Dustbury waxes nostalgic about the old IBM keyboards:

Old keyboards, at least on the Wintel side of the aisle, still have a great deal to offer: they have solid feel, they don’t have a bunch of Windows-specific keys to mess with, and they last forever.

There’s actually a serious issue here. I have a client who’s only able to use an IBM keyboard (or equivalent keyboard with a hardware keyclick). He’s quadraplegic and needs the auditory feedback. This presents an upcoming problem: USB to PS/2 converters don’t work (power draw problems) and fewer and fewer notebook computers have PS/2 ports.

I’ve found a solution for him. But the issue remains: technological change (particularly in the computer industry) is not an un-alloyed blessing. I could give dozens of examples of this. Take the old Singer Workstation, for example. Probably the perfect tool for dozens of everyday business tasks. It wasn’t until the advent of programs like Quickbooks that the industry began to return to the level of efficiency that it represented—and they’re still not as efficient.

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• Lileks and Power and Control comment-fisking DU.
• Brad DeLong gives the highlights of a Social Security reform plan I’m completely
  in favor of (not surprising since I’ve been saying nearly all of these things for 30 years).
• Tigerhawk has the latest installment of his Carnival of the Commies (the best of the Left).
• The indispensable Dan Darling has some of the best commentary on the Iraqi election that you’ll find
  in the blogosphere over on Winds of Change.

• If you’re looking for an opponent of the Bush Administration who strikes precisely the right tone in his reaction to the Iraqi election, you need go no farther than Bull Moose. This is especially worthy of consideration:
  

  However, in light of this weekend’s success, intellectual honesty compels progressives to acknowledge two difficult propositions. First, despite his myriad mistakes, President Bush deserves credit for pressing forward with the elections. Second, despite his enormous contributions to progressivism for which we are all indebted, Senator Kennedy committed a severe error by suggesting a withdrawal of our troops on the eve of the elections.

  Last week, the Senator stated, “The U.S. military presence has become part of the problem, not part of the solution.” No, our troops are for the time being the only defense against Iraq falling into the abyss. That was the wrong message at the wrong time.

• Crooked Timber has the feature you’ve been looking for: Ask a 19th Century Whaling Expert. Questions anyone?
• As usual, the best round-up on the Iraqi election is from Joe Gandelman of The Moderate Voice.
• Please address all complaints on the subject of recovered memory vs. false memory to Shrinkette.

That’s the lot.

The Iraq campaign and reconstruction will be a success in general if we leave behind a functioning country with a representative government. Today’s vote makes that almost certain.

To be a strategic victory in the Terror Wars, though, will require something more. Victory will require that Iraq not have one election, but many, and that when the leaders are voted out of power, they go peacefully. Victory will require the decisive defeat of the terror campaign in Iraq, destroying or converting the Ba’athist elements and destroying or driving out the jihadi elements. Victory will require that other countries in the region begin to reform in response to the changes in Iraq, or that we undertake the same process in at least several of those other countries. Victory will require and it will require building institutions that are of the country, not of the person or party currently in power. Only when these things are done will we have struck at the root of jihadi terrorism, because only then will we be able to demonstrate the difference between Arabs under tyranny (religious or otherwise) and free Arabs are more different than alike, and the free West and free Arabs are more alike than different. And only when we have demonstrated this will the jihadi appeals to the sorry lot of the Arabs being caused by lack of fundamentalist Islam finally lose their currency.

Which is one reason why this makes me very, very happy. It appears that at least one of the key elements is coming into place. That the Iraqi Army appears to be non-political in the officer corps (hopefully this is widespread) is a critical feature necessary to ensure that Iraq doesn’t slide back into tyranny.

If Allawi loses and steps down, another key element will be in place. (If Allawi wins, we won’t be able to test this until the approval of the permanent Iraqi Consitution and the first transitional election after that in particular.) If the Ba’athists over the next 18 months accept their defeat, another piece will be put in place.

Time will tell.

The Carnival of the Recipes, a collection of recipes from some of the best cooks in the blogosphere is available. This week it’s hosted by Kin of Kin’s Kouch.

