Bush on Saddam

"Trying to eliminate Saddam, extending the ground war into an occupation of Iraq, would have violated our guideline about not changing objectives in midstream, engaging in "mission creep," and would have incurred incalculable human and political costs. Apprehending him was probably
impossible. We had been unable to find Noriega in Panama, which we knew intimately. We would have been forced to occupy Baghdad and, in effect, rule Iraq. The coalition would instantly have collapsed, the Arabs deserting it in anger and other allies pulling out as well. Under the
circumstances, there was no viable "exit strategy" we could see, violating another of our principles. Furthermore, we had been self-consciously trying to set a pattern for handling aggression in the post-Cold War world. Going in and occupying Iraq, thus unilaterally exceeding the United Nations' mandate, would have destroyed the precedent of international
response to aggression that we hoped to establish. Had we gone the invasion route, the United States could conceivably still be an occupying power in a bitterly hostile land. It would have been a dramatically different - and perhaps barren - outcome."

-- President George Bush Sr and Brent Scowcroft, in "A World
Transformed", 1998

On Iraq

"I would guess if we had gone in there, I would still have forces in Baghdad today. We'd be running the country. We would not have been able to get everybody out and bring everybody home.

"And the final point that I think needs to be made is this question of casualties. I don't think you could have done all of that without significant additional U.S. casualties. And while everybody was tremendously impressed with the low cost of the (1991) conflict, for the 146 Americans who were killed in action and for their families, it wasn't a cheap war.

"And the question in my mind is how many additional American casualties is Saddam (Hussein) worth? And the answer is not that damned many. So, I think we got it right, both when we decided to expel him from Kuwait, but also when the president made the decision that we'd achieved our objectives and we were not going to go get bogged down in the problems of trying to take over and govern Iraq."

-- Dick Cheney, then Secretary of Defense in the administration of George Bush Sr., speaking before the Discovery Institute in Seattle in 1992.

Workplace Tips

http://www.moderndrunkardmagazine.com/issues/07_03/07-03-juicing-on-the-job.htm

I am passing this along because it's nail-on-the-head with regard to how any thinking person (which are very, very few) feels about the modern technology workplace.

I am not passing it along to be funny.

Getting through the days in a culture of dumb-it-down isn't easy. Even if taken as satire, these sentiments speak volumes about our times. People are stupid.

Cards - The Latest Spam

I receive 15 to 20 of these each day. I really don't understand the point. This has been going on for weeks now. Somewhere, out there, does someone think I might click on the 18,864th copy of this that I received? Everyone has seen their share of junk email. But the real point here is this - this sort of thing will eliminate standard email from the array of useful facilities provided by the internet. Thanks a lot.

******

Date: Mon, 30 Jul 2007 12:00:18 -0700
From: freewebcards.com <sly@pshift.com>
Subject: You've received a greeting ecard from a School friend!

Hi. School friend has sent you a greeting ecard.
See your card as often as you wish during the next 15 days.

SEEING YOUR CARD

If your email software creates links to Web pages, click on your card's
direct
www address below while you are connected to the Internet:

http://66.16.143.152/?2b0099675c50080d0229e368412571d7d41977

Or copy and paste it into your browser's "Location" box (where Internet
addresses go).

We hope you enjoy your awesome card.

Wishing you the best,
Mailer-Daemon,
freewebcards.com

******

People are stupid.

Doom

The vast majority of people would not know good technological implementations from poor technological implementations. More than a quarter of humanity have no access to electricity and rely on wood, charcoal, or dung as their principal source of energy for cooking and heating. But that is not what we mean. This conversation today is limited to those that are supposed to know better, those that we hope know better, those who earn a first world living from, supposedly, knowing better.

Let's begin today with email.

it seems that email is falling out of favor with techy youth. According to this:

http://news.com.com/Kids+say+e-mail+is%2C+like%2C+soooo+dead/2009-1032_3-6197242.html?
tag=nefd.lede

Many young people see email as primarily a tool for "communicating with adults." What's more popular that email? Text messaging and social network sites like facebook, especially accessed from wireless phone.

Question: what is the functional difference between email on a wireless phone, and text messaging on a wireless phone?

Answer: nothing.

To be more specific, the current crop of teens and 20-somethings have grown up never having seen anything like pine, elm, mh, or mail, not that pine is great program, it's just an example. It's a handy little contrast to the most popular email platform of our age, the Microsoft Outlook and Exchange combination.

Outlook is, if not the, at least a front runner, for the worst user-space software ever created. I will not discuse why. Kids hate it, enough said.

What do kids want? Easy, there's nothing new here at all. They want something fast and easy to use to communicate with other people. They want to type messages into a device, and have those messages appear someplace else for someone else to read.

email is a protocal, SMTP. It doesn't know or care what is in in a message. It can be a simple text message, or it can be some gigantic Microsoft Word file, saved as a pdf and MIME attached along with grahical versions of emoticons and a jpeg of the senders cat in the sig, all containing exactly the same message.

Why is email in the decline among young people? This question misses the point rather badly. Communication is more important than ever among young people. They expect it. They expect fast. They expect it simple.

They don't use email because Microsoft broke it for all of us. Thanks a lot.

It make me angry. People are stupid.