(Prompted by Hit & Run's linkage to the Science Fiction Book Club's list of “The Most Significant SF & Fantasy Books of the Last 50 Years”, with the Foundation trilogy making it in at #2.)

Since I spent much of the weekend laid up with the seemingly annual recurrence of my sprained ankle, I finally got around to doing some light reading. My reading choice was the three books of Asimov's original Foundation trilogy: Foundation, Foundation and Empire and Second Foundation. Much of the plot of the series revolves around the invention and seeming perfection of “psychohistory” by Hari Seldon, and the consequences thereof. From the Wikipedia:

Psychohistory was also the name of a fictional science in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy universe, which combined history, psychology and mathematical statistics to create a (nearly) exact science of the behavior of very large populations of people, such as the Galactic Empire. Asimov used the analogy of a gas, where whilst the motion of a single molecule is very difficult to predict, the mass behavior of the gas can be predicted to a high level of accuracy. This concept he then applied to the population of the fictional Galactic Empire, which numbered in the quadrillions. The character responsible for the science's creation, Hari Seldon, established two postulates: that the population whose behaviour was modeled should be sufficiently large and that they should remain in ignorance of the results of the application of psychohistorical analyses.

In some ways (although Asimov came up with the concept before the behavioral revolution in political science, beginning with Voting and The American Voter), “psychohistory” sounds a lot like the work of the quantitative parts of the discipline, particularly in the fields of mass political behavior and international relations, albeit much evolved and with a predictive rather than an explanatory emphasis (we can reasonably predict short-term political phenomena, within limits, but there's nothing in the contemporary political science toolbox that would be able to predict how long the United States will persist, for example).

So it's fun to think about some of the parallels, although I'm not convinced it would be a good thing for the universe to have Jacob T. Levy, Daniel Drezner and myself operating in secret to keep our galactic plan on track. (Plus it would be a bit too close to the whole “Trilateral Commission” nonsense promulgated by the fringe.)

Of course, there's always the case to be made that psychohistory was just a Grade-A McGuffin... even within Asimov's universe!

Bill Hobbs links to this fascinating piece by Naval War College professor Thomas Barnett. Rather than selectively blockquote, I'll just recommend that you Read The Whole Thing™.

Greg Wythe links to this Washington Times piece by R. Emmett Tyrell making a very pertinent point:

The steady drift of Democratic activists away from war with Iraq, despite the president's every effort to accommodate their concerns, is another demonstration of a phenomenon of American politics that I only became aware of in the Clinton years. The phenomenon is this: A sizable proportion of the politically committed in America today are not propelled by principle or by fact but by the deep emotional satisfaction, indeed the peace of mind, that they derive from beating hell out of an opponent. To be sure, it is commonly heard that the politicians, at least those of the finest flower, long to put partisanship aside; but the truth is that without partisanship politics would lose much of its attraction for many politically active souls. Frankly, many of them are itching for a fight and grateful for every perceived enemy.

I think this trend is as present in the Blogosphere as anywhere else — there are clearly some very unreasonable voices that nonetheless gain a wide audience, at all extremes of the political spectrum.

Jordan Lancaster implores readers of today's Daily Mississippian to pack up and hit the open road. I wholeheartedly agree with the sentiment, although I regret to inform that my spring break adventure will just be driving to visit Dad.

Josh Chafetz at OxBlog has taken up the gauntlet thrown down by Dan Drezner. I think everyone's trying to drive up their Ecosystem ratings.

Anyway, you won't see shameless pandering like that here. Which is probably why blog.lordsutch.com doesn't rank very highly...

The more I read about John Ashcroft, the less I like the guy (not that he started on a very high plateau in the first place in my book...). Gary Farber and Kevin Drum have the latest.

And then there's Ashcroft's bong obsession (via InstaPundit).

Dan Drezner makes his pitch why his corner of the Blogosphere should be “Your #1 International Relations Blog” — at least if those international relations involve a then-underaged Russian media darling's since-terminated marriage to a former Red Army hockey player.

Shrewd work as always by Prof. Drezner. This blog's best search hits by far are on the phrase “Jennifer Garner lingerie,” so the, er, jiggle factor definitely seems to drive traffic. Nevertheless, there are some serious questions to be asked:

1. I wonder why I never heard that Ms. Kournikova was in Memphis? Surely it wasn't to play tennis...

2. Ashley Judd is probably a better conversationalist than Ms. Kournikova. Then again, my pet rock probably is too.

3. Even if Den Beste did have this news, wouldn't it take you more than an hour to read through his post on it? Perhaps, but I'm sure Lake Placid and containment would have been discussed at length, and Martina Hingis and Mary Pierce would have been properly chastised for their political failings, so at the very least (a) the post wouldn't really be about Sergei and Anna's hanky-panky, but rather most instructive in the current workings of the International System from a neorealist perspective, and (b) there would have been some creative new insults flung at the Franco-German axis. (Of course, then there would be the inevitable series of posts from hawkish lefty bloggers insisting that while they approved of the Federov-Kournikova relationship, he really should have waited until her 18th birthday, which quickly would have degenerated into name-calling and discussions of which cities should be attacked by WMDs. So perhaps it's better this way...)

In any event, my predilictions lean more in the Jennifer Capriati direction: you could still take her to meet your parents, but it's a safe bet she'd go to second base on a first date. Win-win all around.

Of course, this last paragraph is a joke.

At the end of Special Report with Brit Hume this afternoon, Brit had the usual roundtable of talking heads (or at least two-thirds thereof): Morton Kondracke, Fred Barnes, and a woman from NPR whom I'd never laid eyes on before and whose name completely escapes me (apparently filling in for the third white guy who normally sits there). The contrast in the level of cooperation the U.S. has received from Turkey and Pakistan was on prominent display, and the panel largely attributed this difference to the fact that Turkey is a democracy while Pakistan isn't.

At some level, this is a gross simplification, at least in the Turkish case. While Turkey does have a popularly-elected government, the self-appointed guarantors of republicanism and secularism in the National Security Council and Constitutional Court keep Turkish democracy on something of a tight leash, not unlike the control of the Iranian majlis by its Assembly of Experts, albeit to much different ends. Yet clearly Turkey is moving in the direction of consolidating democracy, while Pakistan's situation is much more murky, having lurched back and forth between democracy and dictatorship since partition from India (and through the secession of Bangladesh). While modern Turkey has seen its authoritarian excesses, they pale in comparison to Pakistan's. On the other hand, the secularist impulses of the Turkish guardians often are excessive: notably, their obsession with headscarves, their requirement of Islamist parties to disavow Islam, and the seemingly arbitrary bans on popular political leaders.

So, one might ask: is managed democracy a viable system? More to the point, is it democratic? Even the “best” democracies have relatively unaccountable bodies that sometimes interfere with the will of popular representatives; the United States Supreme Court, Germany's Constitutional Court, and Britain's Law Lords to name just a few. How different is Turkey's National Security Council? Is it better to have Turkish-style stability or Pakistani intermittent democracy?

I'm not sure there are right answers to these questions, but they ought to weigh heavily on us in deciding how post-war Iraq will be governed. Do we go for the full Madison or Bagehot, and risk collapse in the medium to long term? Or do we settle for Ataturkism, and hope it eventually evolves into something better?

Something's been bothering me for a while, but it took two posts in Steven Den Beste's blog (U.S.S. Clueless) and Bill Whittle's latest (“Confidence”) to crystalize it all.

The first post of Steven's was his response to a correspondent named Dev. Dev wrote:

England, Ireland, France, Russia, Spain, Italy, China, India, Pakistan, Israel, the Lebanon, most of Africa, much of Asia, Australia, and many other countries in the world have suffered at the hands of fundamentalist terrorism for most of the last century. It is quite hideous to see the response of America to one attack. To be quite honest it frightens the hell out of me. I have lived in England for 2/3 of my life and in that time have experienced terrorism first hand on three occasions. I am only 29. I realise that I am lucky compared to those in countries where it is a way of life. Yet I do not think that the whole barrel of apples should be thrown overboard for the sake of a few rotten apples.

Steven's second post was his commentary on D-Squared Digest's attack on him for having the gall to feel victimized by 9/11. Notably, both correspondents are British.

As Dev says, Britain has suffered its fair share of terrorism, most notably in Northern Ireland (but also notably in the Lockerbie tragedy, the work of Libyan agents), as have other European countries. But comparatively speaking, most European terror has been either political or communal in nature; the participants in the Irish “Troubles” (both the IRA and its offshoots, and the Unionist paramilitaries of the pro-British community) targeted political and communal targets about equally, while the Basque ETA and most of the Communist-inspired domestic insurgents in other countries largely went after political targets. The closest parallels to the terror visited on the U.S. in September 2001 is to the Palestinian attacks on Israeli noncombatants or the IRA's targeting of members of the royal family and civilians on the British mainland in the 1970s — a strategy that ultimately was abandoned.

