Oops.

The one thing about “Democracy,” by which I’m talking about just the simple (ha) idea of allowing people to elect their leaders,is that it sometimes doesn’t go the way you want.

from http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,251-2010895,00.html

“Western leaders lined up to express their concern at the political earthquake, but in the Arab world, the apparent landslide was greeted with jubilation as a triumph which would inspire other Islamist militant groups committed to fighting Israel and America’s influence in the Middle East.

European Union leaders must decide whether to continue with its £350 million annual payments to an administration which is now, in its charter, committed to the destruction of the Jewish state. “Oh dear, fasten your seatbelts,” said a senior figure on learning of the Prime Minister’s resignation.”

Now?  It’s time for us to put our money where our mouth is.  If you want ‘democracy’ in the middle east, if you want the people to elect their government, then you get to deal with the government that is elected.  Of course we’ve spent many billions of dollars in Iraq trying to make sure this sort of thing won’t happen there, at least not yet (sooner or later, maybe twenty years from now, we can count on somebody we don’t like getting elected).

This is gonna be rough, folks.

An afternoon in the life

Not even an afternoon, just fifteen minutes.

We show up early for therapy today (for once). Nice office-type person tells us the Doctor is busy with something but will be with us soon.

We spend the next half hour, one child reading “Highlights for Children” and the other devouring anything he can find – a three day old newspaper (“Hey, the Steelers won!”), a local chamber of commerce bit, the usual. He finally found a magazine and lay on the floor to read it.

He kept asking how to sound out different words – like “tread” and “democracy” and “conservation.”

I thought these were pretty cool words for a children’s book. When it was time to go into the office, I looked at the magazine title – “Mother Jones.”

I can’t wait to hear what the teacher says tomorrow…

Coming soon to a google near you: sucking up to the government

I’d love to hear their reasons why this won’t happen in the United States (or show us that it hasn’t already)

Davos Dispatches: Brin defends Google’s China move

Dig this:

This is nothing…there’s no malicious plan there, it just legitimately is a bottleneck that bandwidth is somewhat limited.

The worlds fastest growing economy, where 97% of all electronics are now manufactured or assembled (that may be a slight exaggeration, it may be only 95%), can’t add bandwidth?

Fortune: It’s probably by policy also.

Brin: I don’t know. I don’t want to speculate.

That’s more like it. The govt. wants to keep their people in the dark. And Google is just trying to help them out.

Later in the article:

Ken Roth: Google’s got a great philosophy of “Do No Evil.” And I’m sure they say well, “It’s better for us to be there than for us not to be there and there are just a few things that people can’t search for.”

Fortune: But it’s fascinating that they’re resisting the slippery slope in the United States more than anyone else. If it wasn’t for their resistance we never would have heard that the Department of Justice was attempting to get all those search records, which Yahoo and MSN and AOL already turned over.

Ken Roth: Exactly. Google’s in the vanguard in the United States, and it’s compromising along with the rest of them in China. I’m surprised. I would have expected better from Google.

Why won’t that happen here? Are you sure when you google something that the results aren’t limited by government policy? Are you sure your name and IP information isn’t being saved or passed on to some as-yet-unknown agency?

Really, how can you tell?