay. Why you ask? Is it animosity toward Argentina? Some gripe with Brazil for winning the last world cup? No. I have been leading a church small group consisting of junior high students and one of them expressed interest in Uruguay because he did a school assignment on it. Oh yeah, and they were the very first winners of the World Cup (no soccer bias here).
So what's going on with the second smallest country in South America these days?

Uruguay is lodged right in between Brazil on the north east and Argentina to the west. It is not flat, but doesn't have much elevation either. Mostly rolling hills. The highest point is somewhere in the 1500 foot range (500m). Uruguay is about as big as the state of Washington with fewer people.
The economy is mostly services, even though the majority of the country is used for farming and livestock. Between 60 and 70 percent of the people work in the service industry. The people are well educated and European in ethnic background (Iberian Spanish and Portuguese).
The economy was doing rather well up until about 1999, when the whole region experienced much economic turmoil. Since Argentina and Brazil are about half of Uruguay's import/export activity, and they were hit hard by the economic slump, Uruguay suffered as well. The employment rate got up to 20% and the value of the Uruguayan peso fell about 50%. The US Dollar is worth about 24 Uruguayan pesos right now (which, again, is not bad considering the region).
Interesting fact: hydro power contributes 99% of the electric power in Uruguay, and they export twice again as much outside the country.

The government is similar to ours. More-so than many of the countries I have looked at in the course of this blog. There is one head of state, the president, who is elected by popular vote every 5 years (elections are coming up this fall). The vice president is on the same ticket every election. The president is currently Jorge Batlle Ibanez of the Colorado party.
The legislature is bicameral with a house of Senators (30) and a house of Representatives (99). Both are elected by popular vote, again every 5 years. The legislature and the president seem to get elected in the same year. The party Encuentro Progresista controls both houses, with the Colorado party and Blanco party not far behind in the number of seats they control.
There is also a supreme court, picked by the president, who serve 10 year terms.

The history of Uruguay is terribly fascinating. It was generally left alone by the Spanish because of the lack of minerals, specifically gold, and didn't become important until the 1700s. The Spanish wanted to seize the land before the Portuguese from Brazil did. The Spanish imported lots of cattle, with seemed to do well in that environment, and cattle was the main economy for most of the countries history until the 20th century. In that time a group of settlers became known as the gauchos (cowboys). Probably not all that different from the American west in many ways. It was a gaucho, Jose Gervasio Artigas, who led the initial revolt against the Spanish.
The country gained independence from Spain in 1828. They have an independence day, August 25. The rest of the 1800s are marked with internal strife. The two major parties, which still exist, were the Colorados (Reds - Urban liberals) and the Blancos (Whites - Rural conservatives). The colors had to do with the color of the hat bands they wore to distinguish themselves from enemies on the battle field.
The turn of the century brought more stability as the Colorados, under Jose Batlle y Ordonez, began to promote social, economic and political modernization while controlling the country for the first 25 years of the century.

Current news:
Soccer is still huge. The South Americans are already competing for places in the next World Cup in 2006.
Meat exports are up! No mad cows here.
This article about the current election for president is a good intro to the political climate, what happened to the stability they used to have and what the people think is the cause of all their troubles (free market reforms) . The Colorado and Blanco parties are being severely challenged by a once disparate coalition of leftist parties.