Yet the British example is instructive. Between July 1969 and December 2001, just over 3500 people were killed as a result of the conflict over Northern Ireland, according to Malcolm Sutton (also see this table that breaks the deaths down by year and status). Much is made of the relative size of the death toll in Northern Ireland, but the fact remains that about as many people died in three hours on 11 September 2001 as died in three decades of conflict over the Emerald Isle.

The political result of terror in Britain is also instructive. The ongoing Troubles led to Britain's passage of anti-civil libertarian laws, such as the Prevention of Terrorism Act and its successors (including the Terrorism Act 2000), that make the PATRIOT Act look positively enlightened by comparison. London is blanketed by surveillance cameras; some estimate that the city has over 150,000 of them. Britons no longer bat an eye at truly Orwellian imagery in the streets. All largely in response to — or justified by — terrorism.

D-Squared and Des don't understand America's response because the only responses they've ever seen to terror are restriction of liberty at home (the British response) or sheer capitulation (the Franco-German response; ask your favorite Frenchman about Algeria some time). They didn't understand why America retaliated against the Berlin nightclub bombing in 1986, or why the Israelis retaliate against bombings by Hamas and Palestinian Islamic Jihad, because their societies are cowed by terror — to use the banal phrase, beaten to death post 9/11 here, in Europe the “terrorists have won.” Every governmental response, from getting rid of the trash cans at train stations to blanketing the streets with surveillance cameras to having jackbooted paramilitary police with submachine guns on patrol at airports, was as much a victory for the terrorists as the Achille Lauro, Enniskillen, Lockerbie, or Munich.

What Europeans don't understand about America is that we refuse to accept that solution. America's attitude may be best summed up in an unlikely source, James Madison's Federalist 10:

Liberty is to faction what air is to fire, an aliment without which it instantly expires. But it could not be less folly to abolish liberty, which is essential to political life, because it nourishes faction, than it would be to wish the annihilation of air, which is essential to animal life, because it imparts to fire its destructive agency.

To paraphrase Madison, like faction, terror too is nourished by liberty. Give up enough of our liberty and perhaps terror can be extinguished. But how much is “enough”? Terrorism persists in some of the most illiberal societies in the world, such as China. More to the point, without our liberty, what is the point of preventing terror? If we can't live our lives in freedom, what value is there to life itself?

The left calls on America to recognize the so-called “root causes” of terror. Perhaps there are root causes, but if so they are hardly the shiboleths of the left; Kahlid Shaikh Mohammed doesn't care if the United States ratifies Kyoto or the International Criminal Court treaty, and neither topic has ever come up in the ravings of Osama bin Laden. Rather, the root causes are a diseased credo dressed up as religion that incites its followers to murder innocents and the failure of contemporary Arab states to provide their populations with any real hope for the future. If we are to defeat terror, we shall have to address both of these “root causes,” and the toppling of Saddam Hussein and the establishment of a truly functional Arab state in the Middle East will have far more effect on them than either the diplomatic flummery of the Franco-German axis or cowering behind yet another layer of surveillance and neo-Securitate.

I'm with Dan Drezner on this one; his resignation letter read more like a string of quotes from Sen. Diane Feinstein's talking points than it did as a coherent philosophical statement.

In the morning: why the Europeans don't understand America's reaction to terror, and why it really doesn't matter. Before I write it, though, I have to get some sleep.

Speaking of sleep, I won't be losing any over what's probably happening to Khalid Shaikh Mohammed and his al-Qaeda buddies (via Michele, who's collecting suggestions on what to do with him). This is the same bozo who admitted in an al-Jazeera interview in 2002 that he masterminded 9/11, so I think it's pretty safe to say he's not going to ever meet a U.S. executioner — if he ever sees a U.S. trial, he won't last a week past sentencing. I say we just put him in the exercise yard at Rikers Island and tell the guards to take a long lunch break.