Robin Burk over at Winds of Change has pointed to a fascinating web site: The Edge. The site is devoted to the answers of 120 leading scientists and science writers to this question: what do you believe is true even if you cannot prove it? It makes for fascinating reading and I strongly recommend it to your attention.

Some of their answers are trivial, some are highly technical, and some conflict with one another. They’re all interesting.

For example, I found this answer from Howard Gardner, Harvard University psychologist, particularly interesting:

The Brain Basis of Talent

I believe that human talents are based on distinct patterns of brain connectivity. These patterns can be observed as the individual encounters and ultimately masters an organized activity or domain in his/her culture.

Consider three competing accounts:

#1 Talent is a question of practice. We could all become Mozarts or Einsteins if we persevered.

#2 Talents are fungible. A person who is good in one thing could be good in everything.

#3 The basis of talents is genetic. While true, this account misleadingly implies that a person with a “musical gene” will necessarily evince her musicianship, just as she evinces her eye color or, less happily, Huntington’s disease.

My Account: The most apt analogy is language learning. Nearly all of us can easily master natural languages in the first years of life. We might say that nearly all of us are talented speakers. An analogous process occurs with respect to various talents, with two differences:

1. There is greater genetic variance in the potential to evince talent in areas like music, chess, golf, mathematics, leadership, written (as opposed to oral) language, etc.
2. Compared to language, the set of relevant activities is more variable within and across cultures. Consider the set of games. A person who masters chess easily in culture l, would not necessarily master poker or ‘go’ in culture 2.

As we attempt to master an activity, neural connections of varying degrees of utility or disutility form. Certain of us have nervous systems that are predisposed to develop quickly along the lines needed to master specific activities (chess) or classes of activities (mathematics) that happen to be available in one or more cultures. Accordingly, assuming such exposure, we will appear talented and become experts quickly. The rest of us can still achieve some expertise, but it will take longer, require more effective teaching, and draw on intellectual faculties and brain networks that the talented person does not have to use.

This hypothesis is currently being tested by Ellen Winner and Gottfried Schlaug. These investigators are imaging the brains of young students before they begin music lessons and for several years thereafter. They also are imaging control groups and administering control (non-music) tasks. After several years of music lessons, judges will determine which students have musical “talent.” The researchers will document the brains of musically talented children before training, and how these brains develop.

If Account #1 is true, hours of practice will explain all. If #2 is true, those best at music should excel at all activities. If #3 is true, individual brain differences should be observable from the start. If my account is true, the most talented students will be distinguished not by differences observable prior to training but rather by the ways in which their neural connections alter during the first years of training.

I suspect that a combination of #1 and #3 is true. I further suspect that the practice effect restructures the brain in such a way that no one person can, in fact, excel at everything. So although a person might have the potential for achieving excellence in anything the very process of achieving that excellence will foreclose other possibilities.

There are lots of things that I believe but can’t prove. Here are a few:

• I believe that all human languages derive from a single common source and are, therefore, related.
• I believe that our genus, genus Homo, doesn’t have as many species in it as paleontologists seem to believe (I also believe that most of these separate species are actually our own species, Homo sapiens).

What do you believe even though you can’t prove it?

Here’s what’s caught my eye this morning:

• This should put the fat in the fire: the apparent discovery of a set of genes that correlate with homosexuality (male) (hat tip: A Stitch in Time).
  If it pans out, this should strengthen the Equal Protection argument for homogamy which I’ve always found somewhat
  weak.
• And deliver us from evil. Amen. (hat tip: Amydala).
• Andrew Sullivan
  brings up a good point: what are the objective criteria for success for the election in Iraq?
• Is it just me or do you find the carping about fraud in the November election from both
  Left and Right undermine the electoral process? The time for oversight
  is before and during the election, folks.
• From Elizabeth Anderson of Left2Right: do you deserve your pre-tax income?
• DEBKA reports the results of the upcoming
  Iraqi elections (hat tip: Econopundit. Well,
  it’s a prediction but I like the way this version reads.
• The New Sisyphus writes something that I completely agree with and that explains
  my sense of urgency in the War on Terror:

  No President of the United States–no Democrat, no Republican–will stand quietly while a radical, terrorist-sponsoring nation that, as a matter of policy, holds rallies where it exhorts its citizens to suicide bombings while chanting “Death to America!” acquires nuclear capability.