Media war blindness. I have been paying attention to what the blogosphere has been saying about media ineptness regarding the war on terror. But I had been thinking lately that we need to get beyond just observing it and try to figure out why it's happening and what we can do about it. Note: this means that certain people need to admit that there is a problem.
Joe Katzman over at Winds of Change has a great post today where he is talking about that very thing. At least people are trying to analyze and search for cause. The fix will have to come later I guess.
Last week I also saw a great article by Steven den Beste digging into the heart of why the media appears to lean to the left. I can't link to the post directly, but you can go there and search the archive for it.
Here is the gist anyway.
Den Beste thinks that the problems started in the 60s and early 70s with Watergate. The problem wasn't the scandal itself, but how that affected the media industry. What happened was that two virtual unknowns became famous because of one breaking story. Suddenly every reporter in the world is trying to become the next Woodward, knowing that all it could take is that one story. Therefore sexing up of stories and creating stories where there are none becomes common place. Editors and executives didn't help things much, knowing that exaggerated stories and hype sells newspapers and commercial slots, so they encourage that type of reporting until it gets to the point where the NYT is actually allowing stories with major factual flaws and outright lies.
The tendency of the media (and the reporters themselves) to put the resources in areas where there are more stories, like currently the middle east, changed another tradition. Reporters no longer cover "beats." Beats were areas that a reporter covered all the time. They often didn't stray out of them, even when things were slow. You spent all of your time covering the Capital, or the technology business in Silicon Valley. When you were starting out you mentored under a guy in a particular beat so when the senior reporter left you already knew a lot about that beat. When all that went away, now reporters cover subjects they know little about. Read that post from Katzman above on the poor reporting in Iraq. It displays this last point in full technicolor.
These days I can tell how bad an article is going to be just by looking at the author. What's the solution here? Do we remove the author's name from the articles, so that reporters are just a member of a team and can't expect fame and fortune for breaking the big story?

Country of the week.

Moldova is a country tucked away in the heart of Eastern Europe. In some ways it is like Switzerland or Poland. At the crossroads between other countries and great powers. But unlike those countries Moldova doesn’t have a distinctive geography or culture or language. Yet.

Moldova has been ruled by many different cultures, from ancient slavs, to the Turks in the 16th century, to the Romanians and the Russians. It has been a power struggle between the Russians ans the Romanians for the last two hundred years. In the early 1800s the Russians annexed the area and re-named it Bessarabia. It was returned to Romania in 1856 and united with Walachia to form the Kingdom of Romania. That didn’t last long and the Russians re-annexed it and held it until the Russian Revolution.
The people of Bessarabia tried to re-unite with Romania, but the Soviets would not have it and turned it into an ASSR (like the Ukraine) with it’s capital in the Ukrainian town of Balta. The capital was moved to Tiraspol later.
The Romanians tried again to re-claim the area during WWII, but the Russians pushed them out and held it until the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991. The capital was moved to Kichenev, which is now (according to the CIA site) named Chisinau.

Since independence there has been non-stop conflict caused by the conflicting cultures of the slavs and the romanians. There has been civil war. The official language has been Romanian, and then a few years ago even that was recinded.

The government is set up in a democracy, with a President, Prime Minister, a parliament and a court system of sorts. The president is elected by the parliament for a 4 year term. The Prime Minister is chosen by the President with consent of the parliament. The Parliament (just one house) is chosen by popular vote of the people. Interestingly, the Communist party has 50% of parliament and just elected a communist president for the first time since independence from the Soviet bloc.

The economy is heavily weighted toward agriculture, as they have no mineral wealth, but lots of farmable land. Most of their industry is centered around agriculture as well. The unit of currency is the Moldovan Leu, which is worth about 1/13th of a dollar.

President Vladimir Voronin has proposed a pact to be signed by the EU, Russia and the United States stating, among other things, to:
support Moldova's territorial integrity within its internationally recognized borders; support the search for guarantees of democracy for the entire country; recognize Moldova's cultural, ethnic and linguistic diversity as a fundamental asset of the country and support ethnic dialogue and efforts to build an atmosphere of tolerance; recognize and guarantee Moldova's permanent neutrality.

They insist on the nutrality, and seem to have turned down entry into NATO.

Moldova and Bulgaria have signed a free trade agreement.

Here’s a great article from the BBC summing up the state of life in Moldova, one of the poorest countries in the world. You can really understand why they were lured into voting an unreformed communist government back in to power considering prospects for making it on your own there are so dim. Article states that 50% of working age people have emmigrated to other countries to find work. Sometimes leaving their kids to do it.

Spelling Bee. The National Spelling Bee has some stats this year that may give some a surprise. According to the Mercury News:

Most spellers attend traditional public schools (179). The rest attend home schools (35), private schools (27), parochial (20) or charter schools (four).

As Instapundit mentioned, the disproportionate home school number seems interesting. And if it isn't disproportionate, then it's telling.

From NewsMax: Kerry flips Vietnam Vet the bird.

India Update. After the elections it appears that the Congress party is back in power and the Hindu Nationalist party BJP is out (and by out I mean that they lost a majority in the legislature and therefore also the prime minister).
Interesting thing to note is that the Congress party won on the coat tails of Sonia Gandhi, herself not a native to India. She had earlier expressed no interest in leading the government, and after she led the party to victory she turned down the position of Prime Minister when it was offered to her. She has a bad taste for this kind of thing after her late husband, himself the PM once, was assassinated in the early 80s. The party instead elected Dr. Manmohan Singh as PM.
One of the direct benefits of having this primarily secular party in power is a reverse of the path the BJP was on to discriminate any other religion other than Hinduism. Christians and Muslims alike were more than discriminated against. It was illegal to convert to Christianity in some states.
Right away many countries around the area have expressed interest in strengthening ties with India. Although this article talks about Iran and China prominently. Not the countries you want trumpeting your party's rise to power.

Jon Stewart gives a speech. The illustrious host of the News Show on the comedy channel, who I find to be a really funny guy whatever his political bent is, gave the commencement speech at William and Mary college (his alma mater) in Virginia. It's very funny, and also very good. Read it.

The New York Times finally admit it made a mistake and didn't investigate something thoroughly enough. The irony is that it is regard to them believing exiled Iraqis that Saddam had WMD. That's fresh. We'll admit we made a mistake, but only if it hurts the current administration. Whatever. The bad investigating part is true anyway.

Trust in the media. As I've been reading blogs over the past few weeks the impression that the general news media is not doing it's job, or is biased and engaged in an outright campaign of deceit is hard to miss. Frankly, it's hard to miss it when you read your newspaper or watch it on TV. There are statistics coming out now that are telling. Stats are saying that people are not trusting the media at all, and that the overwhelming view is that they are liberal in their slant.

Instapundit had some links just in the past couple of days highlighting bad media quality. This one calls the media on faking quotes.
He also points to this article in Editor and Publisher that revealed a Pew Research Center poll on what newsroom workers consider themselves politically. The findings should be obvious.

Jeff Jarvis has a conniption regarding NPR bias. And he is definitely not the only one. This is only one of many complaints about National Public Radio.

The press is also doing its best to put a bad face on the war. Despite evidence to the contrary. There are far more sources for this than I have room for.

Volokh notes that the media, for ex. CNN, keep using bad surveys, but people are going to believe them anyway.

These are just a sample. The main perps in this are the Assoc. Press, the NYT, Reuters, the Washington Post, the Guardian and BBC. Unfortunately that affects us all, because most of our local papers just recycle stories by journalists working for these organizations.
My wife and I canceled the paper. I get about 90% of my news from the internet. Google and Blog style.

Country of the week.

Another of our neighbors who we don’t pay enough attention to, or sometimes the wrong kind of attention, is the lonely island nation of Cuba. This isn’t just a country full of communists and baseball players. Cuba is a beautiful country with a vibrant people, who have gotten the short end of the stick because of certain people who have decided to put it upon them selves to run the country into the ground.

Cuban modern history begins with Christopher Columbus (before that there were native cultures existing for thousands of years), and the colonization of Cuba by the Spanish occurred here as early as anywhere else in the new world. The Spanish were fascinated by tobacco, which has been grown and smoked here since long before the European discovery of the new world.
The Spanish treated the island as a colony until the 1800s bringing slaves from Africa, when the people began to fight for independence. It didn’t always work out well. There was a 10 year war from 1868 to 1878. Landowners declared independence and freed slaves. The nation didn’t achieve independence until the turn of the century, when the Cuban Revolutionary Party, led by Jose Marti, strung a series of military victories together. The US was brought in, almost by accident, when a US ship was blown up off the coast. At that point the Spanish surrendered and left.
Jose Marti is the spiritual father of Cuba, originating the ideals that ended up driving the country, and even inspired Castro and Che Guevara. He is kind of like our George Washington and Thomas Jefferson all wrapped up into one.

