Found this while surfing while I should be sleeping. Op-Ed in the NYT from Sunday pointing out similarities between the current Iraq situation and the British occupation of Iraq in the 1920’s. Certainly not a part of history I am very familiar with… but it is very relevant here. As Prof Ferguson says, it is certainly a much better comparison than Vietnam or other things that have been brought up lately. A good history lesson would probably be useful here.

The Last Iraqi Insurgency
(Niall Ferguson, New York Times)

From Ted Kennedy to the cover of Newsweek, we are being warned that Iraq has turned into a quagmire, George W. Bush’s Vietnam. Learning from history is well and good, but such talk illustrates the dangers of learning from the wrong history. To understand what is going on in Iraq today, Americans need to go back to 1920, not 1970. And they need to get over the American inhibition about learning from non-American history.

(via Insults Unpunished)

For the first time since I have been tracking it (in October) the number of countries with State Department Travel Warnings has gone DOWN. In October it was 25. By the end of November it was 27, where it had been holding ever since. It has now dropped down to 26.

For those wondering, the country that had a warning, but now does not, is Turkey. Turkey is now apperantly OK. So if you were holding off on your trip to Turkey, perhaps now is time to buy your tickets!

State Department Travel Warnings Over Time

A chart of how many countries world wide have US State Department Travel Warnings as that number varies over time.  Serves as a proxy to chart roughly how dangerous the world is as the world situation changes over time.  Perhaps not the best measure of that, but an interesting one perhaps.

My father’s site is apperantly getting some attention. One of his posts was talked about in comparison with a Clarence Page piece in the Washington Times. The person doing the comparison was a Professor from Indiana University in an opinion piece in the Indianapolis Star.

A link between reparations, forgiving African debt
(Philip Rutledge, Indianapolis Star)

A few days later, William Minter’s somewhat crusading AfricaFocus Bulletin (africafocus@igc.org) arrived, with the headline, “Africa: Who Owes Whom?” In addition to Minter’s own analysis of the debt situation in the Democratic Republic of Congo, the electronic Bulletin reposts extensive material from the Web site of the American Friends Service Committee (www.afsc.org/africa-debt) and other sources, painting a sordid picture of “odious debt” and alleged misdeeds by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, with some myopia by U.S. officials.

(via AfricaFocus)

The article where my father mentioned the editorial, is also interesting, highlighting some arward winning Internet efforts coming out of Africa, where Internet penetration is still far less than in other parts of the world. My favorite part of the article are actually the added notes on the Botswanan Basket Weavers, where the patterns are linked to Mathematics!

Africa: Internet Creativity
(AfricaFocus)

The intricacy of the patterns are illustrative of a subject that also well represented in sources on the web: the history of mathematics in Africa. See, among the many sources:

(1) African Mathematical Union, Commission for the History of Mathematics in Africa
http://www.math.buffalo.edu/mad/AMU/amuchma_online.html

(2) Plaited strip patterns on Tonga handbags in Inhambane (Mozambique), by Paulus Gerdes
http://www.mi.sanu.ac.yu/vismath/gerdtonga
Non-mathematicians can enjoy the patterns and skip the math.

(3) Review of Women, Art, and Geometry in Southern Africa, by Paulus Gerdes
http://www.maa.org/reviews/wagsa.html

My father and I do have *some* interests in common you know. :-)

Isn’t one of the very first things one learns about doing research involving human sources, even the normal non-classified, non-sensitive kind, that one needs to know the motives of your sources and what their agendas might be in order to evaluate the information coming from them?? This holds for evaluating the information you hear on television news, that you read in the newspaper, and when you are looking things up in old books at the library. Who woulda thunk it also applies when you are the administration of the world’s most powerful country and you are talking to people whose whole lives have been dedicated to trying to arrange the resources to go back to their country and overthrow Saddam? They exaggerated and told them what they wanted to hear to justify an invasion? Oh my gosh!!! I never would have guessed that was even possible!!!!

Exiles’ prewar data assailed
(Warren Strobel and Jonathan Landay, Philadelphia Inquirer)

U.S. intelligence officials have concluded that almost all of the Iraqi defectors whose information helped make the Bush administration’s case against Saddam Hussein exaggerated what they knew, fabricated tales, or were “coached” by others on what to say.

Coming back again to the difficulties caused by “strategic voting” rather than people just voting for the candidate who is closest to their own views. It just leads to all sorts of heisenbergian effects and distortions of the process. I’m not sure the “bubble” posited below will come to pass, but it might, and is just another example on the process feeding on itself in unhealthy ways.

Kerry 36,000
(Noam Scheiber, The New Republic)

Kerry is clearly benefiting from the fact that people think other people are going to vote for him down the road, which is why they’re voting for him now; they’re not voting for him because he’s the candidate they personally want to be president. As Chait points out, this is classic bubble behavior–you buy a stock not because it’s intrinsically valuable, but because other people are buying it and the price is going up (and you think both of these things is likely to continue). The problem with bubbles, both in politics and in financial markets, is that they tend to deflate just as rapidly as they inflate.