One of my biggest pet peeves as a roadgeek is the seeming impossibility of getting any information on a highway project if you can't make it to a public meeting. While DOTs are getting better about posting their public meetings online (Tennessee's dedicated calendar is probably the best in the Mid-South, while Arkansas at least puts theirs online in the news releases; Mississippi posts the notices rarely in their news release section; and Alabama not at all), you've still got to get to the meeting. Because if you miss the meeting, you'll never find a copy of the environmental impact statement (EIS) or other documentation without spending the rest of your life looking for it, it seems.

There are some notable exceptions to this situation: Indiana DOT has put all of its documentation online at the project website for Interstate 69 in southwestern Indiana, as has the Tennessee Valley Authority and the Hoover Dam Bypass project (among others). But most of the time, the EISes just disappear into a virtual black hole, seemingly uncataloged (or at least, not cataloged under any name that seems logical) and gathering dust in a local library. Since all of these documents are produced electronically today, products like Adobe Acrobat's “Distiller” could easily be used to prepare portable online versions of the EIS, and agencies could distribute the EIS more readily over the web and on recordable CDs. It would make the process more transparent to the public and be a low-cost way to include more people in transportation planning and similar processes. So why are so few states doing it?

The only conclusion I can reach is that the federal agencies that ask for this documentation don't require states to put these documents online. While I'm not generally a big fan of federal mandates, this seems to be one case where the mandate might in fact be justified — the costs are low and the potential benefits quite high. It's a requirement Congress should seriously consider adding to the TEA-21 reauthorization bill due this fall.

The Political State Report has added a new poster who's covering Mississippi politics, “JaxGenerals.” He's got an interesting post up today, part of a series on the upcoming statewide races, on how Haley Barbour has apparently cornered the primary field (note, however, that the field isn't closed until the end of Saturday; someone else could still slip in the primary). According to the Mississippi GOP, his only opponent in the primary is Mitchell H. “Mitch” Tyner.

Meanwhile, the current lists of Democratic and Republican primary candidates are up on the state parties' websites. It looks like the incumbent whose seat I'm running for has attracted some primary opposition, while I'm free and clear at the moment. As always, the Magnolia Political Report website should have the latest news.

Check out Michele's new TroopTrax project for a good way to support the U.S. servicemen and women who are putting their lives on the line for us and the Iraqi people. It'll do more good than hecking anti-war protestors, and it's good for the soul too. (The downside is that those asshats* at the RIAA will end up getting some of the money. Ah well, the universe ain't perfect.)

* Yes, that's not a nice word on my first official day as a candidate for public office, but if I can't call the RIAA asshats, what is the universe coming to?

David Janes has added a new feature called ThreadTrack to Janes' Blogosphere; it's an excellent way to see what other weblogs are talking about the same topics, in a bit less linear a way than things like Technorati, BlogDex, and DayPop. Be sure to visit his site for details on how you can enable ThreadTrack in your blog; it's enabled here with the » (n) links you can see at the bottom of each entry.

Also, I've added some cool new stuff in the backend that won't be noticeable by most anyone except me; most notably, each entry is now being processed by Tidy to convert it to valid XHTML, which improves the new full-content feed via the RSS backend, to help aggregators.

The final coalition has been invested by the Knesset, according to the Jersualem Post and Haaretz:

• Likud/Yisrael B'Aliya: 40 seats (38/2)

• Shinui: 15 seats

• National Union: 7 seats

• National Religious Party (Mafdal): 6 seats

Meanwhile, the formation of the coalition still hasn't stopped Mitzna and the coalition parties from sniping at each other, or apparently from still negotiating alternate coalitions, according to the Jerusalem Post:

Labor Party leader Amram Mitzna warned Sharon that the economic and security situations will not improve until negotiations with the Palestinians are resumed and an agreement is reached to establish "two states for two peoples." He also blamed Sharon for the fact that a national-unity government was not established. "It was within reach, but he did not chose to do so," he said, noting that he had chosen National Union leader Avigdor Lieberman and NRP leader Effi Eitam instead.

Shinui MK Yosef Paritzky shot back: "You're to blame," and Shinui leader Yosef Lapid told Labor that it is "not too late to join the government" and create a secular government that can make sweeping reforms.

Of course, the part that warms the heart of my inner political science geek are these coalition promises:

Sharon promised to work to pass a constitution "by consensus" after a number of basic laws are completed.

He also noted that the parties in the coalition have committed to raising the electoral threshold to 2 percent to reduce factionalism.

It's not quite the Lawrence plan (in comments), but it's better than nothing...

