Jim Moore’s blog: Innovation, Strategy, Public Policy

Coutesy of MSNBC here.

Not
realizing his remarks were being picked up by a microphone, President
Bush bluntly expressed his frustration with Hezbollah, and his
preference for diet Coke during the G-8 summit in St. Petersburg. Read
a transcript of his comments:

Bush to Putin: I gotta leave by 2:15. They want me out of town so they can free up your security forces.

No, just going to make it up. I’m not going to talk too long like the rest of them. Some of these guys talk too long.

Gotta
go home. Got something to do tonight. How about you? Where are you
going home? This is your neighborhood doesn’t take you long to get
home.

You eight
hours? Me too. Russia’s a big country and you’re a big country. Takes
him eight hours to fly home. Not Coke, diet Coke. Russia’s big and so
is China.

Yo, Blair. What are you doing? Are you leaving?

Blair: No, not yet. On this trade thing…

Bush:
Yeah, I told that to (inaudible). If you want me to. I just want some
movement. Yesterday I didn’t see much movement. The desire to move.

Blair: It may be that it’s impossible.

Bush: I’ll be glad to say. Who’s introducing me?

Blair: Angela

Bush: Well tell her to call on it. Well, tell her to put me on the spot.

Thanks for the sweater; it was awfully thoughtful of you. I know you picked it out yourself.

Blair: Oh, absolutely!

What about Kofi Annan?  I don’t like the sequence of it. His attitude is basically cease-fire and everything else happens.

I think the thing that is really difficult is you can’t stop this unless you get this international presence agreed.

Bush: She’s going. I think Condi’s going to go pretty soon.

Blair: Well that’s all that matters. If you see, it will take some time to get out of there. But at least it gives people…

Bush: It’s a process I agree. I told her your offer too.

Blair:
Well it’s only…or if she’s gonna or if she needs the ground prepared as
it were. See if she goes out, she’s got to succeed as it were, where as
I can just go out and talk.

Bush: See the irony is what they need to do is get Syria to get Hezbollah to stop doing this s— and it’s over.

Blair:
Because I think this is all part of the same thing. What does he think?
He thinks if Lebanon turns out fine, if he gets a solution in Israel
and Palestine, Iraq goes in the right way, he’s done it. That’s what
this whole things about. It’s the same with Iran.

Bush:
I felt like telling Kofi to get on the phone with Assad and make
something happen. We’re not blaming Israel and we’re not blaming the
Lebanese government.

Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffet have together given and pledged more to help the poor of the world than anyone in history before them.  This is a remarkable and critical contribution.  In my own discussions with those in the public health field, including the dean of Harvard’s School of Public Health, there is tremendous respect and gratitude for what the Gates Foundation is accomplishing.

But consider that Buffet’s pledge to the Gates foundation is 5% per year on about $30B, or about $1.5B per year.  The Gates foundation has already been given by Bill and Melinda Gates about $29.1B.  Most foudations spend about 5% per year of assets, which would, once again, be about $1.5B per year, plus or minus.  With this amount, most observers believe that the Gates Foundation has accomplished a world of good.

But to put these amounts in perspective, the US taxpayers have spent–not invested, but spent–like drawing money from your ATM–about $320B on the Iraq war  This is ten times the total amount that the Gates Foundation has in TOTAL ASSETS, and thus vastly more per year than the foundation spends in its work on behalf of the poor.  The amount spent–spent–on the Iraq war could have ENDOWED ten Gates Foundations.

The $320B–that is, three hundred and twenty billion dollars–could have been invested in something else. Indeed, almost anything else would have been a better use of the money.

How about education in the United States.  Dividing the $320B into the number of states, that would be $6B–that is, six billion dollars–per state. Over a few years.  Would that have made a difference in our children’s lives?  Yes.  Would that have helped the nation’s companies develop educational technology rather than war-fighting technology?  Yes.  Might that in turn have helped turn us into an educational technology supplier to the world, rather than–as we are today–one of the largest arms dealers?

This all from “the education president.”  Oh yea, I forgot, he is now “the war presdent.”  You bet your bottom dollar!  Hell, this money could have been invested in golf courses and we would all be better off.

Here is a recent summary story of spending for the war, in case you’d like to read it.  The dollar amounts are discussed in a report on congress passing a new multi-billion-dollar bill of spending for the war, this week.  Here is an excerpt:

Under the law, $65.8 billion will be rushed to the Pentagon so it can continue fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan through
September.

