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?