If every single Arab state suddenly got democracy, should we expect their foreign policy towards Israel to change?

No.

Perhaps the state funding of terrorist groups would cease, but they could still be funded privately. Perhaps active recruitment of military and police officers to train terrorists would have to go underground. Perhaps the rhetoric would be moderated somewhat (as it has been in Egypt and Jordan which are "moderate" if not democratic.)

But anti-Israelism is a popular opinion in the Arab world. How can we expect a popular elected government to do other than reflect the attitudes of their population?

Does this mean that we shouldn't support efforts to democratize these states? No. Democracy for the Arab states is not a means to peace in the Middle East; it is a worthy end in itself. We expect wealth, education, and prosperity to follow on the heels of democracy. Years from now, in a generation or six, perhaps peace will come.

Much concern has been aired in the media about bloodthirsty attitudes of Americans. Apparently, we want our soldiers' lives to be preserved, our enemies killed, and we don't care very much about foreign civilian casualties.

Now, I don't see how this is at all unexpected. The United States is a nation, much like any other. (Americans like me are likely to believe that it's better than most.) A nation is a group; and when a group is threatened, it responds in a predictable way.

We are not above hating our enemies. We are not above disregarding the lives of the innocent. We know how to hate, and we know how to make war. And in the recent history of the world, we have made war better than anyone else on earth. Perhaps it's because World War II was so long ago; and perhaps it's because Korea, Vietnam, and the first Gulf War were small and far away, but everyone has forgotten this fact. The hand-wringers among us have forgotten; the Europeans, our erstwhile allies, have forgotten; and most of all, our enemies have forgotten this one simple fact:

The last time an enemy started a war with an attack on the soil of the United States, we ended that war by detonating two nuclear devices on the soil of that enemy.

Addendum:

I am not trying to take a position in the debate over whether the U.S. was right to use atomic weapons in Japan. I merely point out that the U.S. has a history of using brutal violence gainst its enemies with the full approval of the U.S. public.

(The use of atomic weapons was wildly popular in 1945. Even today, most Americans appear to approve of the decision -- 1999 Gallup poll: Americans over 50 approve, under 30 disapprove; results not available at press time).

Oscar, our little white male cat (little only in comparison to the 18-lb. hulk that is Dizzy) returned this morning around 5:00 AM after an absence of nearly 48 hours. We're keeping him in now.

A rather long review and criticism of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs and Steel by Garrett Hardin. Hardin criticizes Diamond's biology, and argues that the burden of proof is on Diamond to explain why genetic difference is not responsible for differences in human outcomes.

An interesting point is that, to the extent IQ scores are a fair measure of "civilizedness", it's not surprising that Asians -- especially people of Chinese background -- score higher than European whites. China has been civilized for a lot longer than Europe has.

Greenspan's irrational exuberance speech is making me think more about monetary policy, in particular with respect to inflation and deflation.

Inflation and deflation affect stored and borrowed money: they affect savers/lenders and borrowers. Inflation (especially unforseen inflation) helps borrowers at the expense of savers, allowing the borrower to repay the debt with money that's worth less. Deflation has the opposite effect: it makes the borrower repay the debt with money that's worth more.

After Japan's stock market and real estate market crashed, Japan entered a period of zero money supply growth or even deflation. The Bank of Japan's published interest rate is still hovering around zero.

Why won't the same thing happen in the U.S.? The stock market is thinking about crashing now. Real estate will be next, if the stock market does collapse to pre-1990 levels: it'll take longer because a margin call is immediate and a foreclosure takes months.

Although I've thought for a long time that deflation would then come to the U.S., as it did in the early years of the Great Depression (1930:-2.4%, 1931:-9.4%, 1932:-10.4% source). But now I think deflation is less likely -- at least as a deliberate act of monetary policy.

The United States is still a borrower of foreign capital, and it would be against the U.S.'s interests as a borrower to allow deflation of the U.S. dollar as long as foreign lenders are willing to lend us money in dollar-denominated notes. I believe Japan is a net lender of capital, so deflation is less serious there.

Expect to see this played out as rich vs. poor, whether inflation or deflation happens -- inflation "steals the savings of the poor", while deflation "breaks the back of the indebted poor".

It's clear: Israel should never have become a state in the first place.

