Some Links

I haven't been posting because the in-laws are in town. We spent a great week touring the magnificent tourist sites around Jordan--Petra, Aqaba, Jerash, the Dead Sea, Mt. Nebo. Really, if you want to travel somewhere exciting and different, Jordan is one of the world's best kept treasures in the world. I also have finals this week and am trying to finish my registration for next semester.

Until I get back to my usual long-winded posts, here are a few links to check out.

Starbuck writes about one of my favorite subjects: how bad government is at trying to reproduce the successes of the civilian world. He hammers Army Knowledge Online (AKO) and discusses how he relied on Google Earth when responding to Hurricane Katrina because he couldn't get detailed maps for his mission planning software. He gets bonus points for citing me twice.

I always trust Marc Lynch for advice on how we should respond to terror incidents like the attempted Christmas attack by Captain Underpants. If we overreact, we are helping al-Qa'ida.

Zenpundit reflects on the moral courage of Miep Gies, who sheltered Anne Frank and her family during the Holocaust and who recently passed away. I've found studying international relations to be disturbing, because it breeds a lot of cynicism about the way the world actually works, and the basic language of morality and human decency often gets lost. In the real world, policymakers have to make hard choices between imperfect alternatives that often have a high human cost (i.e. what should we do in Afghanistan?). It's easy to get jaded. So I deeply appreciate people like Gies--not only because of their quiet acts of heroism, but because they are prophets who never let us forget the value of individual human beings and who call us to the high road of moral decency.