Another interesting DoD briefing yesterday, this one on the all-volunteer armed forces. Obviously, this was prompted by Rangel’s draft proposal. Worth reading, for some interesting statistics. The most interesting point is that black Americans join the military in a proportion roughly equivalent to the proportion of blacks in society as a whole; the 30% number we’ve heard a lot about is due to the fact that blacks tend to remain in the military at a higher rate than do other ethnicities. Seems to me that the question to ask, therefore, is not “why are there so many black people in the military” but “why is the military such a superior alternative to the rest of society in so many cases?” Maybe it’s something the military is doing; maybe the rest of society just sucks harder. Probably a combination of both. I’d like to see more investigation of this, in any case; I bet there’s something to be learned there. ...

A little teaser for the next Special Delivery, although actually, this is the image from the second one that I mentioned. It’s linked to the entire page.

I just added Sub Judice to my blogroll, cause I’m a lawyer junkie. It’s not so much a weblog as it is a dialogue: two lawyers, discussing issues of interest to them. They’ve been talking about the Grutter v. Bollinger (original) case recently, which may well mark the end of affirmative action in college admissions. I’ve also added Confessions of a Mozillan, which is written by Dave Hyatt, one of the main Safari developers. He’s commenting on issues reported with Safari, and letting us know about fixes. This is very impressive interactivity. ...

Entries were kinda light over the last few days because I was finishing up my zombies. (No kidding.) They will be light the next few days because I’m starting a new job. (Yay!) But no fear, I’ll be back.

After failing to get to the theater in time to see Catch Me If You Can, my brother and I settled on Narc. It was really good; Joe Carnahan, the director, wanted to make a 70s cop movie and he succeeded. The plot’s complex enough to be interesting and not entirely obvious, but not so unwieldy that it gets in the way of either the psychological tension or the action. I was a little worried that it would veer into a moralistic frenzy, always a danger in a movie that has so much to do with drugs, but nope. The acting’s excellent. Ray Liotta put on thirty pounds to play his role and it worked perfectly. ...

The Instapundit comes out in favor of racial internments: “The wrongfulness in the World War Two internments, after all, wasn’t that they happened, but that they were unjustified. Had significant numbers of American citizens of Japanese descent actually been working for the enemy, the internments would have been a regrettable necessity rather than an outrageous injustice.” He also quotes reader email, which includes the sentence, “The citizen/alien line—so crucial to the wrongfulness of the Japanese American internment—has now been breached.” ...

Since I’ve been boosting the Sidekick excitedly for the last few days, I ought to let people know about a caveat. If you use Keyguard mode, sometimes incoming calls won’t ring, which means you’ll miss the call unless you happen to be looking at the screen when the call comes in. (Keyguard mode automatically locks the screen after a given period of inactivity, to prevent accidental calls.) If you turn Keyguard mode off, no problems. ...

Addendum to the below: the direct trigger point was in fact a US diplomat pushing the issue; we called North Korea on their nuclear program. OK, that’s fair. I think that the essential conclusion is the same, though. I’m honestly not sure why Bush isn’t standing up and saying “This happened because we pushed them, and it’s a perfectly acceptable price.” At this point I think that’s a reasonable stance. ...

[Leafnet](http://web.archive.org/web/20230127105333/http://web.archive.org/web/20230127105333/http://www.leafnet.org/ (original) “Leafnet: get the message out”) (original) (by way of Boing Boing) is a new approach to distributed politics. I really like it. The basic idea: check the site, print out a leaflet, post it in a bunch of places. It distributes the work of pamphletting across everyone who’s interested in the subject. Very nice concept. Now he needs to tie it to an alert system. It’d also be more effective if it was oriented towards a specific set of political issues. If you expect people to pay attention to alerts asking ‘em to leaflet, they need to know what to expect, and that’s even more important if people have to go to the site to see what new campaigns there are. ...

I did some research this morning on the context of the North Korean issue. (Or, if you like, crisis.) First off, here’s the Agreed Framework from 1994. This is the basic agreement, brokered by Jimmy Carter and signed by Bill Clinton. It’s got three elements: North Korea agrees to stop producing plutonium, the US agrees to help them build a light-water reactor by 2003, and the US agrees to make sure North Korea has alternative energy in the form of fuel oil until the LWR gets built. ...