After independence the country of Cuba spent a few decades trying to overcome electoral fraud, corruption and the heavy dependence on American trade. In 1933 some army officers joined up with a student uprising and staged a coup. Fulgencio Batista took over the country, initiated some reforms and then was elected president. Things were smoother for a while, in the perspective of the US, but Batista was little more than an elected dictator, and when Batista realized he was going to be defeated in the 1952 election he staged another coup.
Enter a little know lawyer named Fidel Castro and an Argentinean Doctor named Ernesto Guevara. He led men in battles against the Batista government, was jailed, banished from Cuba, but came back with Guevara and led a campaign that eventually took the country over. Fidel has been dictator for the last 45 years, but Cubans revere Che just as much. First of all, whatever political or government problems exist, Che doesn’t get tagged with because he eventually left the country to stir up trouble elsewhere and died soon after. He is a symbol of courage and national pride.
Che and Fidel were idealists and when Castro led the revolution into Havana, he centralized all government functions and most industry in the name of communism. This upset the Americans, who started the trade embargo that still exists.
The USSR kept Cuba going for decades and used Cuba as a staging point to export communism all over latin america.

Cuba’s most important exports are sugar, rum (which is a byproduct of sugar cane) and tobacco. The country is just bigger than the state of Kentucky, but has plains, mountains, tropical forests, dry and dusty areas and lovely beaches. It's probably a very nice place to live if it weren’t so poor. There are just over 11 million people living there.
Castro is President of the country. He is elected by the National Assembly, and usually runs unopposed. The National Assembly is elected popularly, but the slates are approved by special “candidacy commissions.” Elections, as you can guess, are not very open there. The Presidential and Assembly terms are 5 years. The last elections were in 2003, and the next set will be in 2008.

It’s the 102nd anniversary of Cuban independence from Spain.
Some lawmakers (authored and introduced by Max Baucus (D-Montana)) propose to finally eliminate the sanctions on Cuba after 40 years.
This is in response to the Bush administration actually tightening restrictions on visiting and sending money to Cuba.
Focus on the detainees being held at Guantanamo, the US military base on the Southeastern end of the island.
Here is a good article about how things are for people trying to help the Cuban people in the face of a restrictive regime.

Catholic Democrats. I have really been enjoying the spat between Catholic Democrats who are pro-abortion and Catholic Bishops who are trying to get them excommunicated from the church unless they repent and vote pro-abortion no more. World has a link to an article stating that 48 Catholic democrats sent a letter to the Cardinal of Washington that it's actions will bring back anti-Catholic bigotry and hatred. Catholics won't be able to get elected because everyone will fear that they are getting orders from the Pope on how to vote.
Come on. What a bunch of winers. As Catholics they should be taking their cues from the Pope (and more importantly from the Bible), but there are only so many issues that this covers. Really the only areas that are affected by this would be areas of direct morality, like abortion and gay rights. As a religious person, specifically a Christian, you should be making decisions, like voting, on how you see the world through the lens of your faith. Otherwise it's not much of a faith at all is it?
The article goes on to detail the Democrat's arguments about why they shouldn't be blacklisted just because of Abortion, when they agree with the Pope and Church on many other issues, like the death penalty and the war in Iraq. They just don't understand why this issue is such a big deal to some people, it seems.
Democrats also see this as the Church trying to influence the legislative process as a violation of the establishment clause (when it's quite the opposite. The Est. Clause was created to protect the church from politicians). Really this is just the Church reacting to decades of behavior, not the Church trying to influence votes.

David Kay speaks. Before the war. Hat tip to Instapundit.
This article written by David Kay, infamous weapons inspector, is about Iraq's material breach of UN resolution 1441. This should be an eye opener, but as usual will probably not open anyone's eyes who don't already have them open. This is something I've been thinking about for a while, and I often wonder why everyone who declares that Bush lied (or whatever) and that there are no WMD in Iraq usually point to David Kay and the fact that he said there was nothing there.
That's not really what he said, and this article summarizes his feelings before the war that inspections trying to find a smoking gun were doomed to failure, as they had for the last 12 years. The evidence was there. Iraq WAS in serious breach of the UN resolution.
Interestingly, it also points out that the Bush administration made a blunder here, although you can decide for yourself if that would have changed whether or not we would have gone to war anyway, or just postponed it.
Read the whole thing.

