Happy Birthday Mac

It's Mac's Birthday today and I can't ever get my typepad comment account to work right, so....

Happy Birthday Mac


Kalroy

Hawai'i? A Swing State?

Now this is interesting. Over at Transterrestrial Musings, a daily read for me, I find this link to a news report on Yahoo showing Hawai'i to be almost a swing state.

So I'm working on Johnston Atoll and one of the guys tells me that a Republican governor was elected in Hawai'i (I was born and raised there), I called him an, er, ummm, "stand up philosopher."

I don't see why the state couldn't swing the other way. During the heyday of the anti-war protests (aka wonderful NVA propaganda) Hawai'i wasn't nearly as virulent as the larger states. Hawai'i has a large active duty and veteran population. Hawaiians themselves join the military at rate higher than their demographic proportion. People in Hawai'i don't like the way the left treats the military. Spitting on veterans is not something you do in Hawai'i, though I'm not sure if it's that way at UH anymore.

The Democrats have a huge following in Hawai'i, but nobody likes to be taken for granted, and nobody enjoys backing a party that gives them nothing in return, and many (I hope most) Americans don't like the way the Left disdains, insults, and denigrates the military.

Kalroy

Fable

Spent a bunch of the last week playing Fable, by the way. It's not as good as it could have been, but better than some have made it out to be. It's an outstanding game in search of more gameplay. It needed to have the same type/style of gameplay, but with the content and free-roaming aspect of Morrowind (an outstanding game). It will appeal to a larger audience than Morrowind (heck, Ed loves the thing), and the graphics look "mah-velous." Still too short a game, without much to do after you beat the game (you can only kick chickens for so long before getting bored).


Kalroy

Star Wars Battlefront

I spent most of the weekened playing Star Wars: Battlefront (geek). Pretty good game. I enjoyed it, and it was hard to put down. Ended up getting my laundry done late because of the durn thing. I played through all the "historical" missions and two of the conquest mode scenarios. Had a great time. Then I went on XBox Live. Had my bum handed to me for a bit. But I also did pretty well. What's worse is I had a great time.

It's a great game. The flaws are not fatal. It's a multi-platform game so the graphics aren't great, lowest common denominator (PS2) , and the conquest mode seems odd in that picking a side to play is either non-existant, or simply not instinctive enough for me to figure out, which is too bad.

Kalroy

Amazing Honda Ad - Flash Animation

Amazing Honda Ad - Flash Animation

Courtesy of Arrowatch. This is pretty cool (broadband almost a must). As I recall Honda did another similar commercial involving a tire that went roaming.

Enjoy,

Kalroy

Nanotechnology

Instapundit has a link to Foresight Conference on Molecular Nanotechnology. Nifty stuff, but mostly just overviews and descriptions of the actual seminar topics. On the plus side, the site itself has a primer portion and that led me to a basic description of nanotechnology that I found very interesting, and an online book called Unbounding the Future. That has so far proved interesting enough that I'm now half an hour past my bed time and suddenly felt the need to share this with Sarah and my other four regular readers. If you find the time, check it out. The primer is for general audiences and I like the way he puts it into terms I can understand, same reason I enjoyed Michio Kaku's book on Hyperspace (string theory).

Kalroy

Global Test

Cox & Forkum: Global Test good cartoon.

Let's go back to Kerry's global test.

quote:

---

No president, though all of American history, has ever ceded, and nor would I, the right to preempt in any way necessary to protect the United States of America.

But if and when you do it, Jim, you have to do it in a way that passes the test, that passes the global test where your countrymen, your people understand fully why you're doing what you're doing and you can prove to the world that you did it for legitimate reasons.

---

We'll ignore the first part since it has nothing to do with a "global" test and is, rather, a domestic premise. Kerry's test is that the world believe you pre-emptively struck for legitimate reasons.

The problem with this statement is that it is utterly subjective. Legitimacy in whose eyes is he talking about? Certainly not Poland, Australia, Great Britain, The Czech Republic, or the rest of the Vilnius Eight. Perhaps he means France and Russia? We'll look at those two countries.

France believed that Saddam had stockpiles of chemical weapons and that those would be found after the invasion. France believed that Saddam killed hundreds of thousands of his own people using those weapons. France believed that Saddam had violated every UNSC resolution that was passed. Despite this France threatened to veto proposed UNSC Resolution 1442 (or so). So despite what we all thought at the time France saw the war as not being legitimate; or rather as not being legitimate enough to override their own interests which involved billions of dollars in oil contracts, weapons contracts and nuclear contracts.

Russia not only thought the same thing, they had added evidence that Saddam intended to use terrorist strikes in the US. Despite this they were unwilling to support the US because of their own interests which included oil and weapons. I think they did see legitimacy in US actions which would explain why they didn't support us, but also didn't actively work against us.

Germany was tied intimately to France's position because the administration was elected on a platform of anti-Americanism, and had solid EU ties and interests with France.

Perhaps the countries that Kerry meant are Iran, North Korea or Saddam's Iraq. These countries would never see any American action as legitimate. The UN is made up of countries. The majority of these countries are not western democracies, and a number of them (in Europe also) see the US as an entity that needs to be taken down. So much so that EU representatives have characterized the EU's position as a counter to American economic and military might. These are not the kinds of countries that would see any action in the best interest of the US as legitimate, since their goal is to "counter" America.

John Kerry claims that he holds America's sovereignty important, but then goes ahead and states that America's actions must be approved by the world, by a "global test," that relies on countries hostile to US interests approving our actions before we do them. I agree with Bush that America's interests are the most important thing here, not whether we win a popularity contest among France, the Sudan and Vanuatu.

Kalroy