Free Wisdom Online

Today's American: How Free?

Freedom House is going to release a report tomorrow, entitled "Today's American: How Free?" A Russian newspaper Kommersant claims to have gotten a copy of the report somehow and summarizes its main points in an article entitled "America's Fake Democracy" (in Russian). According to Kommersant, the report comes down to two points: (1) US has issues on the civil and political rights, but (2) is still one of the freest countries in the world. Pointing out the fact that Freedom House is a US-funded organization until recently ran by a former CIA director, Kommersant and other Russain newspapers seem to find this report very amusing. Kind of like American's might be amused if Cuban government issued a report entitled "Today's Cuban: How Free?" and concluded in it that while Cuba has issues, it is still one of the world's freest countries.

This got me curious about whether there is any basis for thinking that Freedom House rankings reflect US aliances. My guess was that they weren't. So, I got their rankings for 2004 vs 2001 and compared it with the list of members of "Coalition of the Willing." Here is what we get:

There does seem to be a tendency for member states to get better rankings. The t-test puts the chances of this being just a random coincidence at just a little over 5%. (Which is to say, the difference is technically "not significant at the 95% level.") The picture is a bit more stark if we look for countries that are not "Free" in Freedom House's rankings (score > 5, which would include both "Non-Free" and "Partially Free").

We get the following deltas for coalition members with a total score > 5 ("Non-Free" and "Partially Free", i.e., worth than Mexico):

 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0 -1 -1 -1 -2 -2 -2 -2 -2 -2

Deltas for non-members with a total score > 5 are:

 2  2  2  1  1  1  1  1  1  1  1  1  1  1  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0
 0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0  0 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1 -1
-2 -2 -2 -2 -2 -2 -2 -2 -2 -3 -5

(Again, negative deltas are mean more freedom.)

It is clear, that membership in the coalition didn't give all not-so-free countries an immediate boost in scores: many of the Coalition members that had abysmal ratings in 2001 preserved them in 2003. (Uzbekistan kept its' solid 13 - just one point away from North Korea.) On the other hand, many did improve their rankings dramatically, and none of them lost points - quite differently from the non-members. Coalition countries on average lost .75 points of non-freedom, while the non-willing lost only 0.20 points. (Again, less points is good.) And if we do a t-test for those less-than-free countries we do get a statistically significant difference in means (though, now we are looking at rather few instances).

It is not clear what this means, of course. The causation might be simply going the other way: countries undergoing democratization might be more eager to ally with the US.

Anyway, let me close this "aside" (which, as I said, I expected to come out in Freedom House's favor) and get back to what I was planning to complain about originally.

What rubs me the wrong way about the report is its very title: "Today's American: How Free?" Ask me if I care! The title (and it seems the actual report) seem to conflate two different issues: the freedom or unfreedom experienced by citizens of a particular country and the freedom or unfreedom produced by their government. One would have to be quite ignorant of life in the US and Russia to truly doubt that citizens of the United States experience more freedom than citizens of Russia. This does not, however, immediately translate into a moral right for the US government and organizations funded by it to talk about freedom in other countries. For that, the relevant question here would: is the United States government itself a source of freedom in the world? Note, that if we focus on just the freedom experienced by Americans, the detainees of Guantanamo or Abu-Ghraib do not "count" towards making US an unfree country - simply because they are (mostly) not citizens of the United States. So, according to this logic a country may use torture and detain people without due process and still be considered fully "free" - as long as those are not their own citizens. (This would include arresting journalists working for unfriendly TV channels and keep them in solitary confinement for over six years and still getting full score for "freedom of press" - again, as long as this treatment is reserved for foreign journalists.)

In a certain sense of "freedom" this does make sense. If I were American, I would surely want to know how US stacks up on treating its own citizens. However, looking at it from the point of view of whether US government has moral authority to critize other governments for lack of freedom, what matters is the effect of US government overall and especially outside the United States. For US pontification about freedom in other countries to carry any weight, it needs to convince people in other countries that it actually cares about their freedom. Freedom House doesn't seem to realize this.

As I said before, I do wish US had some moral authority on this issue. Russia surely could learn something about democracy. But until Freedom House figures out where US fits in this whole freedom / non-freedom thing, they might have to take a break from rating other countries, since their ratings are unlikely to be taken seriously.