Without statehood, there would be nobody to complain against in the U.N. We see the reaction of the international community when people without a state violate international law (combatants out of uniform, combatants wearing the enemy uniform, deliberate targeting of non-combatants): there's no reaction. The terrorists, Palestinian and otherwise, who commit these violations of international law, these war crimes, in the occupied territories and Israel, are not censured or blamed by the international community.

If Israel had never been founded -- if the state of Israel had not been declared -- if the Jewish people who live there were struggling to maintain their very existence against a more numerous and better-armed and better-funded foe just as they are today, but without the trappings of statehood -- then the Europeans and the liberals and the news media would be much more sympathetic, right?

Right?

After all, they're not acting on any anti-Jewish bias. Are they?

Here's an article by Arianna Huffington about financial scandals. Huffington, you will recall, is the former wife of multimillionaire Michael Huffington, former candidate for the Senate in California.

Among the gems of self-contradiction in this piece are:

-- raillery against "corporations", while the whole piece is copyright to "Christabella, Inc."

-- comparison of the distinctions between "right and left or black and white" to the distinction between an asset and a liability

Okay, Arianna, here's a quick refresher course: Money is not real. Accounting is not real. Accounting models of financial systems are the best way we have of understanding those systems, but they're still not real.

Oh yes, and the IRS and SEC use different rules, so it's perfectly reasonable for a clever person to be able to find something which is an asset in one set of books and a liability in the other. (Case in point: future employee stock option payments.) It may well be dishonest, but I'm sure it's technically legal -- and the law is technical.

I don't use accounting tricks like that in my small business because I can't be bothered to find the accountant who'll teach me how to do them -- and I probably couldn't afford to pay that accountant, anyway. How about you, Arianna -- can you say you honestly stand behind everything that's on the books of Christabella, Inc.? Do you even know?

Israel's foreign ministry has a propaganda page with some flash presentations. The propaganda is viscerally unconvincing, and appeals to the viewer at the level of reason. Don't the Israelis get it? Propaganda is supposed to convince irrationally.

On the other hand, it's not like the base message -- that Palestinian "militants" intentionally murder Jewish children and other non-combatants -- gets through. Why not try this strange appeal-to-reason propaganda, on the off chance it will?

Tom Tomorrow has a big "I told you so" section at the end of a recent web log entry. Yes, Virginia, there really was a bubble.

In coming months and years we should expect to hear:

-- that we have not yet seen the full productivity improvements to be expected from the use of PC's in business

-- that prosperity is "just around the corner"

-- that America's economy is fundamentally sound

-- that we all should have known this was going to happen, all along

Well, we did! Alan Greenspan said "irrational exuberance" in 1996. Turns out it was true: irrational exuberance caused undue escalation of asset values. It will likely take the stock market 20 years to recover a DJIA at its over-10,000 level. The collapse should stop with the DJIA in the 3,000-5,000 level, but it may fall as far as 1,000.

So what? I heard on the radio that 65% of the households in Alberta have at least one member who regularly uses the Internet. Merely 10 years ago, virtually nobody was aware of the Internet. Here's how it works: Market bubbles are how we finance infrastructure development.

It's too hot to think today -- 33 Celsius in the shade. The raspberries are hot and sweet. The radio promised a week of rain and cloudy days -- if they deliver, I'll try to be lucent.

This Noakes exercise plan is extremely boring: walk 20 minutes every other day for the first 6 weeks. The rationale is sensible, so I must try to talk myself into it.

Ultimately, the whole thing can be summed up in one tired proverb: You must walk before you can run.

First beer explosion occurred today. I salvaged about a glass from a blown 22-oz bottle. The beer I laid down about a week and a half ago (it's a hefeweizen) seems to be carbonating well, but it's not mature enough to drink.

If another one blows, I'll open them all up to relieve the pressure. My current theory is that the bottle was weak.

The local berries are in season: this is the height of the saskatoons (dark blue, sweet bush berries), the raspberries are starting to mature, the strawberries have been going steadily for a few weeks. Some of the more exotic stuff -- nanking cherries, gooseberries -- isn't having fruit yet. But for the last few days, we've been browsing the bushes, picking the ripe berries and immediately eating them.

Which got me to thinking A gatherer existence isn't so bad..

Of course, I want to plant the bushes that I plan to gather from right by my mud hut, so it's more like farming, really. Especially when you factor the cucumbers, tomatoes, carrots and lettuce -- which I can't honestly call gathering, because we have to baby them and water them daily because of the heat.

