1-14-12 Hodgepodge
Saturday, January 14, 2012
We'll See
Michael Ledeen sees a death spiral for Iran's theocratic regime, but his last paragraph negates much of the rest of his column:
And yet, Khamenei’s killers continue to attack us in Iraq and Afghanistan, and we still have not openly supported his opponents, any more than we have supported Assad’s opponents in Syria. How many Americans have to die at the hands of this wicked regime before we help the Iranian and Syrian people put an end to their long national agony? [bold added]In the meantime, we may look like we're hurting the man on the street while lining the pockets of members of the current regime (because we effectively are), and I doubt that there is significant cultural opposition to theocracy in Iran, anyway.
Weekend Reading
"As the old adage goes, 'one swallow does not make a summer.'" -- Johathan Hoenig, in "Stocks and the Dollar: A New Correlation?" at SmartMoney
"Up until this breakthrough, parents and reality were ignored so Freudian-based excuse-making and parent-bashing therapists could have control." -- Michael Hurd, in "Anorexia Causes and Cures" at DrHurd.com
My Two Cents
Hurd notes that anorexia is surfacing in ten-year-old children! This is shocking to me. As a parent, I am grateful that he has passed the word along that there is an effective way to stop such nonsense in its tracks.
Good Point
Tech writer Scott Hanselman likens phone apps to 1990's CD-ROMs. I think he has a point, and hope he's right about where things are headed:
Auto-updating fixes only part of the problem. Sure, we'll get that feature one day, but the apps are still little islands of functionality that don't talk to each other. It's great that they talk to the Cloud and to various services, but few apps know they aren't alone on my phone. In fact, nearly all my apps live in the Tiny Tower of my phone but think they are alone.I find apps that simply replicate web sites particularly annoying. When I visit some web sites, I'll get a splash page asking me whether I want to install the app. "I already have that," I think. "It's called a browser."
... But as a user, more and more, I want to Go Somewhere and get functionality as opposed to Bring Something To Me to get functionality. Managing apps, updates and storage is as pointless as my managing my growing Tiny Tower.
Fortunately, Hanselman sees many apps getting assimilated into web browsers again as these and HTML improve.
-- CAV
Updates
4-24-12: Added a hypertext anchor.
2 comments:
In relation to your first item, on Michael Ledeen, readers might gain from C. Bradley Thompson and Yaron Brook's Neoconservatism. Their book shows the role of Ledeen (and many others) in the neoconservative movement, a movement whose philosophical roots go back to Plato and whose historical roots grew from fascism in pre-Hitler Germany.
Here is my review of the book: http://www.theobjectivestandard.com/issues/2010-fall/neoconservatism-thompson-brook.asp
Neoconservatives are advocates of continuing war of sacrifice -- a war in which Americans sacrifice for the sake of others. In this case, the others are advocates of Islamic democracy. By "democracy," I mean a dictatorship by the majority.
Burgess,
Thanks for mentioning that book, reminding me of its existence, and pointing to your review.
Knowing what I do of Thomspon's and Brook's views on conservatism and the war we ought to be fighting, I have no doubt that readers will gain from learning more about them.
Gus
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