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The Berkeley Tree Sitter

Back in February some guy climbed the tree in the middle of the Berkeley campus as a protest. (Sadly, most people seem to have never figured out what exactly he was protesting for or against, but it seemed like a rather long list of issues, from Berkeley's plan to cut some ancient oaks to their ties with oil companies.) Berkeley police wasn't happy about this and wanted to arrest him for trespassing, but decided to not drag him down from the tree - for the fear of liability, I heard. (The did drag down a poster that he had - part of the reason nobody was quite sure what he was protesting against.) So, instead, they camped near the tree, while he camped in the tree. Yes, he had a hammock, so he slept in the tree and he had a bucket with him to do you-know-what. They were at it for quite some time - two and a half weeks. He then finally agreed to come down in mid March. The police then cited him, supposedly for "tresspassing" and "illegal lodging."

[slideshow] [complete album]

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Drive-by Tax Returns

(For non US-readers: Americans are supposed post mark their tax forms by April 15 and many post offices stay open late to accomodate.)

Berkeley post office workers standing out in the streets with boxes for people to drop off their returns without leaving their cars.

[slideshow] [complete album]

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My Photo Lab

"find ... | wc" tells me I've got 21365 photos on my computer. I am guessing that I must have taken at least 50,000, though, since I delete at least half of the photos I take. I've gone through several different tools for managing all of those photos and have been meaning to document what I do and share the scripts that I've written for this, in case someone else finds my approach useful. Well, I finally motivated myself to do that, which has become possible in part due to the fact that I've been in love with git and Gitorious, after migrating Sputnik to them. With Gitorious the task of releasing code somehow doesn't seem as daunting. So, I started a project on gitorious to publish my script collection: Yuri's Photo Lab.

The rest of the post draws on the README.txt that I included in the repository.

The repository contains a collection of scripts that I use to manage digital photos. I use those scripts in combination with F-Spot and my server-side application written in Django (running on this site), which I am not releasing since cleaning it up and documenting it would be too much work and I am about to abandon it anyway. (I am hoping to move to Sputnik in the next few months.) I use all of those tools on Linux (currently running Ubuntu Edgy). This all might work on OSX, parts might work on Windows.

After taking new photos, I go through the following steps:

Step 0: Get the photos off the camera into some directory.

I do this either by putting the card into a reader and mounting it, or by connecting my camera and using Digikam. I never let F-Spot import the photos from the camera, however, since I want to rename and triage them before importing them.

Step 1: Triage.

I use GQView to delete the unwanted photos. Of all the applications I've tried, GQView does the best job of allowing me to quickly go through hundreds of photos, deleting most of them.

Step 2: Rename

Once the photos are triaged, I organize them into directories by date. I name each directory with the date and a short description. For example: "2007.09.08-varanasi", "2007.09.09-varanasi-2", "2007.09.10-delhi", "2007.09.11-agra", "2007.09.12-delhi-again".

Where do I put those directories? Let's start from the top, actually. I keep all of my photo-related stuff under "~/photos/". The original photos go under "~/photos/main". Under "main", I have directories for each "quarter":

yuri@chai:~/photos/main$ ls
2000.07-Summer2000       2003.06-Summer2003        2006.06-Summer-2006
2000.09-Fall2000         2003.09-Fall-2003         2006.09-Fall-2006
2000.12-Winter2000-2001  2003.12-Winter-2003-2004  2006.12-Winter-2006-2007
2001.03-Spring2001       2004.03-Spring-2004       2007.03-Spring-2007
2001.06-Summer2001       2004.06-Summer-2004       2007.06-Summer-2007
2001.09-Fall2001         2004.09-Fall-2004         2007.09-Fall-2007
2001.12-Winter2001-2002  2004.12-Winter-2004-2005  2007.12-Winter-2007-2008
2002.03-Spring2002       2005.03-Spring-2005       2008.03-Spring-2008
2002.06-Summer-2002      2005.06-Summer-2005       rn.py
2002.09-Fall2002         2005.09-Fall-2005         todo.txt
2002.12-Winter2002-2003  2005.12-Winter-2005-2006
2003.03-Spring2003       2006.03-Spring-2006

So, I put my "2007.09.08-varanasi", etc. into "2007.09-Fall-2007". Then from this directory I run a script "run.py" (which sits in "main") to rename the photos from whatever the cameras named them into a uniform pattern:

yuri@chai:~/photos/main$ cd 2007.09-Fall-2007
yuri@chai:~/photos/main/2007.09-Fall-2007$ python ../rn.py 2007.09.11-agra

The "rn.py" script is included in the repository.

