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We played Rise of Nations this evening here on the LAN. Even with ideal conditions, multiplayer strategy games are almost more effort than they're worth. I think age is a major factor here. When I was in my 20s, I burned thousands of hours mucking around trying to get Total Annihilation or Warcraft 2 or C&C or whatever games going.

But now at 32, I seem to have a lot less time or at least patience to throw away 20%+ of the "game day" due to various problems in multiplayer. Whether that be a given game crashing in a team game or it losing sync (and this is on a LAN) or mismatched teams or some other glitch or general game issue. It's not Rise of Nations' fault, this could be Warcraft III or Age of Mythology or whatever, it would have been the same thing.

I think first person shooters work out well for multiplayer because you can join games in progress. So not everyone is dependent on one person. But in strategy games, it only takes one person to ruin it (accidentally due to a crash or whatever) or through maliiciousness (not a problem when you're playing with friends but definitely a problem when you're playing on-line).

Some months ago I started using some spam filters. My favorite has been SpamPal. Our mail server also has its own spam filter on there. They worked reasonably well. About 90% of the spam was caught by them. Which for me was significant because each day I get around 500 to 600 email of which around 300 to 400 is spam. Going through 600 email to find the 200 legitimate email was a major pain. It's still quite a pain even with the filters.

But in the past month, more and more spam has been getting through.

Anyone else running into this?

They need to pass a law so that totally unsolicited email cannot be sent out. I don't care if they have a valid email address. I don't mind getting email from buy.com, I've purchased from them. I don't mind classmates.com emailing me either since I signed up for a free account there. But I really resent "Jenny Smith" sending me a "Can you look at this?" which is in actuality an ad for some site that sends my information to hundreds of lenders. They have no business emailing me.

The new JoeUser.com system is still very new. There are still zillions of little buglets we're working through. Just today we fixed a problem with printing of articles as well as enhancing and then fixing the email article feature. There's still a lot of work to be done so please bear with us.

But coming in a few weeks, people who create accounts (or already have accounts) will have the option of having their own blog. It'll be free to have your own blog here. And your blog won't be some wacky www.joeuser.com\blogs\users\yournamehere it will instead be added as a new domain name like yournamehere.joeuser.com.

That's not in place yet but it's coming. We also have a bunch of cool blogging features that we think you'll really like if you end up choosing to have your blog here.

Right now there's a lot of people who seem to think that because we haven't found weapons of mass destruction in Iraq is a major problem for the US. In fact, it's not. In the bigger picture, WMD was just a low hanging fruit excuse to do what needed to be done in Iraq.

Those same people seem to forget that there were a lot of other low hanging fruit reasons to invade Iraq. One of the most obvious is, if he didn't have WMD, then Saddam was a fool to flout the UN resolutions and mess with the inspectors (let alone throwing them out of the country). And regularly shooting at our planes flying the no-fly zone sure didn't help either.

Ultimately though Iraq is just one battle in the war on terror.  It's not about the oil. It's not about imperialism. It's about defeating the Islamo-fascists. 

In World War II, the United States and Britain had to invade French North Africa in order to get at Rommel. Geographic location was the key.

Let's look at the Middle East from a fresh perspective:

There's Iraq. Right in the middle. It has a port right on the Persian Gulf.  The 3 of the 4 most significant sources of Islamo fascist terrorism have borders with Iraq: Syria, Saudi Arabia, and Iran. Only Egypt is not on the border.

There are two basic ways to defeat Islamo Fascism: Try to conquer it and re-educate the people (the World War II method) or try to have a country of similar culture take a different path and become so successful that the native populations of the target countries begin to demand their governments change (The Cold War Method).

Now, before I get emails, Islamo Fascism should not be confused with the religion of Islam. Islamo Fascism is specifically an authoritarian movement by Islamic extremists that want to turn Islam into a form of government and views all those who do not conform with their views not just "infidels" but true enemies who must be exterminated. It is in their culture's failure that we have become their target. Our obvious success despite being infidels represents a threat to them, a threat they hope to wipe out through increasingly deadly attacks (September 11th was merely the culmination of nearly 10 years of attacks of increasing intensity on US interests).

Iraq was simply the best choice where to start. We live in a politically complex world and the US couldn't just invade Saudi Arabia or Iran. And Afghanistan (just east of Iran) is land locked which has made operations there a pain. But Iraq...well Iraq was a different story. First, I believe that the administration, just like previous administrations, truly believed Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.  Secondly, Iraq was flagrantly supporting terrorists (mostly Palestinian terrorists).  And lastly, there were a whole series of UN resolutions against Iraq that Iraq had flouted thus giving the United States the legal justification to commence military operations.

