We’ve heard the words “Support the troops” almost everyday since the war started. One of the main contexts in which you hear this powerful little phrase is in response to criticism of the war and plans to get troops home. This is probably the most irresponsible and harmful possible use of this phrase. When we say this, we are not saying it in support of troops at all but rather the continuation of the war. To truly support the troops, we need to first make the judgment about whether they are being necessarily put in harm’s way.

If you had a child that went into a war due to some false premises or bad intelligence, then you are in a situation where you must make this distinction about what “supporting” them means.  Do you support them by a) doing whatever you can do to get them out of harms way sooner or b) blindly keep them there and tell anyone who is criticizing plans to get troops out that they are not ’supporting’ your kids.
Unfortunately, option B is what you are doing if you use the phrase “Support the troops” to discourage criticism of the war. Let’s support the troops by helping them get out of harms way as soon as we can rather than trying to make ourselves look patriotic by shutting down discussions that can really help.

I’m so glad to see New York City looking out for their citizens and cutting out transfat from restaurant foods. Transfat is a terribly unhealthy substance used as a cheap substitute for natural saturated fat sources, and a large part of the cause for the unhealthy image saturated fats have gotten.
Some argue that banning transfat is going too far and is really paternalistic. I believe this move is more clearly warranted than antismoking bills due to the relatively undetectable nature of transfat. While smoking does harm the health of others around the smoker, at least they are aware and can make the choice to move. When restaurants sneak transfat substitutes into food, it hurts everyone in the restaurant (unfortunately there’s no ‘transfat free’ seating area in most restaurants) and it is difficult for the consumers to avoid the substance short of not eating out.

This is a case that I think it is good to have the government intervention. Free market competition is forcing restauranteurs to use the cheapest health harming substances to compete.
The consumer side of the market is unable to demand transfat free food through their eating choices and purchasing decisions because they are unable to discern who is using transfat substitutes. The government’s action here is good to provide protection of consumer health where the consumer market is not able to do so effectively.

I’m tired of hearing claims that the Bush administration’s war has been victorious in keeping us safe because we haven’t had a single death in the US since 9/11. To me, this is just insulting to the Americans in Iraq. We’re celebrating the fact that we haven’t had any deaths on American soil when in fact we’ve let almost as many American’s die on the terrorist’s own land.

It’s really sad what we mean by ’safety’ in this context for those of us on American soil. ‘Safety’ is really just knowing that others (not you) will die to reduce the already very remote chance that you’ll ever get hit by an attack. And even that reduction in risk is questionable. By sending troops there, we’ve basically just relocated the target of attacks off our own soil.

How staunch supporters of the war can call the thousands of 9/11 deaths a tragedy and the thousands of troop deaths (plus tens of thousands of Iraqi deaths) a victory is beyond me. It’s amazing what we’ll convince ourselves of so that we can feel ’safe’.

Just downloaded the new Acrobat Reader 8.  I always opened PDFs with Preview on my mac because it was so much faster, but the new Acrobat Reader opens just as fast now.  Looks like Adobe finally got their PDF load time issue figured out.

Just moved my site and blog over to a new server.  I took the plunge and got some hosting at GoDaddy.com for pretty darn cheap.  It seems like it meets most of my needs so far like php support which is needed for this blog and decent storage and speed.  Their e-mail forwarding is great, too.  I had been running my e-mail through zone edit before which gave my forwarded e-mails a roughly 30 minute delay.  Godaddy’s e-mail forwarding is very snappy.

I’ve only noticed one issue with running wordpress on GoDaddy which is I can’t seem to be able to use pretty urls for my post addresses.  The other thing is support for Ruby isn’t included until the next higher purchase level (I got the economy hosting), which I was looking at learning eventually.  Besides that I’m quite pleased with the hosting so far and from past experience, their service has been quite good.