This gives all photos in "2007.09.11-agra" names like: "20070911_392_8069.JPG". This includes: a date ("20070911"), a number within that date (392nd photo for 2007-09-11) and a random number. At this point I have over 20,000 photos all named this way. Having all the photos named the same way has helped on many occasions.

Sometimes photos from the same day fall into several different groups (e.g., two unrelated events) and sometimes there are just too many of them to display them all together. In those cases, I split them into several different directories after renaming them. E.g., I might split the photos of Agra (originally "2007.09.11-agra") into "2007.09.11-a-agra-red-fort", "2007.09.11-b-fatehpur", "2007.09.11-c-agra-streets", and "2007.09.11-d-taj".

Step 3: Load into F-Spot

F-Spot is a great application, once you tame it. In it's wild form, its a bit invasive, for my taste. I've configured my F-Spot to use "~/photos/main" as its photo directory, but I don't let it mess with the structure of that directory. Occasionally I import photos using F-Spot's GUI, always telling F-Spot to not copy the files but to just use the existing copies. But this gets very tedious. So, instead, I usually use a python script ("rn.py", included in the repository) to import the photos:

yuri@chai:~/gk/git/photolab/mainline$ cp /home/yuri/.gnome2/f-spot/photos.db
   ~/tmp/
yuri@chai:~/git/photolab/mainline$ python fspot.py import
   /home/yuri/photos/main/2007.09-Fall-2007/2007.09.11

Yes, I always make a backup of F-Spot's database file before doing this. I recommend that everyone does the same. Oh, and you need to make sure that F-Spot is not running while you do this.

Step 4: Add Tags using F-Spot

I then open F-Spot and use it's GUI to add tags to my photos.

Step 5: Generate Thumbnails and Smaller Images

I use ImageMagick to generate the thumbnails and mid-size versions of the images to display on the website. I use version "6.3.6", which supports "--autorotate". With this flag, ImageMagick will check each image's EXIF record for the camera orientation and rotate the image if necessary. As of January 2008, using version 6.3.6 on Ubuntu meant compiling ImageMagick by hand, which is a bit of a pain in the a#&: you need to make sure that you have JPEG libraries installed before you build ImageMagick. Oh, and if you build it with PNG support, then some things stop working in Gnome...

I keep my resized images in "~/photos/sized". When I need to resize images, I run "makethumbdir.py" (also included in the repository).

yuri@chai:~/photos/thumbscripts$ python makethumbdir.py
   /home/yuri/photos/main/2007.09-Fall-2007/2007.09.11-d-taj
   > make_thumbs.sh

This creates directories under "~/photos/sized" for each directory since 2007.09.11-d-taj and a shell script (make_thumbs.sh) which copies each file into the corresponding directory twice (once for a thumbnail and once for a mid-sized version for showing on the web), then calls ImageMagick's "convert" on it:

/usr/local/bin/convert "/home/yuri/photos/main/2007.09-Fall-2007/2007.09.11-d-taj/20070911_402_4296.JPG"
   -size 300x300 -auto-orient -thumbnail 150x150 
   /home/yuri/photos/sized/2007-09-11-d-taj/20070911_402_4296.thumb.jpg

I then run the shell script:

yuri@chai:~/photos/thumbscripts$ sh make_thumbs.sh

Step 6: Copy the Images to the Server.

I use "scp" to copy the images to my server. Nothing fancy about this. Perhaps the only trick is finding a host that is generous with disk space. I use DreamHost. (If you decide to open an account, use "YURI50BUCKS" promotion code to get $50 off.)

Step 7: Load the Images into My Web Application.

Again, the custom web application that I am using is too messy to release, but the basic idea is simple: I have F-Spot's database file which has tags among other things. I want to load this information into my web app. I again use "fspot.py" for this, but this time as a module called from another script (updatePhotos.py). I am including this script in the repository just as example.

