DanKohn.com

The Economist talks about Africa’s wars in a juxtaposition of the ancient and the modern:

The outlook is best in Angola, where the government has won convincingly. After years in the bush, the rebels are sick of fighting, horribly malnourished and surrendering in their thousands in the hope of a few bowls of maize porridge and a pay packet in the regular army. The government is still corrupt and incompetent, but the absence of war has allowed trade to flow once more along Angola’s potholed roads, and thousands of families divided for decades by the fighting tearfully to reunite, sometimes on what is now Angola’s most popular reality-television show.

US backing of Savimbi’s UNITA may win out slightly over our backing of Mobutu in Congo as the most corrupt, evil, horrendous dictatorship we have ever supported. Of course, you’d also need to consider Saudi Arabia, and Egypt.

Superb piece by former CIA head James Woolsey:

The ruling mullahs in Iran are beginning to look like the inhabitants of the Kremlin in 1988 or of Versailles in 1788 — the storm that engulfs them may not be here yet, but it is gathering.

A democratic, capitalist Iran and Iraq would leave Saudi Arabia as the main remaining country in the world that oppresses its people and exports terror by brutally combining religion with the state.

I like this insight from the WSJ:

Just as people grow up to become their parents, companies morph into the firms they spent their formative years fighting.
Sun Microsystems, for example, now looks a lot like Digital Equipment of the early 1980s, clinging stubbornly and perilously to a strategy made out-of-date by cheaper machines.

Microsoft seems to have become like the IBM of old — moving at a glacial pace with massive self-serving software “architectures,” apparently unmindful of the PC being a lean, grass-roots machine. (There’s a sly name for these sorts of .NET-style strategy announcements that are heavy on marketing but light on specifics: “marketecture.”)

I’m especially pessimistic on Sun.

A great, short history by Gail Collins in an NYT editorial observer of the suffragist movement, and “the vast arc of history between the summer of 1848 and the summer of 1920,” when women got the vote.

Inspiring WSJ story on automation improving women’s lives in rural Mali.

Not only is the peanut butter better — and Mrs. Doumbia’s selling easier — so is the quality of life in the 300 Mali villages that have the machine. Girls who were kept home to help with the domestic work from dawn to dusk are now going to school. Mothers and grandmothers who would have spent a lifetime pounding and grinding now have the free time to take literacy courses and start up small businesses, or to expand family farming plots and nurture a cash crop such as rice.
They have dubbed the durable, uncomplaining machine “the daughter-in-law who doesn’t speak.”

This is the simplest, best description I’ve ever seen on explaining why productivity improvements (which can often be socially wrenching) are the only way to improve the standard of living.

Brilliant review by Hendrik Hertzberg in the New Yorker of Robert Dahl’s new book, “How Democratic Is the American Constitution?”:

Even if it were true that the condition of being a citizen of a state with a small population entails such grievous disadvantages that, to correct for them, the very votes of such citizens must be assigned a greater weight than the votes of other Americans, how much is enough? Are the special needs of people who live in small states — people who can, after all, escape their condition by moving somewhere else — greater than the special needs of people who are short, or people who are disabled, or (more to the point of American history) people who are black? Here’s a little thought experiment, inspired by Dahl’s reflections. Imagine, if you can, that African-Americans were represented “fairly” in the Senate. They would then have twelve senators instead of, at present, zero, since black folk make up twelve per cent of the population. Now imagine that the descendants of slaves were afforded the compensatory treatment to which the Constitution entitles the residents of small states. Suppose, in other words, that African-Americans had as many senators to represent them as the Constitution allots to the twelve per cent of Americans who live in the least populous states. There would be forty-four black senators. How’s that for affirmative action?

I had always considered it obvious that the way to deal with the European Union’s constitutional problems of different sized states was a bicameral legislature, but this has caused me to reconsider. Of course, I certainly don’t expect the US Senate to allocate seats differently in my lifetime (though I could imagine California splitting into 3 states to get 4 more Senators), so I’m much more focused on much more essential (and, interestingly, all non-partisan) issues of political infrastructure:

• We need to bring voting machine technology into the 21st century so that the person you think you voted for actually gets your vote (more on this soon).
• Move redistricting out of legislatures and into independent state agencies to eliminate gerrymandering and create some actual competitiveness in Congressional elections (as Arizona has done).
• Pass a constitutional amendment eliminating the possibility of faithless electors (i.e., make the electoral college a purely statistical function of causing votes to be taken by the state and representing the number of representatives rather than by percentage of people). And no, I’m not happy with how much more the Presidential vote of a Wyoming citizen will count then mine, but it’s better than the current situation, in which as random political hack chosen as an elector might throw the whole election.

The NYT compares Death by Asteroid with more pedestrian forms of terror:

Thank goodness! Another killer asteroid is on the way, just in time to take our minds off the stock market and foreign affairs. Asteroids, in fact, are just about the perfect peril — a lot less scary than a close encounter with a shark and a lot more reliable than Saddam Hussein….

Meanwhile we are free to worry away at our leisure. It’s a lot more fun than fretting every time Tom Ridge or John Ashcroft warns us that terrorists are out to do us in, at a time and place unspecified. At least with asteroids, those who issue the warnings know where the terror rock is and can calculate where it is headed.

More on death from above.

Clever NYT article on the nightmare of modern home theater systems:

N artificial intelligence, they have the Turing Test: Can a computer impersonate a human well enough to fool a researcher? In magic, they have the Book Test: Can a magician mind-read well enough to divine a word chosen at random? And in the home-theater field, they have the Baby Sitter Test: Is your system simple enough that a guest can turn on the TV unaided?

Unfortunately, only my best friend and I know how to operate my home theater system, but I haven’t been willing to invest the time to record all the macros necessary to make it user friendly (no babysitters come over to encourage me).

Congressmen in the pocket of Hollywood have proposed a histrionically absurd bill to enable the music and movie industries to hack into people’s computer who they think are illegally trading music: “Under the bill, companies would not be required to warn users in advance of their actions. A user wrongly attacked could sue only if he or she suffered more than $250 in economic losses and obtained the U.S. attorney general’s permission to file a lawsuit.” Kudos to AP for mentioning how much Hollywood bribed — I mean donated — to the bill’s backers.

The NYT’s gift for understatement in explaining that conservatives are unhappy with Ashcroft, who has had an “unusual” trajectory the last two years: “Losing to a dead candidate is a decidedly unpromising sign about the electoral future…”