Links and Minifeatures 03 02 Thursday

Well, the commercial side is finally ready for prime time. I had to keep after the programmers constantly to do it on schedule and to spec, but they did get it done. Okay, if I was grading their business practices, their score might only be in the low 80s, but when nobody can manage anything above fifty, grading on the curve of their competing firms means they deserve an A++. Right now we're concentrating on merchant sign ups, but if you have a need and we have the merchant already, we're happy to oblige.



The idea is to have a pool of ethical practitioners in the mortgage, real estate, and insurance industries, that gives them reason not to defraud their clients. The idea is to include financial planners as well as soon as I can find someone willing to sponsor me for the relevant tests.

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Govt. Eyes Error That Cost U.S. Billions



Now this needs to be investigated as to whether it was really just an error or not. Billions lost because somebody "forgot" to put a clause Congress required in over a thousand different oil leaseholds? I know that if I was an oil company looking to get a good return on my investment that would certainly be a candidate for a few hundred thousand.



It says they've ruled out computer error, so at the very least someone needs to be fired for incompetence. I don't know any company that would put up with this. Why should we put up with it from public employees?



When did this "error" take place? 1996, 1997, and from 2000 onward. Who does that suggest is responsible?



Suppose this had begun under Bush administration appointees? Is there any doubt that they would be crucified. As it is, I'm justifiably angry that they've took five years to find out about it. But given the fact that they were handed an ongoing problem, that could easily be simple negligence, although I want that looked into as part of the investigation.



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Yellowstone Bulge May Cause Thermal Unrest. Offhand, I'd say that's so low a concern as to not be worth mention. I saw a documentary a while ago and followed up by reading a bit. The reason for the geysers is that Yellowstone is a buried caldera that last erupted about 640,000 years ago, and was approximately 1000 times more powerful than Mt. St. Helens twenty five years ago. They're thinking that it would bury most of the plains under a foot of ash if it did so again, and it's overdue. Not a darned thing we can do about it, of course. Geologists are saying that Yellowstone erupts at about 600,000 year intervals - meaning it may be overdue.



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Fascinating! Generic Confusion has an article directing us to the Islamic concept of Takaful, which is how they handle insurance contracts. Inefficient by comparison with Western models but it gets around religious prohibitions put into place by a man who just didn't understand economics. (I find the notion of an all-knowing god putting these limitations on human economic activity to be laughable. Such a god would be more than capable of economic designs that are not only moral, but work efficiently.)



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Argghhh! debunks John Derbyshire on the readiness downgrade of the one previously level one Iraqi battalion. Reason? A new command rotation and scheduled training.



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This needs more circulation: Professor Bainbridge has an eye-opening article about Mr. Clinton seeking patronage for a friend of his.



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Wizbang has the authoritative debunking on the Legacy Media's assault on Bush in the form of claiming he was warned in advance of Katrina.



My take is that even if it were an unambiguous warning of disaster - which it wasn't - what precisely is the President to do?



1) Order levees built over the course of decades demolished and rebuilt in a day? If you can read this without laughing, you need a refresher course in reality.



2) Order evacuation? Send Troops? This is not his decision to make, as any number of people have pointed out, and if he had, it would have been correct to impeach him.



3) Stand there with his finger in the dyke (and his thumb elsewhere) while other major problems that he is charged with fester? Okay, I know some people want precisely that. Doesn't mean it's practical, worthwhile, or intelligent.



4) Precisely what he did.



Big Lizards has more.



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I knew I wasn't alone! Vodkapundit has a very nice article on the tactical victory and strategic disaster that was Gulf War I. If I live another five thousand years, I might forgive Bush I for multiple-botching that easy opportunity to do something right.



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Dr. Sanity and Adventures of Chester have excellent articles about the question of whether Islam is potentially compatible with Western Democracy, and the consequences of yes and no answers.



The only thing that I have to add is that the ideas of Western Democracy may have been claimed to be universal, but not demonstrated to be so, and I'm not certain that even those who laid the cornerstones believed it to be universal. What Western Democracy is, is more accommodating of alternate beliefs and ideas than anything which has been tried or proposed before. Western Democracy tries to incorporate new strengths to the extent possible. I do not believe that failing to incorporate Islam would be a failing. We didn't incorporate much of pre-WW2 Japan, and the only fascism is those poor deluded leftists who think they understand our choices better than we do. Of course, this has become most of them, but I digress.



The exclusion from the world of Islam as presently constituted would make for a dark blot on the soul of Western thought, but not an unbearable karmic burden of precedent. When the axe murderer charges the cop, implement held high and persists despite warnings, warning shots, and the threat of the gun lined up on his chest, the policeman who does what is necessary to preserve his own life and that of any bystanders is not irredeemably stained. Yeah, he may - wrongly - believe that "if only" he had done something different, the axe murderer would still be alive, and blame himself. But a sane response puts the responsibility and any karmic burden squarely upon the axe-murderer. The cop in this scenario is a hero by any reasonable standard. Why not the sane, tolerant society who removed a mad dog who was endangering others and could not be stopped by any lesser response from committing offenses many times worse?



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Armies of Liberation connects the dots on the Great Al-Qaeda Prison Break. Doesn't look good for the incumbent regime.



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Via Instapundit, a proposal to come up with a rational system of fair use that rewards engineers, not patent attorneys.