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The Bestest Passw0rd

Someone in my department forwarded a link to http://www.passwordmeter.com/ to our "noise" list. After we all entered out email and bank passwords into this site and evaluated them, I suggested that we use the site to find the bestest password - so that we could all use it. The bestest password of course would have to satisfy the following criteria: (1) be as short as possible, (2) get 100% on the passwordmeter.com, and (3) be totally cool. After improving on my committee members' email password "f33ltehtr0||z" (13 letters, 56% score), by turning it into "E3l.*|z!" (8 letters, 100% score), I came up with another one: "-:-|lI.!" Also 8 letters, still 100%, but so much more coolness. Let me show it off in all of it's l33titud3:

I later managed to improve on this a little by introducing Unicode:

Or, the same thing drawn by hand:

Here is the second password getting approval of passwordmeter.com:

To be clear, those are all valid characters: a pipe, capital Turkish I with a dot (İ), capital Roman I, lowecase L, lowercase Turkish I without a dot (ı), lowercase L with a dot underneath (ḷ, used in transliteration of HIndi among other things), upper case Cyrillic Ӏ, and finally a period. Note that the Ukrainian Ӏ looks just like the Roman capital I but is a different Unicode character. This is important, since simply re-using "I" incurs a "repeated letter" penalty and the resulting score is nowhere near 100%. Yes, this password is very hard to type. On Ubuntu Edgy I can type 7 of it's letters using the compose key (e.g., compose + . + i to enter the dotless Turkish ı), and the Ukrainian keyboard layout. I can't enter the ḷ and had to copy and paste it. However, is one of the things that makes this password so strong! I mean: I can't even type it myself easily!

So, here you have it: the world's two bestest passwords. I'll have to decide which one to use for my email and which for my bank.

2008.04.26 update: I drew a version of the bestest password by hand, since to ensure that the letters are perfectly balanced and don't come out as being of slightly different width. The new version is included above. I also entered it into the iSchool t-shirt contest for this year. If it doesn't win, we'll be making a run of the bestest password t-shirts anyway. (Joe is already wearing one, but his uses the early rendering, which doesn't look as pleasing to the eye.)

This is all a joke. Please don't actually use this password. And don't use http://www.passwordmeter.com - their ideas about what makes strong passwords are kind of silly. More importantly, it's not a good idea to put your passwords into random websites.

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Faking Domain with AdWords

I just saw this add in gmail:

Note the URL: "www.UCBerkeley.edu/Negotiations". Seems too good to be true, doesn't it. Also, why "ucberkeley.edu" and not "berkeley.edu"? Indeed, when you click on the link, you get taken to a different domain (galimagroup.com). The domain that is shown (ucberkeley.edu) is registered to UC Berkeley but is not live:

But I am worried about the implications here. It seems that AdWords allows the advertiser to show a domain that actually isn't theirs (or simply doesn't exist) in order to attract the viewer. Great. Note that since the actual link gets routed through Google, you actually have no idea where you'll end up after you click on the web. It's not often that I am tempted to click on an ad in gmail, but the next time this temptation arises, I'll make sure to resist it.

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New York Times Has No Shame

New York Times published an article on Sunday, entitled "Putin’s Iron Grip on Russia Suffocates Opponents". The article itself is ok, I thought, though I didn't read much of it, finding it a bit boring. Not great, mind you, but ok. A bit overdone, with some strange phrases like "far-flung places like Nizhny Novgorod, 250 miles east of Moscow." (Excuse me? In Russia "250 miles east of Moscow" would be pretty much Moscow suburbs. Now, 4,000 mi - that's "far-flung.") If you've followed Russian politics at all, then there would be nothing to see here. But then they did an interesting PR move: they asked Russian Live Journal users for comments.

LJ is crazy popular in Russia, kind of like Orkut in Brazil. It sometimes seems like in Russia LJ=Internet. In fact, in case you haven't been following social networking sites news, LJ was recently bought by a Russian company. So, with some help from Russian LJ leadership, New York Times got over a thousand comments. Which they then selectively translated into English and put up on the NY Times website. Apart from amazingly crappy translation (sometimes translating sentences to mean nearly the opposite), what I found sad is how the mix of the comments was rebalanced to make it seem like the Russian LJ community was split between the different opinions about the article: some people loved it, some hated it. Nothing can really be further from the truth: if the LJ's opinion of the article can be summarized in one word, the world would be "shit". Not "shit" as in "shit! we screwed" but as in "why do they publish such shit?" In fact, that's literally a word that a good 10% of the posters seemed to use to describe it. Again, I don't think the article deserves that designation, but if NY Times bothers to ask Russians for their opinion, it should present this opinion as is, or say "The words that the Russians used to descibe express their opinions of the article are not fit to be printed in a family newspaper."

