Good piece in today’s Opinion Journal by Michael Rubin on why it’s a mistake to “engage” with regimes that oppress their people. We need to ask why Mr. Powell wants to have a dialogue with one of the most notorious slave traders in the modern world. Sudan would appear to need the Aghanistan treatment–excise the cancer surgically, cauterize the wound, apply antibiotics in the form of intelligent aid. As in Afghanistan, their people will thank us.

Eric Drexler has some useful words at the Foresight web site.

The whole thing is worth reading, but I particularly enjoyed what is yet another interesting take on what happened on Flight 93:

#3 Our advocacy of openness as the safest strategy has been validated. In under two hours, the problem of airliners hitting buildings was solved ? by passengers in the fourth plane to be highjacked. They did it “open source style”: shared information on the need, collaborative design, and unpaid group implementation. (With earlier information, they might have been able to save their own lives, as well as those in the building their plane was meant to hit.) Their example can inspire us as we work to find a “bottom-up,” distributed, networked, immune-system-style defense against the abuse of nanotechnology.

Buena’ dia’ (that’s how they say it down here–for some reason Puerto Ricans drop the trailing “s” on many words–it’s a dialect thing).

Will Vehrs compliments my meager efforts (thanx), and comments that he didn’t know this was a PR-based blog. Well, that’s understandable, because it’s actually not. It’s a transterrestrial blog (hopefully to become an interglobal blog sometime in the future). I blog wherever I am.

Much of the time I’m in southern California, but I spend time down here because Patricia is working on a job here (Tren Urbano–an urban rail project in San Juan). I’ll be back in Redondo Beach next week, and then in Missouri and possibly Michigan for the holidays.

Who knows where I’ll be next year? New York? Cork? Only time will tell…

Anyway like the old saying goes, wherever I go, there I am, with my weblog.

Buena’ dia’ (that’s how they say it down here–for some reason Puerto Ricans drop the trailing “s” on many words–it’s a dialect thing).

Will Vehrs compliments my meager efforts (thanx), and comments that he didn’t know this was a PR-based blog. Well, that’s understandable, because it’s actually not. It’s a transterrestrial blog (hopefully to become an interglobal blog sometime in the future). I blog wherever I am.

Much of the time I’m in southern California, but I spend time down here because Patricia is working on a job here (Tren Urbano–an urban rail project in San Juan). I’ll be back in Redondo Beach next week, and then in Missouri and possibly Michigan for the holidays.

Who knows where I’ll be next year? New York? Cork? Only time will tell…

Anyway like the old saying goes, wherever I go, there I am, with my weblog.

Buena’ dia’ (that’s how they say it down here–for some reason Puerto Ricans drop the trailing “s” on many words–it’s a dialect thing).

Will Vehrs compliments my meager efforts (thanx), and comments that he didn’t know this was a PR-based blog. Well, that’s understandable, because it’s actually not. It’s a transterrestrial blog (hopefully to become an interglobal blog sometime in the future). I blog wherever I am.

Much of the time I’m in southern California, but I spend time down here because Patricia is working on a job here (Tren Urbano–an urban rail project in San Juan). I’ll be back in Redondo Beach next week, and then in Missouri and possibly Michigan for the holidays.

Who knows where I’ll be next year? New York? Cork? Only time will tell…

Anyway like the old saying goes, wherever I go, there I am, with my weblog.

According to Brit Hume, President Bush has announced that we’re withdrawing from the ABM Treaty after almost three decades. Thus we undo one more of Nixon’s mistaken policies (I could never figure out why the left hated Nixon–he instituted more of their loony prescriptions than most Democratic presidents). This would never have happened under a President Gore.

I’ll probably say more on this later, but for now…

Hallelluiah! It is now legal to defend ourselves.

According to Brit Hume, President Bush has announced that we’re withdrawing from the ABM Treaty after almost three decades. Thus we undo one more of Nixon’s mistaken policies (I could never figure out why the left hated Nixon–he instituted more of their loony prescriptions than most Democratic presidents). This would never have happened under a President Gore.

I’ll probably say more on this later, but for now…

Hallelluiah! It is now legal to defend ourselves.

According to Brit Hume, President Bush has announced that we’re withdrawing from the ABM Treaty after almost three decades. Thus we undo one more of Nixon’s mistaken policies (I could never figure out why the left hated Nixon–he instituted more of their loony prescriptions than most Democratic presidents). This would never have happened under a President Gore.

I’ll probably say more on this later, but for now…

Hallelluiah! It is now legal to defend ourselves.

A conversation with UPI columnist Jim Bennett triggered this thought–could we come up with an unostentatious version of a Segway vehicle that could promote another split in the Amish? For sects that already use electricity, or drive non-chromed cars, it wouldn’t be that much of a leap. It’s a pretty high-tech device, so it’s not clear how “tinkerable” it will be.

I’m imagining the non-gloss black Segway, with a black-clothed farmer astride it, and the big yellow safety triangle on the back (see, another need for a bumper, though the cup holder would almost certainly be unholy), cruising slowly down the road at twelve miles an hour, being passed by “the English” on their souped-up, aerodynamic versions at twice that speed.

Its bumper sticker?

Iain Murray implies that I’m a blogger of the Caribbean Anglosphere. True if I were in the Bahamas, or Jamaica, or Caymans, or other British or American islands. But, actually, I’m in Puerto Rico, which by all appearances is trying to paddle its way out of the Anglosphere as quickly as it can, back to the fantasized glory days of their Spanish heritage.

The island has a new governor, Sila Calderon. She ran a Hillary-like campaign, with billboards containing nothing except her picture and the word “Sila!” One of Governor Calderon’s first acts was to roll back the requirement for English language instruction in the primary schools–Espanol is good enough for us, gracia’. She’s supposedly of the Commonwealth party, but she was accused the other day of being a closet member of the Movimiento Independista by the San Juan Star. One of her second acts was to have the stationary changed from “Puerto Rico, US Commonwealth” to “Puerto Rico, Free Associated State.”

Mark Twain once said, “A dog will not bite the hand that feeds him. This is the principal difference between a man and a dog.” The dirty little secret is that there were quite a few down here who were almost as pleased at what happened on September 11 (I was here the day it happened, scheduled to fly back to California on a 10 AM flight–needless to say, my departure was delayed as I watched the towers fall) as some in the West Bank and Gaza.

Unfortunately, too few Boriquens (what they call themselves) realize how much their economy is being propped up by dollars from Washington. If we finally decide that without Vieques, the Roosevelt Roads naval facility is not by itself worth the billions of US taxpayer funds that flow down here, they just may find out.