Archive: February 16, 2005

Wednesday, February 16, 2005

1. Roger L. Simon: The Guru Speaks:

   I think this whole story has an interesting reflection in the War in Iraq. Those same Democrats who only favored private Social Security accounts when they were in power are the same people who backed Clinton completely during the unseating of Milosevic, but are opponents of the more geo-strategically important unseating of Saddam. Would they have been for the same War in Iraq under the same conditions with the same results had Clinton been in power? I'd bet my house on it. And the same goes for most of the war's media opponents. This is power/party politics with the thinnest veneer of logical rationalization.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Opinions/Politics]

2. Belmont Club: The Curtain Rises:

   Hence, having engineered a Mexican standoff at worst and a functioning democracy at best in Iraq, it may be possible that the Iraqi campaign is strategically over. If this proves true it may have been inherent in conception. Whether consciously or not, the choice of Iraq as a beachead into the mainland of Middle Eastern terror was a blow directed at a faultline in the Islamic world, just as generals of the previous century directed attacks at the command boundaries of enemy armies. If that strategy proved profitable, so would its sequel: Lebanon lies along another such faultline.

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Opinions/Politics]

3. EditCSS is an excellent Firefox extension. It lets you edit your current css in a sidebar and updates the page you're viewing in real time. Very handy! Here's the homepage for EditCSS.

     ¶ (3) Tags: [Programming]

4. OpinionJournal: Socialism's Last Redoubt, "Why do Dems oppose Social Security reform? Because they're committed to government control":

   In 1945 Clement Attlee led the British Labour Party to victory over Winston Churchill's Conservative Party. He then proceeded to socialize much of the British economy, for he believed that "the creation of a society based on social justice . . . could only be attained by bringing under public ownership and control the main factors in the economic system." Labour's goal was to get rid of the waste and irrationality that, in the socialist view, doomed market economies to failure.
   
   Fast forward six decades, and you hear an Attlee echo--Sen. Hillary Clinton telling a California audience last summer that taxes must rise because "We're going to take things away from you on behalf of the common good."
   
   American socialist Noam Chomsky made the same argument concerning Social Security: that allowing people to invest in markets is a bad thing, for "putting people in charge of their own assets breaks down the solidarity that comes from doing something together, and diminishes the sense that people have responsibility for each other."
   
   So the 2005 Social Security argument is an old and familiar one: government decisions versus individual ones, government control of assets versus individual ownership. In short, socialism versus individualism.
   
   ...
   
   When you increase an individual's wealth, he becomes less dependent on government, and his attitude towards government changes. Socialists can't allow that, for it erodes their fundamental principle that social justice can only be achieved when important segments of the economy are under government control.
   
   And that is why today's very liberal Democratic Party is so vehemently arguing against personal ownership of Social Security market accounts. The government's Social Security system is socialism's last redoubt, and must be preserved at all costs.

   Democrats are only about "choice" in one area.

     ¶ (5) Tags: [Opinions/Politics]

5. jwz on Hula, Groupware, and the death of Netscape, via Simon. Also see what Tim has to say (also via Simon).

     ¶ (0) Tags: [Programming]

Best way to programmatically generate flash applications?

Anyone have any recommendations on the best way to programmatically generate flash apps? So far I'm looking at SWF::Builder in Perl and PHP's Ming support.

Permalink | 1 Comment | Tags: Programming | id 6546

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