I went through the first ten posts translated by NY Times and the first 10 top-level posts in LJ and translated each of them roughly into "A-F" rating, where "A" would mean "You are right" and "F" would mean "Go write about your own f***ing Guantanamo instead." Then we get:

LJ comments:         D,D,F,F,F,F,F,F,C,C
Translated comments: D,F,C,D,A,C,C,D,D,A

Now, one can say that "Sad shit" is not a very mature comment, or that the first post was would have been to hard to translate ("And those people tell us to not put our fingers up our noses!" a reference too a joke where a kid says this after seeing his parents having sex.) NY Times could have said that from over a thousand comments, of which the overwhelming majority were extremely negative, they picked those that weren't too offensive and made sure to include some of the positive ones to represent the minority opinion as well. But to just translate the comments like that and say those were the highlights...

The worst thing is that while ostensibly trying to help bring democracy to Russia by criticizing Putin's regime, New York Times suddenly became Putin's greatest aid, providing his supporters with yet another argument that American media simply can't be trusted and that Russians should just rely on the Putinstate-owned sources instead.

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Getting a Phone in Bangalore

Back to Bangalore. (Thanks god I have all of those notes.)

One of the adventures in Bangalore was getting a phone. I planned on getting a SIM card for my phone as soon as I get to Bangalore, since I was sure life would be much easier, and getting a SIM card is somewhat of a fixed cost, so it's good to get it over with early. On my first day, Friday, I went around Brigade Road looking for a place to get it. I asked people in a few random stores and finally someone pointed me to a kiosk. I got there, told them I wanted a SIM card, they said it was R$250 (~US$6.25) which seemed like a pretty good deal, at least much less than what I paid in Brazil. Little did I expect what it would cost me in terms of time.

I hand over the money, get the card. One little detail, the guy says, he needs a copy of my passport and a passport photo. A photo? What the hell? I say where am I supposed to get it. He says: don't worry, just bring it some time. Great, I think, sounds like this means "bring it sometime if you have nothing better to do, otherwise forget about it". Ok. What about activation? In 12 hours it will be working, he says, then you can charge the credit. And it doesn't matter when I bring the photo, I ask? No, whenever. Awesome I think. I go send out an email with my new number to family, saying they can call me in 12 hours.

The next day came and the phone wasn't working, but I was too busy to go figure out why. Finally I got to the guy in the evening, said "What's the deal?" Well, he says, where is the photo and the copy of the passport. You bring them, then, 12 hours later, it will be working. Damn, now I see it in painful clarity. Ok, so I go looking for a place to take photos. No such luck, everything is closed.

Next day I repeat the same in the morning. It's Sunday though, so everything is closed until after noon. Finally at 1:30 p.m. I find a place to make photos and copies. Both are cheap (Rs. 60 for the photo, Rs.1 per page for copies), but did it take time. Finally I got to the guy, he registers me somwhere. Then ask me for a proof of residence. What? Luckily I had my hotel receipt on me and that worked.

So, at 2 p.m. my phone is registered (though not yet working) and I rejoyce in anticipation of cheap phone calls. The cell phone rates really make up for the hassle of the registration. Sure things are generally cheap in India compared to other countries, but one might think cell phone calls are cell phone calls. At least between Russia, US and Brazil there is little difference in price. In India, however, I learn that my pre-paid plans is going to be half a rupee per minute for calls within Bangalore (including cellphones). Half a rupee is just a bit more than US$0.01 - something like US$0.015 with taxes. How, this is base rate, without any "deals". There are ads all over advertizing one rupee rates for any place in Karnataka (the state) or Rs 0.25 for local calls. In Rio the base rate for pre-paid was R$1.30, i.e. US$0.70, so that's a 50 time difference. They warn me that when I get to Calcutta I will have to pay roaming - the crazy rate of Rs.6 per minute (US$0.15). Again, that's roaming. Another strange twist: calls to landline phones are more expensive than calls to other cell phones. I suppose it makes sense. The landline phone system is probably antiquated and monopolized. Cell phone market seems to be competitive and the equipment is new.

I go celebrate with a lunch at "Nagarjuna" at Residency Road. The lunch in Nagarjuna was the first fully satisfying meal I had in India, and I finally understood what people mean when they say that food is awesome in India. They mean Nagarjuna on Residency Road. For R$100 (US$2.50, cheap by the area standards, since it's not hard to end up paying over US$10 for a meal there), I got a fix-price South Indian meal, where they give you a banana leaf and waiters pass by and spoon rice, dahl and other things on it. Just for dahl and rice it would have been worth it.

