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The WSJ has an article titled “Morocco’s Fragile Democracy Tests U.S. Prescription for World”:

A onetime Marxist who endured torture and 16 years in jail, Driss Benzekri was ushered into a lavish royal palace late last year to meet the son of his tormentor during Morocco’s “years of lead,” grim, gray decades of brutal oppression.

Mohammed VI, Morocco’s monarch since the death of his autocratic father in 1999, wanted to talk about human rights, democracy and what he called “the thorny issue” of the past.

As a result of the unusual encounter, Morocco this month launched the Arab world’s first “truth commission.” Led by Mr. Benzekri, the former political prisoner, it already has a mountain of files to examine detailing 13,000 cases of abuse, from beatings to disappearances.

Mr. Benzekri says the country has “made a fundamental rupture with the past.” He contrasts it with what he says were often cosmetic changes in the early 1990s. Then, newly freed from prison, Mr. Benzekri says he attended an antitorture meeting in Switzerland and found that Morocco’s official delegation included an interior ministry official who, years earlier, had personally supervised his own torture.

Mr. Benzekri, the truth commission’s 53-year-old chief, says the fervor of Islamic radicals recalls the Marxist zeal of his own youth. The Islamists, though, outlasted all their rivals: “All other utopian ideas have failed,” he says. “Islamists are the only ones left.”

I’ve argued in the past that having defeated totalitarian fascism and totalitarian communism, the West is now fighting totalitarian fundamentalism. Utopian ideals require totalitarian implementations. (I took the terms totalitarian fascism and totalitarian communism from one of the best pieces the Economist ever published.)

I collect maps, although just prints so far. One of my favorites has been this universe map from National Georaphic.

One of the authors of that map has collaborated to develop a map of the entire universe where essentially all interested features of space, from specific satellites in Earth’s orbit to the edge of the Milky Way and the limit of the visible universe, can be easily viewed on one flat surface. The trick was to to follow the same perspective as Saul Steinberg’s famous “View of the World from 9th Avenue”:

Here’s a great NYT essay describing their accomplishment. And their paper itself is quite readable.

Here is the actual map. On Internet Explorer, push F11 to display it full screen.

And here are a bunch of other formats, in case you want to print it out and frame it, as I plan to do.

My GSM Treo 600 with AT&T Wireless service is, IMHO, the first essential smartphone. Even with the amount of effort to get it configured, it’s a net benefit to your daily life. However, international travelers know that one of the great features of GSM is being able to buy prepaid cards with a local number in whatever country you’re visiting (Croatia, Ecuador, Morocco…). That way, people you’re interactining with in the country don’t need to call a long distance number in the States, you pay reasonable prices, and you don’t get waken in the middle of the night with an office worker calling about a minor issue.

AT&T locks their phone to make this impossible, which is especially ridiculous since I already signed up for a year service package. Thankfully, people on treocentral have figured out how to crack the lock.

The file is currently available from here (updated). If this link breaks, go to TreoCentral and search for “patched.zip”.
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My fiancée and I spent the holidays in Antarctica. Here are some pictures.

Slate’s Bill Saletan has a brilliant exegesis (is that like saying “milieu” in regular conversation?) of why I believe Dean’s candidacy is doomed in Son of a Milieu Worker:

8. Religion and the South. Having grown up in east Texas, I cringe for Dean every time he fumbles for a friendly word about the South. Here’s what he said Sunday: “I have a lot of friends from the South. In the South, people do integrate religion openly, easily into their lives, both black Southerners and white Southerners. I understand that if I’m going to campaign for the presidency of the United States, I have to be comfortable in the milieu that other Americans are comfortable. … I plan to learn how to do that.”

I hardly know where to begin laughing at this comment. Maybe it’s the part where Dean says some of his best friends are Southerners. Or maybe it’s the way he speaks of them as foreigners. Or maybe, as my colleague Chris Suellentrop suggests, it’s the way Dean talks about Southern habits in the third person, like an adult speaking to another adult about children who are in the room. Or maybe it’s the way Dean blurts out that this is all political, just as Bush’s dad used to say things like “Message: I care,” and “When Barbara holds an AIDS baby, she’s showing a certain compassion for family.” Or maybe it’s the very Bush-41 way Dean inserts and impeccably pronounces the word “milieu.” Perhaps Dean intends to run as the son of a milieu work.

I believe if nominated that Dean will lose the general election worse than Mondale (who at least won Minnesota). Fortunately, there is still a small glimmer of hope, in that a new poll shows Clark within the margin of error of Dean’s support.

NYT has a devastating article on adventure traveling in the wrong place at the wrong time: United by a Zest for Travel, Separated by an Earthquake.

This is so much better than the last 2 Matrix movies.