Man, I wanna GeoURL my blog. Gotta get around to it.
Via LGF, Thomas Friedman at the New York Times opines that India should replace France as a permanent member of the security council. Fine by me.
Sometimes I wish that the five permanent members of the U.N. Security Council could be chosen like the starting five for the N.B.A. All-Star team -- with a vote by the fans. If so, I would certainly vote France off the Council and replace it with India. Then the perm-five would be Russia, China, India, Britain and the United States. That's more like it.
Why replace France with India? Because India is the world's biggest democracy, the world's largest Hindu nation and the world's second-largest Muslim nation, and, quite frankly, India is just so much more serious than France these days. France is so caught up with its need to differentiate itself from America to feel important, it's become silly. India has grown out of that game. India may be ambivalent about war in Iraq, but it comes to its ambivalence honestly. Also, France can't see how the world has changed since the end of the cold war. India can.
...the whole French game on Iraq, spearheaded by its diplomacy-lite foreign minister, Dominique de Villepin, lacks seriousness. Most of France's energy is devoted to holding America back from acting alone, not holding Saddam Hussein's feet to the fire to comply with the U.N.
The French position is utterly incoherent. The inspections have not worked yet, says Mr. de Villepin, because Saddam has not fully cooperated, and, therefore, we should triple the number of inspectors. But the inspections have failed not because of a shortage of inspectors. They have failed because of a shortage of compliance on Saddam's part, as the French know. The way you get that compliance out of a thug like Saddam is not by tripling the inspectors, but by tripling the threat that if he does not comply he will be faced with a U.N.-approved war.
Mr. de Villepin also suggested that Saddam's government pass "legislation to prohibit the manufacture of weapons of mass destruction." (I am not making this up.) That proposal alone is a reminder of why, if America didn't exist and Europe had to rely on France, most Europeans today would be speaking either German or Russian.
"France, it seems, would rather be more important in a world of chaos than less important in a world of order," says the foreign policy expert Michael Mandelbaum, author of "The Ideas That Conquered the World."
I like how he ends the article. 
What I've wanted to say before in response to some comments here about France and Germany is the following: previously, I've put France and Germany together in some of the things I've said. However, upon reflection, I don't think I really understand why Germany is against the war. Sure, German companies have done more business with Saddam than any other country's, and sure there's a lot of anti-Americanism over there, but is that it? It seems like there should be more.
France's motives, on the other hand, seem to be fairly clear to me. In addition to what the author mentioned above, Iraq owes France lots of money which they won't get back once Saddam's toppled (well, they probably wouldn't get it back anyway). But from all the analysis I've been hearing, France just wants to be important. As the author points out, their position is "utterly incoherent", so their motive seems to be the desire for importance from a formerly important, but now weak and irrellevent nation, who happens to have a permanent seat on the council they can use to make their voice heard and muck up the works unless they get their way.
Hey, I figured this belongs here too... funny. Hey, this is worth reading too (I'm glad I added the USS Clueless to my list of feeds in Syndirella):
I have to give the French government credit. Its new proposal regarding Iraq is a credible diplomatic threat. It's not actually a credible plan, in the sense of actually having any chance of disarming Iraq, but I don't think it is intended to be one.
Until now, the French and the others in the UN and around the world who have opposed war have been in the position of not having any alternative to propose which was even faintly plausible. Their previous position was "Let the inspections work" but we gave that a try, and Powell's speech before the UN made clear that it not only failed but in fact cannot reasonably be expected to succeed. So for anyone to continue to oppose war, based on the underlying philosophy that "war is the last resort; we need to explore other alternatives first" (which is what Chirac keeps saying, not that he actually believes it) then they needed another alternative to propose, and this is it.
Guido van Rossum: Strong versus Weak Typing:
The one thing that troubles me is that all the focus is on the strong typing, as if once your program is type correct, it has no bugs left. Strong typing catches many bugs, but it also makes you focus too much on getting the types right and not enough on getting the rest of the program correct.
Strong typing is one reason that languages like C++ and Java require more finger typing. You have to declare all your variables and you have to do a lot of work just to make the compiler happy.
All that attention to getting the types right doesn't necessarily mean you don't have other bugs in your program. A type is a narrow piece of information about your data. When you look at large programs that deal with a lot of strong typing, you see that many words are spent working around strong typing.
The container problem is one issue. It's difficult in a language without generics to write a container implementation that isn't limited to a particular type. And all the strong typing goes out the door the moment you say, "Well, we're just going to write a container of Objects, and you'll have to cast them back to whatever type they really are once you start using them." That means you have even more finger typing, because of all those casts. And you don't have the helpful support of the type system while you're inside your container implementation.
U.N. Troops to Serve as Human Shields in Iraq
In order to fend off a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq, France and Germany propose sending a 10,000-person U.N. force to serve as human shields.
The U.N. troops would join the dozens of pro-Saddam protestors already in Baghdad hoping their presence will prevent an attack.
U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan welcomed the proposal, and suggested the traditional baby blue U.N. peacekeeper helmets bear the letters NIMN, for Not In My Name.
The U.N. soldiers will link arms to form human chains around weapons sites, command-and-control centers and presidential palaces. They'll chant slogans, sing folk songs and eat a lot of hummus.
"When Saddam Hussein sees this," said Mr. Annan, "He will know we are serious about peace in the region."
Did you hear about this? Crazy stuff.
Also, Saddam Blinks, Begins Revealing Weapons
Around the country, bunker doors opened and Iraqi soldiers wheeled out truckloads of missiles and canisters of chemical and biological agents. Often they simply laid them on the ground and put yellow plastic "police tape" around them to warn innocent civilians of the danger.
Mr. Hussein said it was the relentless call for more inspections that finally made him blink, and capitulate to the demands of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1441.
Now that I can use Syndirella again, I figure I'll use this as an opportunity to learn XSLT to generate my blogroll from the opml file that Syndirella can generate. Super simple task and a good first experiment to try XSLT with. I'll probably share my code here when I'm done. And this is the first time I have the liberty to experiment, since I don't think I had Sablotron built into PHP long before now.
I'm starting with this tutorial from XML.com, and then once I'm comfortable I'll probably move onto the spec
Sunday, February 9, 2003
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I hate ASP.NET
I hate ASP... I was doing wonderswith PHP, then suddenly one of myclients...
Johnies: Mar 17, 6:14am