Spoken Words: Diplomacy Diplomats are just as essential to starting a war as soldiers are for finishing it…. (Will Rogers)

I was actually looking for a similar quote from Ambrose Bierce, but this one will do nicely.

I write this as we make our last swirl around the bowl, about to be sucked inevitably into the sewer of war. I thought it appropriate to give credit to the turds that got us into this mess, the diplomats, the world leaders, the national leaders.

But, I can’t help but start with Saddam Hussein. The guy is shitbag among shitbags. I am sure there are worse people in the world, but few of them command the resources of this one.

Of course, Saddam couldn’t have done it himself. Its hard to know where to start, so I’ll start with Bush and his administration. Rather than giving the UN enough rope to hang themselves as negligent dabblers, he took the rope and hung the US instead.

There was a strong case to be made that the UN isn’t the sole path to multilateral legitimacy, just as there was a strong case to be made that the UN’s own legitimacy in multilateral matters is not well established (years of knee-jerk soviet vetoes, failure to act in Bosnia, soft peddling with Israel, failing to do anything credible in Iraq since the Gulf War, etc.) They didn’t make that case. They paid lip service to “a coalition of the willing” while putting all their public efforts into forcing the issue with the UN. As expected, it didn’t work out very well, and now here we are we look like a petulant child who has just carried through on his threat to take his marbles and go home. Just the thing to inspire support in the people of the world.

What a mess. Truth is, most of the parties probably agreed more than they disagreed, and yet it has ended up as this colossal clusterfuck.

There is more, of course, but I don’t have the energy to do them up right, not right now anyway.

Mozilla 1.3 Release Notes

Mozilla Mail has junk-mail classification. With some initial “training” the client can identify and segregate spam messages from good messages. To see more about Mozilla’s junk-mail classification, visit the Mozilla Spam Filtering page.

Whatttayaknow, it actually works. The UI was a little confusing at first. The first time it runs, it seems to flag all the messages with a little junk icon. At least it looks like a junk icon with the default skin. Once I installed the Orbit 3+1 skin, I could tell that there was a little question mark. Once you get it straight on what is and isn’t spam, it starts working its magic. Its caught 6-7 spam messages so far. No telling how it does with false positives though, because I haven’t gotten any legitimate mail since installing it. You can see why I am so happy to have a smart spam-filter.

J’Accuse, Sort Of – You never know where you’re going to find anti-Semitic propaganda. By Michael Kinsley

Nevertheless, you shouldn’t brag about how influential you are if you want to get hysterically indignant when someone suggests that government policy is affected by your influence.

Yahoo! News – Bush Will Push U.N. for Iraq Vote This Week

Bush will oppose any effort to extend the proposed March 17 deadline for Iraqi compliance by a month as some undecided Security Council members have suggested, White House spokesman Ari Fleischer (news – web sites) told reporters, calling the idea a “non-starter.”

I really don’t get it. Fleischer dismissed the idea of extending the deadline by 30-45 days. What do they think is going to happen in that time frame? Somehow, I don’t think they are going to make any progress with any weapons programs. It’s not like the issue is going to drift off the international agenda again in that time frame (a legitimate concern if we were talking about another 6-12 months).

The only thing I can imagine happening in 30-45 days is that the US might regain some of the credibility that Bush & co have been working so damn hard to squander. I can see why that would be a non-starter with “Rumstud” and King George.

Bastards!!!

Win2K professional doesn’t support any fault tolerant disk schemes. I should be bloody able to mirror a disk on a workstation. How stupid.

R-Studio – Data Recovery software for Windows OS and Linux
Seems to share UI and some underlying code with the previous product (similar diag/error messages).

Update: After running through the scan, this one demostrated much much better results. I think I am going to buy it. The NTFS-only version is $49.95.

Now I have to install the new drive so I have a place to recover to.

Update2: New huge-ish (80GB, 1000x larger than the drive in the Mac I bought a decade ago) drive is installed. I should have my files recovered by now, but I am being slow and indirect.

I want to add right here that R-studio did a much better job of recovering the directory structure on my dry run than any of the others I tried. It actually shows the original directory structure more-or-less intact and with the original names. The others (if they got anything at all) have a bunch of generic directory names at the root of the hierarchy and nothing that resembles a deep folder like “Documents and Settings” in terms of its contents.