Glad they could “rush” it over! How do you suppose they do that? By armored truck?  Or wire transfer?

“I am pleased that Congress has addressed these urgent
national priorities within the spending limits I set,” Bush
said as the Senate passed the measure.

Congress is also advancing separate legislation adding an
additional $50 billion in war funds to keep combat operations
running from October through March or so.

Oh yea, and here is the best part.  All our Senators but one voted for the new money!  In part this is because the bill combined Hurricane relief with the Iraq war..but then again, who do you suppose constructed the bill in such a politically adept way?  The same Senators.  This way, the “doves” can say they were forced into voting for the war in order to help the poor folks in New Orleans, and the “hawks” can show they voted to “support the troops.” Oh yea, and “chicken hawks” like Hillary Clinton can play it either way, depending upon the audience and the time.  And you don’t think politicians are smart?  Think again.

I am not making this stuff up.  I’m SOOO glad that our Senate put the administration “on notice” that it would have to improve its budget planning.  Wow.  LOL

check out the site of the day on http://TopTenSources.com today, Doris
Kearns Goodwin on Lincoln.  Nice reading for a plane trip or between
sledding and shoveling.

Larry Lessig, take a look at this one. It
demonstrates how Google and Microsoft and all the others slide down the
slippery slope toward the repressive future your describe in
Code.  This is the best article I have seen anywhere on Google in
China..Read the whole article here, from the Australian. Thank you John Gapper!

>Net giants beware: freedom may not last

John Gapper
January 31, 2006

SILICON Valley came to the mountains of Switzerland at Davos last week.
Was it my imagination or did its leaders look shamefaced?

Normally, figures such as Bill Gates of Microsoft and Sergey Brin and
Larry Page of Google are as proud as other software engineers. They are
richer and smarter than most of us and they believe that they are
improving our way of life.

Making money by making the world a better place is nice work if you
can get it. Google’s founders are so convinced they combine the two
that they made “Don’t be evil” a founding principle. But what happens
when business interests clash with ethics? That is occurring in China -
not only to Google, but to Microsoft and Yahoo - and it ought to make
them worried.

Gates teased Eric Schmidt, chief executive of Google, at the
World Economic Forum in Davos after Schmidt ran through the company’s
strained defence of why it was censoring its search service in China.
It was better to run a local search engine that blocked access to sites
than to deny local citizens a speedy Google, he said. It was the lesser
of two evils.

Gates had fun with that, pointing out that “Don’t be evil” is
not a relative commandment. But Microsoft’s chairman has little to be
proud of. His company shut down the blog of a Chinese activist that the
country’s government did not like. Quizzed about that at another Davos
event, Gates indulged in a bit of relativism himself: it was the price
that had to be paid for bringing a liberating technology to China.

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RSS Labs has just released a new Web 2.0 service that converts PowerPoint into OPML.

The service is called OPMLworkstation.com.

OPMLworkstation provides free hosting, including permalinks to
files.  OPMLworkstation files can public and indexed and kept current
in OPMLsearch, or they can be password protected and kept private.

Check it out! 

We can thank Bela Labovitch and Diane Gomez for creating it. They
hope that folks in the OPML community will try it out, explore ideas,
and push the site to its limits.  Let them know what you feel
about the site, as well as how it works for you, and whether you
encounter any bugs.

My own rationale is that OPML can be a used as a universal knowledge format.  OPML features
outines in an open format that can be indexed, searched, shared, combined, and written and read with free tools.

PowerPoint is the most widely-used format for knowledge representation,
especially in business and in universities, but .ppt files are
difficult to index, search, share, and combine.

We can disseminate knowledge by converting it from PowerPoint into OPML, and making
it accessible to the entire web world community through shared datasets and public directories and indexes.

In addition, making PowerPoint an entry point to the OPML ecosystem may
make it easier for more people to participate.  PowerPoint is a
very fast, familiar environment for
folks.  Why not write blogs in PowerPoint, and publish them in
OPML? By the way, why not podcast in PowerPoint, using the “record
narration”
feature?

Here is the introduction to OPMworkstation:

This link is worth sending to friends now.

from Wonkette:

The President’s Evolving Vision

May 2003:

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October 2005:
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Today:
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At a speech next month, the President hopes to announce he’s been “brainstorming” about victory in Iraq.

From the Associated Press, by way of Yahoo: