Tuesday, November 05, 2002

[Colin Glassey 2:30 PM] My attitude towards the Palistinian people has shifted ground over the last three years. I well remember my feeling of shock and dismay when Arafat, the dictator of the Palastinian Authority, rejected Barak's proposal in 2000. At the time I thought the Palastinians had a reasonable claim to a large part of the West Bank. I thought the previous eight years of peace had actually laid the ground for a reasonable end to the conflict. I don't think any of those things any longer. Two solid years of suicide bombing by Palistinian terrorists aided and, to a large extent, controlled by Arafat's own government have completely soured me on the legitimacy of their cause. Did the Palistinians have real, legitimate issues with Israel? Yes. Were the Israeli's continuing to expand their settlements in the West Bank during the Oslo peace talks? Yes. Do I now think the Palistinians deserve to control ANY land in the West Bank and Gaza? No I don't. The bottom line is: the Palistinian leadership is complicit in terrorism. In a real sense, they are waging war against the state of Israel. I would never hand over anything to a government that was waging war against me unless I had been defeated, unless I had no choice. The Palistinians took the gamble in late 2000 that they could obtain more by going to war against Israel (a war through terrorism) than they could obtain through diplomacy. I believe this was a stupid choice to make. I further believe that the Israeli government has no reason to continue talking with the current Palistinian government. Until and unless the current leadership is replaced with people who actually don't want to fight a war with Israel, I would ignore the Palastinian authority. There are two ways of gaining your own state: Fight for it and win. Negotiate a settlement, building up a sense of good will and trust so that the people who give you your state feel they can trust you not kill them a year later. The Palistinians were following the negotiate strategy for a while. Then they switched. They are now at war with Israel. I don't think they have a chance in hell of winning. But it was their call. I personally hope they lose. 2:37:37 PM     [Colin Glassey 12 noon] Boeing announced that they created a demonstration project for a pilotless aircraft called the Bird of Prey. It is very cool. About the cost Gregg Easterbrook points out in his football column (yes, its great fun and its mostly about football) Boeing also said that it had funded the Bird of Prey program privately, at a cost of $67 million, so that any technology developed would be proprietary. Meanwhile the F22 fighter development program for the Air Force, run by Lockheed Martin, has burned through $26 billion of the taxpayers' money over a decade and is yet to field operational aircraft Number One. So when a contractor has to spend its own money, it can engineer, build and fly a radi cal new design for $67 million. When the taxpayer is footing the bill on a cost-plus basis, it takes 10 years and $26 billion to accomplish nothing but generating demands for more money. That is a little unfair, but still. A brand new plane for 67 million? I'm impressed. 12:05:42 PM     [Colin Glassey 12 noon] Great science article from the NYTimes science section on how Grandmothers impact the survival rates of their grandchildren. The science is very interesting and not what anyone expected to discover. Summary: a maternal grandmother living with the grand-kids improves their chances of survival. By contrast, a paternal grandmother had no effect and in one study, actually reduced the survival rate of male grandchildren (study from 200 years of data in a small town in Japan). I'd blame this last result on bad child-care practices which were adopted by the people of that region of Japan (and no, I don't know what they were). Remember: culture doesn't always keep the best ideas, some stupid ideas can get embeded in culture also. 12:01:18 PM     [Colin Glassey 11 AM] Steven Den Beste has another brilliant essay on personal morality. I agree with his analysis and conclusions. My comment: what I want to see is a world where the value of every other human on the Earth has a growing value which, over time, approaches the value given to people from their own country. What we have now is an unstable situation, where people have alligence to family, then a region, then to a nation, but nothing bigger. So who takes responsibility for polluting the air which everyone on this planet breaths? Who takes responsibility for the world's oceans? Global problems demand global solutions. 10:52:41 AM     [Colin Glassey 11 AM] This is a very good essay about the problems with International Law. I have the following response: the author states the following: We are very far from having a universally accepted moral code, except for a few very basic principles. It is not clear that such a universal consensus will ever emerge. There is no such thing as a global demos, without which global-scale democracy cannot exist. I disagree. All we need is the basics of a world-wide moral code. We don't need uniformity on thousands of issues. In fact, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is, in my opinion, just such a document. I have no problem with imagining a global demos built around the princlples of that document. As I read it, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a modified version of the U.S. Bill of Rights which has proven its values over the last 210 years. 10:37:43 AM

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