Ira Sharkansky (father of Shark Blog's Stefan Sharkansky) has some comments on the coalition's possible outlook on the Palestinian conflict.

Eugene Volokh today talks about the 17th Amendment (while Jacob T. Levy links to a September post of his discussing the same topic). The 17th Amendment, adopted 80 years ago, changed the system for election of senators to the current system of popular election; originally, they were elected by the state legislatures (Article I, Section 3, Paragraph 1). The indirect election of Senators was primarily designed to give the states direct input in federal policymaking (see, for example, Federalist 62), and thus in some sense to reinforce federalism by acting as a check on the House of Representatives deciding to exceed the enumerated powers of Congress. (Some argue that the 17th Amendment, rather than the 16th, was the true enabler for big government.)

Of course, there are other issues at work that prevented the Senate from being an effective bulwark on federal power (even before the 17th Amendment); the principal-agent problem loomed large, with the interests of senators not necessarily coinciding with the state legislatures that chose them. One reason why the German Bundesrat works and persists as a powerful, indirectly elected chamber is that its members are true agents of the Land's parliament; by contrast, the pre-17th Senate had very weak principal-agent links (in order to promote institutional stability, another goal of the Senate's design), although whether the Framers intended it that way is unclear.

Jacob writes:

Even if the original 1787 apparatus were clearly better as a matter of constitutional engineering than the current mechanism, it might have been too politically fragile. If it had not bent with the 17th amendment, it might have broken later say, during the Terrible Twenties and Thirties when constitutional democracies were swept away by populist-authoritarianism in much of the world, and we had Longs, Coughlins, and Roosevelts of our own. A defense of the 17th along these lines is kind of like a defense of the 1937 "switch in time that saved nine" by the Supreme Court, not because the switch was constitutionally correct, but because it did manage to "save nine"-- that is, to save substantial judicial independence from a court packing precedent that would have left us with New Deal constitutional revisionism and with a cowed, subservient judiciary and with a precedent for presidents changing the constitutional rules whenever they weren't getting their way.

On balance, I think that the 17th Amendment had little effect in the long term. By the time of its passage, over half the states already had a de facto system for electing senators by popular vote; doubtless most other states would have followed suit eventually. In other words, the 17th is the result of a trend that was taking place anyway, codifying (and legitimating) the Progressivist change that was already on its way to being implemented nationwide. (And, among those changes, it was probably the least harmful procedural change that could have been institutionalized in the Constitution; far more harmful would have been a constitutionally-blessed role for parties as public utilities or a mandate for open primary elections. Of course, in other realms, the 18th was orders of magnitude worse, and also the result of Progressivist do-gooderism.) Ultimately the 17th was no more than a small chink in the armor of federalism, but if the Senate had remained a truly appointed body into the 1930s I agree its legitimacy would have been called into serious question — and perhaps its powers would have been evicerated by a Supreme Court more interested in preserving Marbury v. Madison and judicial review than federalism.

Incidentally, the relative design of the European Council of Ministers and the European Parliament is similar to that of the Bundesrat and Bundestag, although the EU institutions may be the sole current example of asymmetrical bicameralism where the upper chamber is vastly more powerful than the lower; however, it is telling that the phrase “democratic deficit” is virtually synonymous with the EU.

Steven Den Beste has been one of the more strident pro-war voices in recent months. Today he (along with Josh Chafetz at OxBlog) thinks the administration has finally revealed the true motivation behind the Iraqi phase of the War on Terror:

The answer is that I do believe they were thinking along these lines [using Iraq to prod along regional regime change] all along, but that for them to go public with it back then would have led to serious grief by making clear to such stalwarts as Saudi Arabia just what we really intended. I'm happy, therefore, that we've reached the point where we no longer think we require the good wishes of the Sauds, and thus Bush has indeed publicly stated the real goal for this war, and the only way in the long run we can really win it: liberalization of the Arabs. And, as mentioned above, Iraq will be used to create an example in the [M]iddle East of how it's done, and most of that process will be financed by sales of Iraq's oil.

Is this a realistic hope? Perhaps. Among Middle Eastern states, there are basically four major candidate states for democratization:

• Egypt: Like Iraq, it has a large middle class. Unlike Iraq, Hosni Mubarak isn't a murderous dictator, even though the state security services do have their ruthless streak. Egypt also has a more radicalized Islamic population than Iraq.

• Iran: Unlike Egypt and Iraq, Iran is governed by a quasi-democratic theocracy rather than a dictator.