Now the hard part comes in. What do we do next? Do we build up troops in Iraq and use force (overt or covert) to topple the regimes of Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Iran? Or do we work to build up Iraq as an example for the rest of the region.  Just as West Germany served as a stark reminder to Eastern Europe that there was another way, a better way, Iraq could serve as a beacon to those countries whose clerics and militants currently have a disproportional influence on the population.

Either way, the invasion of Iraq was not about oil. If Iraq had no oil and all the other conditions existed, I believe we would have gone in anyway. Just as we went in to save South Korea in the Korean War (but that was because of the fear of communism right? Sure, and this was because of the fear of Islamo fascism, this project in Iraq is far too expensive to justify if oil was the goal -- oil sometimes costs less per gallon pre tax than water in some places).

As for weapons of mass destruction, I suspect we'll find them eventually. But their existence is largely irrelevant to whether we should have invaded Iraq or not. At most, it's a minor political pain for the administration. But since both parties believed Iraq had WMD for years, it's not a significant issue. What is a significant issue is rebuilding Iraq and making it a base for our operations. Better to fight the war of hearts, minds, and bodies over there than in New York.

In American politics, presidential candidates like Howard Dean stress the need of getting other countries to like us "again". Do you think that French candidates sweat whether the United States likes France? In fact, the United States has a 200+ year obsession with wanting other countries to like us or to accept us.

The upper crusts of the American life have traditionally felt scorn and embarrassment at the "crass" culture of the United States. In the United States, the middle class has always ruled the day. And to those elites, who consider their tastes and intellects much more refined, such a situation is abhorrent.

As a result, American leaders, particularly on the left, have generally gone to great lengths to appease "their betters" in Europe and in particular western Europe. Most Americans have no idea how much we have suffered as a result of politicians, like Howard Dean, wanting to be accepted and liked by countries like France.

Let's take Vietnam as an example since those who want us to do what France would have us do use to compare the situation with Iraq with. The implication is, if we just listened to the wise, sagely advice of our "allies" in France we wouldn't be in this "Vietnam-like" mess.

But Vietnam, in a nutshell, was a result of trying to placate the French. The more you know the history, the more infuriating it gets. In 1944, the OSS worked with Vietnamese nationals such as Ho Chi Min against the Japanese. We trained them to try to help liberate Indochina from the Japanese in World War II.

But where things get interesting is France's behavior. It's not commonly known that France was an Axis power for most of World War II. "Vichy France" is treated as some sort of puppet but it was an active participant in World War II as an Axis power. Most history books gloss over France's behavior in South East Asia. But in fact, France actively aided the Japanese, a fellow Axis power, in Indochina. Most people aren't aware of this, they think after France got taken out in 1940 that they were essentially like a chess piece off the board. In actuality they switched sides and from 1940 to 1944 they fought for the Germans and Japanese. Only after those bloody Anglo-Saxxons (UK/USA) conquered, er liberated France for Charles De Gaulle (and boy he sure showed his appreciation didn't he?) and his small contingent of "Free French" did France nominally return to being an "ally". And that was in the last 6 months or so of the war in Europe.

This is important because it sets up everything that happened next. So World War II ends and in the chaos that followed in Indochina, Ho Chi Min, an ally of the United States, sets up the Republic of Vietnam...

And then the French return.

Unlike Britain who started freeing its colonies and the United States who made the Philippines an independent country in 1946, the French wanted to keep their empire and fought tooth and nail before losing it.

The first thing the French did when they got back in force to Vietnam was arm the un-repatriated Japanese troops to "police" the population. Think about that. After fighting for their freedom from brutal Japanese occupiers while the Vichy French stood back and let it happen, the French return and rather than make clear that thought the Axis was an evil thing, they arm the Japanese again. They only stopped doing this because the Americans and British threw a fit about it. Most Americans on the ground believed that the French had no business in Indochina after their behavior during the war. They had seen the bravery and nationalism of the Vietnamese. To put it in perspective, Italy lost more troops fighting on behalf of the allies than the French did and Italy wasn't given back their various overseas possessions. But having France like us was apparently more important than doing the right thing in Indochina at the time.

Eventually France alienated Ho Chi Min who fled to the hills and began a guerilla war. The United States, wanting to support its "ally" France intervened in increasing ways which culminated in what we call the Vietnam war.

The United States, by no means, is blameless in the matter. But if we're going to start comparing the current situation with Iraq with Vietnam then let's not cherry pick. Let's remember that the whole ugly mess was largely caused by doing what France wanted. Hoping that they would like us more if we did.

update: The commenting system seems to be a bit messed up, should be fixed soon  In the meantime, you can email me and I'll try to respond in a follow-up.

update 2: okay, commenting fixed. comment away!