Via Glenn, Michael Duff thinks the Bush doctrine may be working.
I don't really like the Bush Doctrine, okay?
After 9-11, I thought we should confine our efforts to the Al Qaeda organization. Instead, Bush decided to condemn half the Middle East with his Axis of Evil speech and roll tanks into Iraq.
It bothered me. It still bothers me. But dammit, if you look at the patterns, it seems to be working. The Middle East thinks Bush is batshit crazy, and their governments are afraid of us. Do you get that? The bad guys are afraid of us, because against all logic and common sense, we went into Iraq and we took Saddam down.
Middle Eastern governments want us to leave them alone. They'll snipe at us when they feel protected, funneling money to terrorist organizations when they think they won't be traced. But what happens when we follow that money home? What happens when their attempts to scare us backfire, and the crazy American president starts taking out dictators in Iraq and Afghanistan?
I'll tell you what happens. The money dries up, and governments that used to wink and nod at terrorism get on their secret satelite phones and tell their extremists to cool it, unless they want to see Marines taking showers in the palace.
Bush wants to be like Reagan, and he has succeeded. Everybody thought Reagan was crazy, when he went on TV and said, "We begin bombing in five minutes." His comments scared the shit out of people. It scared us in America, and more important, it scared our enemies.
In 2001, New York was burning and we were afraid. Today, there are American flags flying in Baghdad and our enemies are afraid.
He also parrots what I and other people have been saying for a while. When you go to the voting booth in November, think carefully about who our enemies would most like to have be elected. I know the conclusion I'd come to, and I certainly couldn't, in good conscience, vote for that candidate:
... Bush is pissing a lot of people off. But tyrants around the world are making compromise noises because we have put the fear of God in them. And if Kerry wins this election, all of that progress will be rolled back.
Europe will love us. The UN will praise us. The Arab world will breathe a huge sigh of relief. And money will start trickling back into Al Qaeda's coffers. The bad guys will tighten their grip on their respective populations, and the price we have paid will have been paid for nothing.
He links to James Lileks' article about this: Guess Which Candidate Our Enemies Want to Lose in 2004?:
Let's just be blunt: The North Koreans would love to see John Kerry win the election. The mullahs of Iran would love it. The Syrian Ba'athists would sigh with relief. Every enemy of America would take great satisfaction if the electorate rejects the Bush doctrine and scuttles back to hide under the U.N. Security Council's table. It's a hard question, but the right one: Which candidate does our enemy want to lose?
Get that straight before you go to vote in November. I recently noticed this statement on LGF: "A vote for Bush or Kerry will be a vote for or against the war on terror." I think that's right. For all of our sakes, make sure you vote differently than our enemies would.
I need Google for my brain. Today when I was in the bath I remember thinking of the word "pinwheel". But I have no idea why or in what context. I need Google for my brain.
LGF: Iran's Manhattan Project Speeding Ahead
A new discovery of advanced centrifuge equipment in Iran, for enriching uranium to weapons grade, comes as absolutely no surprise to anyone except the United Nations and the International Atomic Energy Agency
Heh.
It's frustrating that MySQL's datetime (et al) data type doesn't support the time zone. A time literally doesn't mean anything (or at best, any timestamp has a precision of +-23 hours, which is unacceptible) without a time zone, just as a monetary amount doesn't mean a thing without knowing what currency the amount is in.
For all future development, I'm going to be storing my usual Creation_DateTime, Modification_DateTime timestamps, and now I'm going to A. store them in UTC, and B. have a Creation_DateTime_TZ and Modification_DateTime_TZ[1]. As an example of why this is necessary... imagine I decide to change my hosting company to one in the UK (or somewhere else)... all the times listed on my site will change.
Eventually I'm going to have to go back and change all the times I've ever entered on my site to UTC, and I'm going to have to write code to figure out when daylight savings time was in effect and adjust the time-zone accordingly.
I've written about data requiring context before, though surprisingly I left out the currency example.
Footnotes:
[1]: Come to think of it, I think I'm going to slightly rethink my table field naming conventions. Usually I put something to indicate the type in the field name. Rather than using things like "DateTime", "Number", "Text", "Description", etc. I'll be using "DT", "Num", "Text", "Desc". So I might have things like Modification_DT_TZ instead, or maybe just Modification_TZ
Thursday, February 19, 2004
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