USS Clueless defends American unilateralism again:

[quoting a British paper] “a disdain for any treaty that might, even marginally, tie the administration’s hands”. We in the US refer to that as “liberty”. I know it’s a foreign notion in Europe, but we actually fought a revolution to get it, and we’d like to keep it. We think it’s pretty damned important.

No, that’s sovereignty, not the same thing at all; though Steve is right in saying our ancestors fought a war for it (when they already had considerable liberty). Liberty, on the other hand, is defended precisely by tying the administration’s hands – or so Americans once used to say.

(While I’m up, democracy is also not the same thing as either liberty or sovereignty.)

Jesse Ventura (according to Rich Hailey) opposes mandating the Pledge of Allegiance in schools, for exactly the right reasons; looks like his libertarian streak is wider than I thought.

2010: newer link

Pink Hello Kitty Laptop. (Thanks to Spastic Mutant for the link.)

Yesterday my Linux box crashed and I spent all evening trying to bring it back to life, with – as they say at NASA – partial success. Argh.

Later: In desperation, I tried ^C when the boot process says “/1 contains a file system with errors, check forced.” Interrupting the check of /1 (whatever that is) lets the boot proceed normally. A temporary solution, but better than nothing.

Linux: Not Ready for Prime Time.

Stephen Jay Gould is dead of cancer at sixty. Somehow he always seemed like a youngster to me (despite photographs) – perhaps because I never knew until now that he had two wives and two sons.

What Went Wrong, an article about last summer’s Intelligence failure. (Old link dead; two new links)

“If I were an average citizen, I’d be pissed at the whole American government,” says a senior official who has worked on counterterrorism.

I usually am anyway, of course, so I can’t tell the difference.

A little-appreciated advantage of the French Republican calendar: only three months have no R.