Turkey Shoot – How Bush made enemies of our allies. By Paul Glastris

Of course, we’ll never know the answer to these questions. History doesn’t do controlled experiments. But we do know that George H.W. Bush worked sincerely and energetically to put together an international war coalition and succeeded; Bill Clinton worked sincerely and energetically to put together an international war coalition and succeeded; and George W. Bush worked grudgingly and sporadically to do the same and failed.

Excellent article putting the failed international leadership of George Bush Jr into perspective.

Salon.com | See no evil

The antiwar left does not mount massive protests against China, Pakistan or Egypt. Millions do not pour into the streets on behalf of the student-led democracy movement in Iran. And Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden are not angrily compared to Hitler — that treatment is more often reserved for George W. Bush.

This seems to be true, and it has been bothering me.

seattlepi.com: Photo Journal
I saw this photo yesterday in a newspaper machine. I was struck by how hard this woman was to miss. She was directly in front of the bulldozer, yelling into a bullhorn, wearing a bright red jacket with reflective tape.

But then, I guess the bulldozer driver didn’t miss her, did he? He ran her right over and killed her. Perhaps the driver was distracted by the extremely dangerous looking caucasian dancing to the ska-band-in-his head in front of him. Or perhaps he was distracted by the camera, worried that it would catch him in an atrocity?

I’m going to remember this picture whenever I hear that the Isralies have “accidentally” killed another palestinian while razing a compound.

H.E. Services – Excavator and Plant Hire Brilliant!! Be sure to check out their line of amusements.

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.