Double Standard

And I agree with her level of indignation about it also. Why is this even considered to be ok?

Althouse: Boys subjected to 9 hours of rote memorization a day in NYC.

At what point do you stop romanticizing another culture and start to see child abuse and plain violations of compulsory schooling laws? Surely, a Christian private school that dispensed with academic study (or threw in two hours) would catch hell.

Value of one

Can you imagine this happening in this country? Why isn't there pressure on the Suadi government to prevent these kinds of deaths? Is there a cultural difference in the the value of a single person?

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | Timeline: hajj disasters

Some 3,000 people have died in incidents at the hajj in the last 20 years in stampedes, demonstrations, and fires at pilgrim camping areas and one person was killed when a bomb exploded near Mecca's Grand Mosque in 1989.

this n that

No where else can we imagine
No one else can be sure
No one thing can make us believe
No one except us
No one

Ah-gin! Ah-gin!

Another touching funny monthly newsletter from Dooce

What was he thinking?

OK, so this kid runs off to Iraq w/o telling his parents. He writes about the evils of terrorists and the "struggle between good and evil". And the blogs on the right fall in love with him (following the link and check out the responses, especially the ones that allegedly complain about the kid). But the only reason they are doing so is because of what he wrote. If he instead had written about the WMD lies, the problems still there and other things that appeal to the left, the blogs on the right would have torn into him like a pack of wolves, complaining about what kinds of parents could let this happen, "stupid kid", etc.

I support the invasion of Iraq and feel we are doing good, long term work towards peace by doing so. However, lets be clear what is happening here. Everything is ok because of his opinion, not for what he did. For those of us with 16 year old kids, this has some gut-wrenching aspects that have nothing to do with the kid's opinion on the war or his family's homeland. The first question, of course, after returning home safely is "What the hell were you thinking!?!?!?".

I'm am very glad he is safe, that is the first and main thing that matters. As for all the blogs glowing about how wonderful he is, you need to look at yourself in the mirror: if you complained about the human shields a the beginning of the war, you need to be very careful about congratulating this kid for what he did. Congratulate them all for standing up for what they believe in or condemn them all for stupidity.

Pajamas Media - Farris Hassan Iraqi adventure

Talk about immersion journalism: Farris Hassan, a 16-year old boy from Fort Lauderdale, Florida, skipped classes one week earlier than the Christmas break was supposed to start. The son of two Iraqi-Americans living in the US for 35 years, and speaking no Arabic, Farris decided sneak into Iraq via Kuwait on his own without even telling his parents, to complete an assignment for his journalism class. He was handed to the US embassy in Baghdad by the 101st Airborne after the Associated Press -who got a nice exclusive- called them when the boy walked into its bureau to announce its editors he was there to do research and humanitarian work. During his adventure, Farris Hassan wrote an essay: "[t]here is a struggle in Iraq between good and evil, between those striving for freedom and liberty and those striving for death and destruction [...] Those terrorists are not human but pure evil. For their goals to be thwarted, decent individuals must answer justice's call for help. Unfortunately altruism is always in short supply. Not enough are willing to set aside the material ambitions of this transient world, put morality first, and risk their lives for the cause of humanity. So I will."

"For tourists we have fish": A trip to Libya (Michael J. Totten)

LA Weekly: Features: In the Land of the Brother Leader

The few men I did see walked or huddled together. They looked sullen, heavy, severe. I felt raw and exposed, wondering what on earth they must have thought when they saw an obvious foreigner wandering around the desolate streets.

So I did what I could to find out. I smiled at everyone who walked past. You can learn a lot about a people and a place by trying this out. In New York, people ignore you. In Guatemala City, people will stare. In Libya, they all smiled back, every last one of them, no matter how grumpy or self-absorbed they looked two seconds before.

I never detected even a whiff of hostility, not from one single person. Libyans seemed a decent, gentle, welcoming people with terrible luck. It wasn’t their fault the neighborhood stank of oppression.

A well written view of a place most of us don't know anything about. I hope nothing happens to him during these visits.

IT spending percentages

This is an interesting take on the question of proper IT spending levels. I think it is still important to understand the percentage, but his swapping of the dog and the tail make sense. The business are the dog and the percentage is the tail, not the other way around. Which should do the wagging?

Koch's IT Strategy - Home Page - Blog - CIO

The report identifies three broad ways to manage IT spending: resource management, work management and demand management. But those are basic principles of good governance in any IT organization--keep projects running well, keep infrastructure and people costs under control and have a good spending management process in place. They are necessary whether you are spending 25 percent of revenue on IT, as some financial services companies do, or less than two percent, as some retailers do.

What would really help is a better way of justifying the proper level of ambition of IT in the specific context of the company, its competition and its customers. For example, how information-intensive are the company’s products? How decentralized is the company? Are there obvious opportunities to create new products or business capabilities using IT that could justify being considered over and above the usual IT budget?

Starting with an average number and then trying to justify why internal spending should be higher or lower seems like a terrible way to determine your fate as an IT organization. How about starting with the business strategy of the company and proximity of customers to information products and services and working back to a number from there?

Michael Yon: Three Times A Charm

Michael Yon : Online Magazine: Three Times the Charm

Three times now—three times this year—millions of Iraqis have come out swinging and voting. Hearing the news about the high turnout (as high as 75% in some regions) and low incidence of violence during the elections in Iraq yesterday, I have to wonder how many times Iraqis have to demonstrate their commitment to freedom and democracy before the world starts to believe it.

Exactly.

Cool Google Maps

This is a very cool site. Lots of fun things that people are doing with Google Maps. One or two might actually be useful eventually. It is just exciting to see the ideas flow. You know that a few of them will hit it big someday.

Cool Google Maps - Who knew maps could be fun?

Yikes!

This is a bit concerning. Having worked at a small company, I can believe that backup tapes could get "lost". However, a bigger company would seem to have a more secure process in place. Very strange. It would be interesting to know the details on this one.

Techdirt:Happy Holidays: We've Lost All Your Critical Data

It's been one of the big themes this year, so perhaps it's not surprising at all to find out that the year is closing out with yet another big data breach. In this case, it's Marriott, who conveniently lost unencrypted backup tapes of an "identity theft's special" set of info on over 200,000 employees, time share owners and customers. Included in the data were every identity thief's dream starter kit: names, social security numbers, bank account numbers and credit card numbers. To apologize, Marriott has agreed to spend the $100 or whatever to give everyone impacted a free credit monitoring service -- which seems like the very least they could do.