• Iraq

• Pakistan: Somewhere on the borders of democracy, dictatorship and anarchy. Unlike the three other states, has at least some experience with democratic institutions, and some of those institutions persist under the Musharraf regime.

In all the cases except Iraq, there is a realistic possibility of further democratization from within. The problem of succession in Egypt may lead Mubarak to liberalize the political system. The Iranian government is generally believed to be on the verge of collapse, with many clerics becoming tired of the secular job of running the country; the collapse of the Iraqi regime may be the triggering event for regime change in Iran too. As for Pakistan, it is unclear how sincere the Musharraf regime is about a return to democracy, but the persistence of independent institutions (such as the judiciary) is encouraging.

So, if the goal is to precipitate a democratic revolution in the Middle East, Iraq is probably the most suitable target. Of course, this leads to some legitimate questions:

1. Is precipitating regime change a legitimate end of U.S. foreign policy? Probably, if there is no reasonable prospect of internal reform or change. Unlike the communist dictatorships of central and eastern Europe, there is no external actor directly propping up the Iraqi regime; thus we cannot expect a homegrown democratic revolution. In the particular case of Iraq, one can make a legitimate argument that we owe the Iraqi people for the West's role supporting the Ba'athist regime (including our own role prior to the first Gulf War).

2. Can regime change in Iraq lead to change elsewhere? Many political leaders in the Middle East (and some scholars in the western world) believe that Muslims are incapable of operating a democratic regime. While Turkey and Bangladesh are useful counterexamples, neither of these states are Arab. A successful democracy in Iraq may lead citizens other states (including the Palestinians) to reconsider why their countries are not democratic.

3. Are there any better options? At this point, probably not. In 1991, perhaps we could have “marched on Baghdad,” but such an attack probably would have led to the collapse of the coalition and would have been about as popular worldwide as the current plans for war. In 1998, we may have had an opportunity to walk away from the sanctions regime; however, that would have consolidated Saddam's power and freed him even more to develop weapons of mass destruction. Today, we have few choices: back down (and destroy our own credibility and that of the United Nations), commit ourselves to stationing a large permanent force in the region (which would be required by any plan to continue inspections), or go to war now. Realistically, those are the only three options for the foreseeable future, barring an unexpected event like the whole Hussein family being killed in some accident, along with the rest of the senior Ba'ath Party leadership.

4. Is this approach likely to succeed? It largely depends on the long-term commitment of the United States and its allies. The international community is going to have to devote several years to reconstruction (in the Civil War sense) in Iraq before full sovereignty can be restored, although some degree of “home rule” will be essential from the start. A half-hearted commitment, or a withdrawal of U.S. support by the next administration if Bush loses in 2004, is likely to lead to disaster.

At this point, it is almost certain that there will be war (barring a successful Iraqi coup in the next week). We can only hope the war will be brief and that few will die. But if the war leads to a free and democratic Iraq it will have been a worthy and just war.

Bill Hobbs has some similar thoughts (which I only just noticed).

Mark Pilgrim has an interesting post today on using rewrite rules to configure Apache to keep out nasty bots; if you run your own server, it's a must-read.

In order to be a good boy myself, I hacked up the trackback module in LSblog to obey robots.txt files, even though I'm not sure it's strictly necessary (the worst it can do is go two posts deep in a site: once to find a trackback URL, and once to access the URL). But, on the upside, it should stop some 403 errors with tracking back to Google.

Since I'm sort-of-iced-in (although the promised ice storm hasn't materialized here, I didn't feel like risking being stranded away from the house), I also moved LSblog to mod_python 3.0.1; it took some fiddling with RewriteRules to make it all work nicely. It's currently using the CGI emulation (which incidentally is buggy — apply this patch), although I'll probably move to the Publisher module eventually, mainly since it has a cooler interface. Currently both the main page and the RSS feed are being served via mod_python; it seems to have halved the page-load times. (There's still some icky database queries that have to be run each page-load; maybe eventually I'll stick a reverse caching proxy in front, if the load ever justifies it. But currently my load average is pegged at 1.00, so I'm in no hurry.)

Hmm. The whole "obey robots.txt" thing didn't work out as well as hoped; it seems we might want to access a cgi-bin directory, but robots are normally excluded from those. (I guess it boils down to a question of how autonomous a robot must be before it's a robot...)

