BBerryOne is a very nicely put together directory of Blackberry friendly websites. There are a lot of sites I hadn’t seen before;  there are pocket sushi,wine,and health guides.

In an article called Why Americans Oppose the Iraq War, Steven M. Warshawsky shows just how easy it is to do something that has long eluded the Democrats– argue against the war in Iraq without appearing weak in the war on terrorism:

Once again, President Bush has defined “victory” in the war on terror as requiring, above all else, the transformation of Iraq into a “free nation” that is a “strong ally” against Muslim extremism.

Even if the President’s vision of a free, democratic Iraq were something more than a quixotic fantasy – and a growing number of Americans (myself included) do not think it is – is it true that “the war on terror will depend on the outcome in Iraq”?  Is it true that “the safety of America depends on the outcome of the battle in the streets of Baghdad”?  

Why does the President continue to define the war in these self-defeating terms?  What about regime change in Iran and Syria?  What about preventing Iran and other terror-sponsoring states from obtaining WMDs?  What about hunting down and destroying known terror groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas?  These were the major elements of the original Bush Doctrine, which the American people wholeheartedly supported. 

Most importantly, these goals are achievable, as we saw in the two years following 9/11.

In his Atlanta speech, President Bush instead emphasized his grandiose strategy of “leading the cause of freedom” in the Middle East and thereby “chang[ing] the conditions that give rise to radicalism and hatred and terror.”  According to the President, we will “replace violent dictatorships with peaceful democracies.” 

However, unless the United States is prepared to overthrow all of the governments in the region by force and then occupy their countries long into the future – which President Bush has no intention of doing and the American people would never support – the President’s words amount to little more than meaningless noise. 

This is truly unfortunate because the war on terror is the central issue of our time.  The original Bush Doctrine offered a concrete approach to protecting the American people.  President Bush’s current Iraq-based strategy threatens to undo everything he has accomplished.

This effective critique comes not from a Democrat but from an intellectual conservative and Republican.  Though I’m sure we would disagree on many points, I respect Warshawsky’s intellectual honesty and also the substance of his argument.

The argument is simple; it’s mystifying that the Democrats have been so inept at making it. (The waffling of politicians like Maria Cantwell on Iraq has been downright embarassing, even as they ignore the bigger picture.)

First, challenge the false assumption that victory in the war in terror depends upon victory on Iraq. Second, acknowledge the low likelihood of a flourishing democracy in Iraq, an opinion supported by polls of ordinary voters as well as experts. Third, present a proactive and muscular set of alternative investments that will bring us success in the war on terror (”What about preventing Iran and other terror-sponsoring states from obtaining WMDs?  What about hunting down and destroying known terror groups like Al Qaeda, Hezbollah, and Hamas?  These were the major elements of the original Bush Doctrine, which the American people wholeheartedly supported.”)

The third step– proactive action against terrorism- is a difficult place for the pacifist wing of the Democratic party to go to.  Going there will not sit well with those who oppose all war or military force.  But the electorate has clearly spoken that they are unsatisfied with a purely defensive approach towards terrorism. Bush and the neocons won by default, with no compelling alternative plans for preventing terrorism, and led us down the current misguided path, seizing more and more power for the presidency at every step.

We need to escape the disastrous spiral that began on September 11th and has continued through a series of largely self-inflicted harms, ending in our current situation of an Iraq quagmire that saps our strength, plunging respect worldwide for the United States, and a loss of freedom and liberty here at home.

We’re in such a bad fix, we have to look beyond party labels. If Democrats can’t argue effectively against Bush, then perhaps principled Republicans will have to do it for them.  Sadly, real progress is difficult because neither parter has a critical mass of intellect and integrity– it’s so much easier to play the current political games around Iraq than it is to address the real issues.

Readers of this blog know that I do not shy from addressing weighty matters of international significance.

I therefore repeat Joe’s announcement that Oct 22 is Eat a Burrito for All Three Meals Day. I’ll let Joe take it from here:

Everyone mark Sunday, Oct 22nd on your calendar. That’s going to be Eat a Burrito for All Three Meals Day. Deciding what constitutes a “burrito” is left as an exercise for the eater.

