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We should be talking more about the Marshall Plan, don’t you think? There seems to be a lot of talk about reconstructing Iraq. But, back when World War II was over, we sent the troops home and began bombaring Europe with crucially needed aid that basically averted an enormous humanitarian crisis.

That is not the kind of plans that we hear about today. I think we could take a lot of the money we spend on the war and render it as aid. Also, we could increase Homeland Security in a legal and safe way to protect us better from terrorists, here at home - where they want to strike, regardless of where they train. We could support the troops by having them quit a battlefield that long ago stopped being a US military battlefield. We could do all these things and we would still be money ahead. Way ahead. And, our soldiers would stop being wounded and killed, just so we can say that we didn’t back down from terrorists (err, or was it the insurgents, or was it the Iraqi army, or that pesky Saddam Hussein…) in Iraq.

The Marshall Plan cost (in postwar dollars) $13 billion, an unheard of sum at the time. Even accounting for inflation, it’s a fraction of our to-date Iraq costs, and costs are “surging” every day right now. We need to be thinking about the Iraq policy in the same terms that we were thinking about destroyed Europe after WWII. I don’t see how you can call it defeatist, we haven’t won or lost in Iraq - we’re just hanging out. The Iraqi army stopped fighting against us a long time ago. Are we really at war with civilian militias in Iraq? How does that advance US foreign policy in any way? I just don’t know. Bring the boys back home, as they said back then. Why is that unpatriotic now?

You really want to make them stop hating us? Bombard them with real aid (and I’m not talking about unoading pallets of money from C-130’s either), and don’t stop doing it After a while, they might actually give a damn what you have to say about things. A lot of folks in our country think that constitutes ‘giving aid and comfort to the enemy’. If we had been right to expect to be ‘greeted as liberators’, help is really what the folks should have expected, not the utter,ongoing destruction of their homeland. Maybe it’s time to stop occupying Iraq, which, let’s be honest, isn’t really in a position to harm us anymore. In fact, it’d be fair to say we have our boot upon its throat. Maybe it’s time to start helping Iraq. We need a new Marshall Plan.

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D

so here’s another noisy, chaotic jam that doesn’t make any sense.

this morning’s jam

D

Because Peter and Charlie were right, not just specifically about REST, (as in representational state transfer) but about the fact that it takes people a while to really understand REST and why it’s not just beneficial, but downright important. I think I finally had some of the ephiphany of REST, but oddly it was because I was thinking about an entirely different problem than web traffic protocols. I was thinking about the different ways people move large amounts of geospatial image, elevation, and vector data around their systems. These days, interoperability is the new way, partly due to advances in technology that allows digital collaboration, partly for the more mundane reason that there are a hell of a lot of formats, web services, and spatial databases out there that people want to use. So, in effect, geospatial data and associated information is coming from all over the place all the time, in all kinds of oddball formats, map projections and states of metadata completeness. Yet we fearlessly use it all together all the time now and it pretty much works well. How do folks do this? Basically, we use a very awkward collection of file format codecs, open standards specifications, web services, and RDMBS systems. This stuff is extremely heavyweight. Again, as it was with web application programming, our first instinct was to create a big fat abstraction layer of stuff to shield us from this big scary world. We created heavy ungainly things that allow us to communicate spatial data and we were happy. But we did it at too high a level again, just like we did with web apps. It turns out that HTTP does provide you with most of what you need for web app communication and much of the app server is stuff we decided we needed to have wher we really didn’t. Well, maybe there’s a way to use a similar type of protocol to make communicating spatial data throughout data systems and get to a place where the communication of data isn’t surrounded with huge, heavy applications to manage all the translations and states and other stuff that we decided we had to have when we really didn’t. Just like web apps. So, I’m not saying use GET,PUT,POST ans DELETE. Maybe something similar in spirit, though. I’m not even suggesting anything specific. This is just the kernel of an idea. But I think there may be something to it. I’ll have to think about it. I know that the OGC specifications have gone a long way towards providing a key data abstraction in the networked world, but I feel like it’s still too high level. I don’t want to have to churn through chatty XML conversations, I want those sweet, sweet bits with a minimum of fuss and I want to edit ‘em, send ‘em back or have ‘em disappear or whatever I want. Web app, workstation app, handheld app, whatever…

I’m going to have to ask Peter and Charlie about this one.