Potpourri for $300, again, Alex

Bits and pieces.

1. While Amazon has been more than a bit overzealous with patent suits in the past (“One Click” anyone?), IBM basically walking in and saying, “Nice business you have here, a shame if someone were to have everything in it patented already” seems absurd. American business is going to need to figure out how to win through innovation (or, at least,
   bribery), rather than by suing others for doing obvious things, otherwise we’re all in a lot of trouble.
2. It’s not that I’m criticizing the Bush Administration for actually looking at other ways to deal with the Iraq situation. It’s just tremendously amusing to me that after adopting “Stay the Course” as the mantra for the last couple of years, all of a sudden the Bushies have decided that, no, that’s not really their motto.
3. A different war, a different time, different goals, different tactics. Still, the contrast between the current statistics, waved all over the place — 83 US military casualties in Iraq this month, about 2,800 since the beginning of the war — and the deaths at a single battle of WW II — Iwo Jima, where 6,800 US troops were killed, among 26,000 casualties — is interesting. Not to argue that the two conflicts are the
   same, but the visceral reaction to the casualty figures today is interesting.
4. Okay, the Sudanese government is doubtless a bunch of murderous, genocidal thugs, doing whatever they can to avoid UN oversight of the Darfur situation (and facing a UN that, lacking anyone with the capability or willpower to do something about it, seems willing to bluster and let them be about their blood sport). That said, if you’re a freaking diplomat, don’t you think that keeping a blog where you say undiplomatic
   things about the people you’re sitting in meetings with (or at least things they’re liable to consider undiplomatic) is kind of … stupid?
5. Speaking of international brouhaha and politics, cool article on ATC yesterday, where Walter Cronkite talked about a real October surprise right before a presidential election — October 1956, when candidate Eisenhower was suddenly faced by an uprising in Hungary and an Anglo-French/Israeli attack on Egypt over the Suez Canal.