The fun pla thing about Nagarjuna was that it felt intensely "local" place. Not that there are foreigners in Bangalore in general (I probably saw a dozen over my week there), but the places that I went to before seemed to be dominated by young yuppies like myself who among whom I probably only stood by being blond. Nagarjuna, on the other hand, seemed like a family place and I didn't see any other foreigners. Since I was alone, I they also put me to share a table with a gentlemen that looked ~50, so I could see how he was eating his food and he could see how I was eating mine. Did I mention they didn't give me a fork? And of course I didn't want to stoop to asking for one and instead did my beast eating with my hand with the extra pressure of being watched by a local. (I did eat my dinner with a hand last night too, but that was sitting by myself in a dark corner - no pressure.)

Next morning I find my phone working, a few hours later I get a call from my wife. (The cheap cell phone rates don't apply to international calls, so I can't call her and have to wait for her to call.) I also recharge the phone, which turns out to be strangely easy. In Brazil and Russia you buy a card to recharge your phone. In Bangalore, you find a guy who recharges phones, give him your phone number, pay, he makes a call, you get an SMS and your phone is recharged.

Next day the phone stop working. I find the guy, he says he doesn't know why. I go to the "Hutch" store on Brigade Road ("Hutch" is the cell provider brand). I should have gone there on day one, except that I didn't find it. They tell the guy sold me a card that was supposed to go with a particular Nokia handset, so it got desactivated. You'll have to get a new one they say. Luckily it's only R$100 (not the R$250 that I paid to the other guy) and they do everything on the spot. (And luckily I the extra photos, a copy of my passport and my hotel receipt with me.)

From that point on, though, the phone worked with no surprizes, and I was quite happy with the quality of signal everywhere.

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Hi, Hillary, Calling You Back

Hi Hillary!

Sorry I didn't pick up the phone when you called this morning. I was still in bed and you called my house number, which I don't give to anyone and for which I pay an extra $2 a month to AT&T to not sell it out. So, I was guessing it was just telemarketers. And then I checked my messages the evening and realized it was you! Oh my god, you called me!

Listen, I disagree with you on many issues. I said before that it's not cool for you to run for your third term (or is it Bill that's running for his, I keep getting confused about this one). And I am still a little bothered by your thinking that destroying Iraq on false pretence was a great idea. (Same with your support for America's brain-dead embargo of Cuba, BTW.) But whatever, the personal call that woke me up this morning totally makes me think it's not such a big deal.

I think I forgot to mention that I am not a US citizen and I don't vote here. Nor would I have voted for you, even with this total change of heart thanks for your message. (Hey, no offence, but there is too much in the balance here.) But listen, let's get lunch or something, and sort out our differences.

You didn't leave a number for me to call you back at, so, call me again, just not as early in the morning.

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Go Obama!

If you get to vote in the elections next Tuesday (and remember that about 6.3 billion of us get no say in choosing the guy who will decide who gets bombed next), please vote for Obama. Not just because the Clintons already got to run the world for two terms. Not because the Clintons are willing to do anything for political gain, including telling Latino Americans to not vote to "a black candidate." But because the US has f**cked up way too much in the recent years and it would take a noticeable public U-turn for the US to regain any sort of moral authority. And the world needs United States with moral authority.

You might ask: why do I care. I don't have to put Canadian flag on my backpack when I travel around the world. (Of course, there are countries that hate Russia too, but that's a different story.) The reason is that while I am quite critical of many things in the US, I think many countries in the world need change more than US does, and Russia is one of them. Some years ago, one could point to something in Russia and say: "We've got to do it differently." We should have fair elections like in the United States. We should give people fair trial like in the United States. We should treat people of different races as equals, like in the United States. We need more transparency in the government, like in the US. Everyone knew that this image of the US was a bit of an idealization, but the US didn't go out of its way to show the world how silly it is to idealize it. Then came Rwanda, Monica and the war in Yugoslavia. Then Iraq, then Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib. Right now, to criticize something in Russia and point to the US as an example of how it could be done better is to make an utter fool out of oneself.

I think the world needs a bit more idealism, and this idealism needs to start in the US, as Europe is just a bit too cowardly and self-centered. US needs a president that would not just pledge to make less idiotic mistakes while bombing other countries and to lie more coherently to the UN. US needs a president that could say that US got problems and will be working to fix them and gain moral authority that could help make the world a better place.

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