Daniel Reese: April 2007 Archives

Twiddla looks like a very usable tool for a group of people, who aren’t in the same room, to draw on a web page together. Kind of a whiteboard shared over the Internet, but designed to draw on live web pages.

One of the authors wrote a brief article on the development process (1 day to functional prototype) that describes a bit of why “eating your own dogfood” can be a good thing.

It has bothered me for years that no one expects Palestine to act with any decency while, at the same time, holding Israel to almost heroic standards of restraint and forgiveness. The amazing thing is that Israel actually achieves those standards nearly all of the time, despite intense international disdain for the fact that Palestine has been deliberately targeting Israeli civilians. Only terrorists deliberately target civilians.

The same sort of situation exists in Iraq, which is fighting a war (with America as one of its few allies) against outside forces determined to kill anyone who ever voted for democracy or doesn’t want to “convert” to Islam.

Orson Scott Card has written a great article asking whether Americans still value honor. It’s clear that many of us do, including everyone who volunteers to serve in our military. But I find it hard to believe that any in Congress could pretend that known and unrepentant terrorists should have any respect. From Card’s article:

Remember the name “Nancy Pelosi.” It will stand someday beside the name “Neville Chamberlain” in the pantheon of deluded fools whose poll-following stupidity led to the deaths of hundreds of thousands of their own nation’s citizens, and the deaths of millions of others who would have lived if those deluded fools had done what was necessary to preserve their national honor.

It makes me angry to know that so many of our so-called “leaders” will lie, causing untold American deaths, for their own political advantage. There are scoundrels in both parties, but I hope we can find someone with integrity to put into the oval office.

Yahoo Finance has an article describing how our tax dollars are spent. One interesting thing is that around 70% of the budget is required spending — Congress and the President don’t have any choice about it. This includes Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid payments and other help for individuals. It also includes interest payments on the national debt which, at 10%, seems like a huge liability.

The full breakdown is: * Social Security: 21% * Miliarty: 20% * Aid to the needy: 16% * Medicare: 15% * Interest on the national debt: 10% * Health & Education: 4% * Civilian & Military Retirements: 4% * Veteran’s Benefits: 3% * Transportation: 3% * Other: 6%

I guess that spending 102% of our tax dollars is how Congress got us such a large national debt in the first place.