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A second Israel
I’ve been in favor of moving American troops to Kuwait and Kurdistan and letting the various Iraqi factions settle itself, with American troops playing Spoiler for our own interests. Upon further thought I’m not so sure.
Kuwait isn’t really a factor, but Kurdistan is. Assuming that the Kurds do secede (which seems likely) we would be the guarantor of last resort for an ethnically homogeneous enclave, much like we are with Israel. While supporting the Israelis is perhaps the right thing to do, it’s doubtful that the relationship is worthwhile on a cost benefit basis. That raises the question, do we really need another exposed ally with little to offer surrounded by hostile countries? Supporting the Kurds would alienate the surrounding countries and be a considerable financial and troop expense.
Then again, it does put another outpost of democracy and freedom (for the region) in the area and the second Israel isn’t the same as the first.
Decisions, decisions.
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SQL Server Errata
As everyone should learn from my 3 hours of Sql server frustration… Sql Server returns different values when you run a CheckSum on the same text for varchar and nvarchar data types.
The above probably isn’t interesting to any of my readers, but should I forget it later I can find it again.
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A good post on immigration
From Kerry Howley in Reason
The greatest distortion for Chadian farmers is not American cotton subsidies, writes Pritchett, but that “farmers from Chad have to farm in Chad—and not farm in France, Poland, or Canada.”
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Wellput from Julian Sanchez
In this post about full brains
Efficient brains need to know what they can afford to forget—probably quite a bit, now that it’s so easy to outsource our recollections to rapidly-searched digital media. The interesting question for me is: When almost anything you might need to recall can be offloaded in this way, what’s worth keeping in wetware memory? My first instinct is that you need to remember exactly enough to (1) make interesting connections, and (2) actually find the full information from the signpost you’ve remembered.
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Funny thing I heard on the History Channel
I’m slowly working my way through the History Channel documentary on the Spanish American war. The black cavalry soldiers, known commonly as “Buffalo Soldiers” were known by the Spanish as “Smoked Yankees”.
It’s interesting to be reminded that America had a low-level conflict with the Indians for years up to that point.
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Monday link roundup
- An in-depth examination on how to build an energy efficient house
- Robot snipers in Israel
- Strobist begins Lighting 102
- No one thinks seriously about alternative energy. Check out this post from TreeHugger “New Battery Pushed Prius to 125 MPG“. It’s a great idea and invention, but it’s a plug-in hybrid. The motion is coming from the power grid. Granted electricity is usually more efficient than gasoline, but that’s like saying that a diesel engine gets infinite mileage because it doesn’t burn any gasoline at all.
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Thoughts on Ron Paul on the Daily Show
He came across better than usual for his usual presentation. They talked a little about domestic policy, nothing about drug legalization or gun control, mostly spending. Not bad though.
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A nifty photoshop video tutorial
It has some great stuff on color correction and sharpening. Check it out at Digital Photography School.
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Ron Paul on the Daily Show tonight
Republican presidential candidate, former Libertarian Party nominee, current Texas representative, temporary darling of the trendy left and overall interesting guy will be on the Daily Show tonight. We’ll see if they go into his foreign policy stance (popular to the Daily Show audience, so long as it’s kept vague) and away from his views on abortion and national health care.
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Two for Monday
- Sandy Berger gives up his law license, which makes me thing that there is some serious hiding going on.
- More on the rogue Atlanta narcotics squad. Unmentioned is any mention of the judges and magistrates who rubber stamp all this crap. Ideally they would be help liable for any fraudulent warrants they sign, but that will never happen.