Volokh's Geography Puzzle. Check this puzzle out. It's a question that demands you pour over a world atlas for hours on end. Here is another post where some answers come in, but there really is no answer unless the question of how big should the concavity be to count (I think Eugene tries to make that distinction).

The real X Games. Light blogging, as I have been at a GIS conference in Portland here. Been talking to people about GIS stuff and how big XML is growing to be in the world of data transfer. More on that later.
For now here is an article on the latest from the X-Prize. For those of you who are unaware, the X-Prize is a $10M prize that will be given to the first private sector launch of a re-usable space craft. The designer must put it into space (defined as 100 kilometers) and then re send it into space within two weeks.
Paul Allen has financed the space ship in this article. The implications of this are huge! Not only are we not using tax dollars to research and test new and cheap ways of launching vehicles into space, but once we do that going to the moon or Mars won't be such a difficult thing.
The 10 million dollar prize is funded by the X-Prize foundation, a private foundation (that you can help fund). The website gives overviews and current status of all the teams competing for the prize.

In Sweden today:

Note to tourists in Sweden: Don't kill a giant serpent that has the head of a dog and fins on its neck. The mythical monster, which supposedly lives in Sweden's Lake Storsjoen, is officially on the country's endangered species list. Parliamentary investigators last week discovered a 1986 local court ruling that made it a crime to kill the animal or harm its eggs. They say Parliament may set aside the ruling.

Hat tip to World Magazine.

Will Rumsfeld resign? Given this post by Volokh, probably not. History, it seems, is not an indicator that high public officials just take it upon themselves to resign because they made a mistake, or because they accept responsibility for some mistake in their ranks.

Is Abu Ghraib an isolated incident? Of course it is. If you know anyone whose been in the military, or went to high school even, you know that despite the rules and morals we were given from a young age, there will always be people who must act like animals (especially in high school).
But most, and I emphasize most, military folks are decent and polite Americans who know their place in the world and are secure with that fact. Take this discussion between two Iraqis about conditions as the prison in question (Hat Tip: Winds of War). Sounds like they are pretty sure.

UNSCAM update. The UN is stonewalling the investigations into it's corruption. Is there hope for this organization? It's starting to look like the mafia on a worldwide scale.

UNSCAM There is actually a blog, Friends of Saddam totally devoted to tracking the UN Oil for Money scam. Why isn't this getting more press? I haven't seen an article in our local Oregonian. This should be bigger than the NBA Playoffs for sure.
According to Friends of Saddam, Bremer halted the money being paid to KPMG to investigate the scandal in Iraq. WHY? Is he insane? The money used for this is coming from Iraqi oil fields, and it's in the Iraqi (and the US's) best interest to see this investigation through. We can't sit back and wait for the UN and their own investigation of themselves.

Another Victory for the US State Department. Civil war was avoided in Georgia recently because the US State Department stuck to it's guns, convinced the Russian government to do the same and politically forced the former Soviet President of Georgia, who was voted out, out of the port city of Ajaria. The former president, Abashidze, had a small loyalist army there and had set up a small "fiefdom" in that part of Georgia. The Russians and Americans finally convinced him to defect and the Georgian government re took the port city. No civil war. The Argus has a great commentary as well as a step by step what happened with links to the stories at each point.

We've been Sick! Light bloggin this week as I've been out of commission. Bad multi-day cold. Also we are searching for a new home, and that can take a lot out of you.

Voting Blues. This excerpt regarding voting machines:
A California advisory panel recommended banning touch-screen voting machines made by Diebold Election Systems, complaining of malfunctions during March's primary election. The members said the state should consider civil and criminal charges against the company, which still argues that its devices are safe and secure. At least 50 million Americans will vote with the computers this November.

Now, why would a software glitch require that the state of California press charges against the software developer? It's a crime not to write bug free code?
I've been wondering for some time whether this electronic voting stuff was worth the while. I've always thought that the old mechanical voting booth was the best option into the future. Voting electronically (even on line, which has been proposed) seems like asking for trouble. Really, despite my initial distaste with ballot-by-mail, which we have here in Oregon for ALL elections, it is really quite sensible. And it's very paper oriented, which means that there's no hacking. It also means I can make my educated choice, mail my ballot in, and then not have to pay attention to the electoral spam that comes in the mail and on TV.