Deeply strange hoodoo. There must be some wacky interaction between LSblog's trackback and Mark's tb.cgi; the comment count goes up, but the comments page doesn't get updated.

As I read more about the so-called “human shields” going to Iraq, I have to say I'm becoming even less impressed with them. As Daniel Drezner suggests today, the human shields aren't risking their lives; Tim Blair's conclusion over the weekend was similar, and Virginia Postrel pointed out yesterday that many of them don't seem to be playing with a full deck:

Clue for the clueless: Orphanages already have human shields. They're called "orphans."

It's like their thought process goes something like this:

• Dubya wants to bomb Iraq.

• Dubya hates brown people.

• Iraq is full of brown people.

• I'm white.

• If I go to Iraq there will be white people there.

• Dubya won't bomb Iraq if whitey's there.

To which there are a number of responses:

• The "Dubya hates brown people" premise is intensely stupid and demonstrably untrue, if you've noticed (a) his cabinet and (b) his family.

• Even assuming that the premises are accurate (which they're not), Dubya still gets to kill lots of brown people, even if your stupid white ass is in the way.

• You're a potential Democratic voter in 2004. The Iraqis aren't. Dubya actually has more incentive to attack Iraq after you go there, because not only does he get to shore up his support with the bloodthirsty hawk warmongers, he also gets to reduce the number of people who might vote for his opponent in 2004. Same goes for Tony Blair and John Howard.

• The only place Noam Chomsky's belief system is valid is within his thick skull. Try thinking for yourself for a change.

Perhaps Salam Pax was right when he called them War Tourists. Even that might be too charitable... at this rate, they'll be seeing less action than a hooker at a Promise Keepers' convention.

Steven Den Beste has taken a valium since yesterday. Porphyrogenitus has a lengthy analysis of what the proposed UNSC resolution actually says. Conrad is reminded of The Prince — not the one from Minneapolis, by the way. And, for the completists out there, you can read all 18 UNSC resolutions dealing with Iraq since it invaded Kuwait in 1990.

Me? I like HappyFunPundit's resolution. Strangely enough, it's like the U.S.-British-Spanish proposal, but translated by Subliminal Man.

I've built a new build of Phoenix with Xft enabled for Linux; unlike previous builds, it's based on GNOME 2 and built with gcc 3.2.3, so it probably won't run except on a very recent system (like Debian unstable). Download it here.

Apparently, ten anti-war protestors got themselves arrested when some decided “to heck with the whole non-violence thing” and attacked Ministry of Defence police guarding RAF Fairford in England.

RAF Fairford was where I was twelve years ago during the first Gulf War; I spent a lot of time loitering around my dad's office in Base Operations — I think it's the building in the background of that picture on the front page, which they'd taken out of mothballs after shutting down most of the base just a few months earlier — watching CNN with the airmen and officers who were quartered in the then-unused second floor. I don't remember a bunch of war protestors back then, but there may have been a few (we never seemed to get the CND activity). Back then, Fairford was a staging area for B-52 flights armed with conventional ordinance (in addition to Diego Garcia); some early B-52 flights in the war actually originated from Barksdale Air Force Base (Shreveport, Louisiana).

Anyway, go surf the unofficial site; it's got some pretty interesting stuff, including information on some of the past uses RAF Fairford saw. (I can verify that Fairford was/is the Transatlantic abort site for the Space Shuttle in certain orbits; my dad went to the Cape for special training in 1989 or so, and would have been responsible for coordinating things until a dedicated NASA team arrived.)

One of the philosophical questions of the ages has been answered: if Phil Donahue's show was cancelled, and nobody was watching it, would anyone find out?

Apparently, the answer is yes. Philosophers are still working on that “tree in the woods” thing, though.

The word comes via Donald Sensing; clearly, I wouldn't have found out about it another way.

Matthew Yglesias and Katie have been having fun deconstructing the lyrics to Avril Lavigne's “Sk8er Boi” (on her debut album, Let Go). Frankly, it's all slick marketing — she may really be a skater punk, but the album isn't what you'd think of as skater punk. IMHO, the gems of the album aren't among the tracks getting airplay; “Losing Grip,” “UnWanted,” and “Things I'll Never Say.”

Anyway, if you won't believe me, believe Ryan McGee, who's down with the Mox's peeps. So he must be cool or right or something.

I blog, you decide: Taylor Dent and Erik Estrada.