• Words fail me: Man peed way out of avalanche (hat tip: Outside the Beltway). Behold the power of beer.

That’s the lot.

I’d meant yesterday to say some nice things about praktike’s guest post over on Dean Nation, the blog of the Dean movement. Here are prak’s ideas:

1. Support the growth of civil society in the Middle East.
2. Push for higher gas taxes.
3. Make connections with Muslims here in America and abroad.
4. Take the threat of terrorism seriously.
5. Educate yourself about the issues.

I agree with 100% of what praktike has to say in this post (and I do mean 100%) and I recommend the post to your attention.

I do have a few observations, however. I think it bears emphasis that while these five things are necessary they are not sufficient. I don’t think that anybody should be confused into thinking that if these five positions are adopted that the threat of terrorism will be abated and all the problems in the Middle East will be solved. I want to emphasize that praktike does not make this claim, either.

Support the growth of civil society in the Middle East

Does it seem to anyone else that there’s a reductio ad elections going on right now? Not everything bad in the Middle East will be solved by Iraqi (or any other) elections and not everything good will come from them. It’s more complex than that. We need to support the good in the Middle East with more than just words and oppose the bad in the Middle East—also with more than just words if need be. And that must be true of both our friends and our enemies in the region (if you can tell which is which).

Push for higher gas taxes

I’ve been in favor of this for more than thirty years so it would be odd if I opposed it now. Largely for strategic reasons (both foreign and domestic). But there is one area in which I’m not quite as sanguine as praktike is here. There’s a world market for oil and even if the United States didn’t import a drop of oil from the Middle East our erstwhile allies in Europe do. Eliminating our dependency on Middle Eastern oil would not reduce Saudi leverage much.

Make connections with Muslims here in America and abroad

I couldn’t agree more. ‘Nuff said.

Take the threat of terrorism seriously

With me you’re preaching to the choir on this one, praktike. Where I suspect we differ (and where I certainly differ from the Bush Administration) is that I think that the timeline is very, very short.

Educate yourself about the issues

Once again, I couldn’t agree more.

UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers. You might also be interested in my post from this morning: Five ideas from praktike (on how we should be dealing with the War on Terror). In this post I actually agree with commenter-to-the-blogosphere praktike who’s somewhat to the left of me.

I don’t want to appear to be picking on the
Arch-Blogger but I think he’s mistaken when he writes:

There was a time when the Left opposed fascism and supported democracy, when it wasn’t a seething-yet-shrinking mass of self-hatred and idiocy. That day is long past, and the moral and intellectual decay of the Left is far gone.

That would be nice, wouldn’t it? But I’m afraid it doesn’t conform to the actual historic record. The American Left did support the Communists against the Fascists in Spain during the Spanish Civil War. But they certainly did not support democracy during World War II.

When the Third Reich invaded democratic Poland in September of 1939 the American Left did not call for support of the Poles. Nor did they call for support of the Danes and Norwegians when Hitler invaded Denmark and Norway in April of 1940. They maintained solidarity with the isolationist America First Committee when the Germans invaded democratic France and the Low Countries in May of 1940. There also wasn’t a peep from them as the Soviet Union, in accordance with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact, occupied parts of Finland, Latvia, Lithuania, Estonia, etc.

In fact it wasn’t until Germany violated that pact and invaded the Soviet Union that a rift began to form between the isolationist Right and the Left. Three months after the invasion Norman Thomas, chairman of the American Socialist Party, announced his break with the America First Committee and threw his support behind intervention in the European war against Germany. I think the record here is clear: the Left wasn’t supporting democracy, it was supporting socialism. And, in my opinion, that was the beginning of the consensus that enabled the United States to enter the war.

So, Glenn, when was it that the American Left supported democracy? Or did you have some other Left in mind?