Don’t eat dessert, because at the end of the day, I’m hosting a dessert burrito potluck, which will feature everyones’ favorite dessert burrito recipes and burrito music. Anyone can come, but EaBfATMD participants will get a special prize. I’m currently searching for a well-ventilated venue…any suggestions? It must allow outside food, and have a PA system for the musicians.

See more progress on: Eat a burrito for all three meals one day

Mmm, desert burritos! Can a better world be far away?

For the photographer who has everything, the Seitz 6×17 Digital Camera features 7,500 x 21,250 pixel images (160 Megapixels), resulting in 48-bit uncompressed TIFF images of 922 megabytes.  Images transfer is via gigabit ethernet.  General availability will be in early 2007; reserve yours now! 

Alex Bosworth has a nice trick for making the browser “throbber” move during Ajax requests.  This provides feedback that a request is being sent to the server, and is especially useful on tabbed browsers as a way to indicate when the tab is finished loading.

Check out Ajax: A Throbber For All Seasons:

As a heavy internet user, I have become attuned to the signal that a webpage is still loading, and in an application that uses XMLHttpRequest, it can be confusing as to what is going on.

So I’ve developed a technique to fake the browser throbbing, by launching a dumb parallel request to the XHR request. The parallel request merely creates an iframe to a page that will load for a long time, triggering the throbber. When I want to stop the throbber, I just destroy the iframe.

I’ve rigged up a demo page on wikiality, so you can see the technique in action and the source code behind it.

Breathing Earth is a hypnotically disquieting, real time display of carbon dioxide emissions, births, and deaths by country, with a nice use of audio to augment the visuals.

Update: It’s especially interesting to watch the US and China competing head to head on carbon dioxide emissions. One thing doesn’t seem quite right though– the birth counter seems to go up a LOT faster (around 4x) than the death counter. The current global population growth rate is 1.3% a year, so it doesn’t seem that a given time interval the deaths and births shouldn’t be that far out of balance. Below is a nice image of population over time.

The new recruiting.com went live last night and is looking great. Jason describes it as “wikipedia meets digg meets technorati for all things recruiting.” 

Recruiters by nature are highly networked and highly social, so we’re hoping this site will provide a valuable place for them to come together and share stories and ideas of interest. 

The home page combines user contributed stories (a la Digg), posts from the recruiting blogosphere (like Technorati), and stories written especially for recruiting.com

1. User Contributed Stories

Recruiters can contribute, vote for, and comment on stories.  Both recency and popularity are used to decide which stories go on the home page.

2. The Recruiting Blogosphere

The Recruiting Blogosphere aggregates stories from leading recruiting blogs and makes them easy to read and search.

3. Editors Picks and Unique Content

The home page also features editor’s picks, including content especially written for the recruiting.com site by affiliated bloggers.

We look forward to your feedback and to continuing to improve the recruiting.com community.

From InfoWorld, Sun picks up a gem in Ruby:

JRuby core developers Charles Oliver Nutter and Thomas Enebo will officially become members of Sun later this month, they announced separately today in their respective blogs…

One of the JRuby team’s PR specialists has already put together a list of AFAQ (anticipated frequently asked questions) about what this move means for JRuby — and Sun.

…Sun’s plans are threefold: To learn more about emerging dynamically typed languages; “to ensure that the Ruby programming language, in its JRuby form, is available to the community of Java developers”; and to examine the “possibility that the Java platform may prove to be an attractive deployment option for existing Ruby applications in certain scenarios.”

There are now 111 Berry411 mobile search plugins

Some of plugins are for everybody. For example:

• yelp: sushi find reviews of nearby sushi joints via Yelp mobile.
• kayak: lets you find the best prices for flights and hotels.
• movieratings: star wars displays movie ratings of Star Wars from Rotten Tomatoes.
• digg: displays recent digg headlines.

Other plugins make it easy to search for specialized information:

• epocrates: tylenol will look up dosing and drug interaction information for tylenol.
• law: hearsay defines legal terms. Uninteresting to most of us, but fascinating to a few.
• urbandict: crunk looks up crunk in the urban dictionary (crunk=crazy+drunk)
• taf:KDEN will display the travel aviation forecast for the KDEN airport.

Check them out and create your own.

Laurel pointed out a cool artist who creates works of art using only paper, scissors, and glue. Somehow reminiscent of Escher in the play between two and three dimensions.