So that's my intended existence: gather what berries I can, farm some food in the garden, and write code to get cash for the things I can't grow myself: electricity, for example. Coffee. Hops. (Although apparently hops will grow in this zone.)

Wired the living room in a fit of activity this evening. Turns out that it's quite easy to drill through carpet and floorboard, and I was reasonably sure that I wasn't going to hit a joist (by measurement -- I guess I could have used the studfinder instead.) Then just ran the cable through the office wall into the furnace room and up through the hole into the living room.

There's enough length to plug in a laptop anywhere along the windowed wall -- from my chair, to the couch, to Danielle's chair on the far end. Next step: the kitchen.

Our old server is failing. It has an old AMD chip with the sig 11 hardware error. I believe there's also some sort of a bus fault where the motherboard kicks off. Possibly also hardware problems with the memory. /dev/hda is failing quickly. /dev/hdc may be failing slowly, or not, but anyway occasionally hangs when I'm trying to write data to it, necessitating reboot.

I have a backup device: /dev/hdb, a CD-RW. When I try to mount it using ide-scsi, the system hangs. Clearly, I am not meant to back any of this data up.

The main inconvenience caused by the hardware problems is that compilation often fails with signal 11. I've written a batch script called 'repeated-make' which runs make until it finally succeeds, pausing between re-runs. It's tedious and annoying. But sometimes there are bright spots:

{standard input}:1594: Error: no such instruction: `pus'

No, that's only an instruction on the Cthulu processor, from HP/Compaq/Digital/Lovecraft.

I like things with few ingredients. Notably, beer: hops, barley, yeast; coffee: ground roasted coffee beans, water. Here's another one: Sunny Boy Cereal: wheat, rye, flax.

The correct way to cook Sunny Boy in my microwave is as follows: boil 1 cup of water. Mix 1/3 cup cereal with 1 c. water in a standard cereal bowl and stir. Place on saucer in microwave and cover with small plate (e.g., luncheon plate). Cook for 6 minutes on 40%, interrupting once to stir.

Prairie Sun Grains, makers of Sunny Boy, also sell barley. I wonder if they do retail.

So I'm working on running, with the ultimate aim of running a marathon before I hit thirty and get too smart to inflict serious joint damage on myself. I'm using a book, The Lore of Running, by Timothy Noakes, M.D. (Leisure Press: 1991), which includes a starting program for novice runners in addition to detailed discussions of running physiology. And it includes a stretching program.

I never realized this before, but stretching has to be tailored to each individual. Another brilliant flash of the obvious.

It sounds stupid to say it that way, because of course all exercise should be tailored to your goals, muscle strength, flexibility, and endurance, and stretching is part of exercise, right? But in fact, stretching is usually done en masse at the beginning of group exercise -- as a warm-up, and also to kill a little time to absorb latecomers.

Of course experienced amateur athletes do their own stretches beforehand, stretching the muscles they find important -- but then they participate in the group stretching program too.

Anyway, this stretching program in Lore of Running is good because it lists two to three stretches for each muscle, and recommends that you try various exercises until you find ones which stretch the appropriate muscles.

And it says you can expect results "after weeks or months."

So I swapped which card was eth0 and which was eth1, and I did it on the low level (module level) instead of the script level. Now after a painful reboot, we have 100BT on the internal interface where it might someday matter, and 10BT on the external interface where it never will. Next: see if we can run the DHCP server now.

Oh yeah, dinner.

Today is my second attempt at making Arrogant Bastard. Last attempt was reasonably successful but flawed due to my dumping in about 500g of dextrose as priming sugar, which added about 7 atm CO₂ to the finished beer, so it was horrifically over-carbonated. But good, though.

This time, I'm using a weird yeast (Wyeast 1028 London) which smells very fruity. I'm not sure whether to supplement it with the 15g Dry English Ale yeast I have left over from a kit...

UPDATE: The 1028 seemed pretty fruity, but I looked up the yeast I used last time (1098), and Wyeast claims it's fruitier. So I guess it should be fine. The LCD thermometer on my primary looks like it's failing.

Frenetic burst of activity last night: set up MovableType, which necessitated installing Apache, installing some new perl modules, and general fiddling. Now using MovableType as a bad diary.

Almost done recompiling the kernel so we can maybe use the CD-RW for backups, and so we can run a DHCP server. DSL is here but we're not using it yet.