Saving Europe: Stop Treating US Allies As Enemies

Earlier posts showed the cost to the US of losing the UK to a French– and German-controlled EU. The US needs to act now to stop this, and my first suggestion is that the US stops treating allied citizens as felons.

To recap: within 18 months, 25 European nations are set to merge into a European Union with common foreign policy, common economic policy, and common military. The merged EU will likely treat weak nations like this:

And will help China sink this:

Here’s how the US loses allies.

Until last year, citizens from friendly counties could visit the US without visas. This was a two way agreement – US citizens don’t need visas for those friendly countries.

Starting last September, the US now fingerprints and photographs every allied visitor. That would include the families of the men and women fighting and dying alongside the US in Iraq.

That has generated a huge and growing amount of resentment in every country effected & is one of the main drivers of the steady growth of anti-Americanism. It will also have a big impact on US tourist revenues this summer. And it’s undermined the positions of friendly politicians, notably Tony Blair and Silvio Berlusconi.

If this reaction seems unreasonable, here’s how Americans reacted when Brazil Immigration photographed them.

European governments haven’t retaliated – most are pleased to see the US shoot itself in the foot. And the Brits treat the US as an ally.

So any European entering the US has the same amount of hassle as entering the dictatorships of China or the old Soviet Union. By contrast, Europeans are waved through immigration in countries from Japan to Australia, and of course all European countries.

Now this scheme is nothing to do with anti-terror (although the idiot in charge claimed that) – any sensible terrorist will either have forged passport or will just come in through Mexico. It’s about the INS using the emergency to grab an extra bit of control. To be fair, the scheme might catch Kofi Annan’s feared Repeat Suicide Bomber…

Here’s what the US should do:

1. At each of the 115 airports where they operate the scheme, install special immigration lanes for citizens of their coalition allies. EU nations effected are Denmark, Great Britain, Estonia, Italy, Lithuania, Latvia, Slovakia, Poland.

2. Staff these lanes with the least horrible INS officers available.

3. And don’t fingerprint or photograph.

The White house may have to move Norm Mineta and Asa Hutchinson from the TSA to make this happen. Maybe enlisting them as Minutemen?

Or the US can do nothing and watch its allies fade away.

On Blogging

The Great Confusion that pulled Bloggers’ feeding tubes over the past 2 days encourages reflection of my 10 weeks experience of the infrastructure and medium.

These notes are for my own purposes, but comments are welcome

Infrastructure

Blogger server availability is in the low 90%s. This is likely because it’s free – thin client architectures need a lot of server side resilience and that costs money.

So my requirements are:

1. Commercial-grade server side availability, say 99.9%
2. Commercial-grade intrusion defenses
3. Location in rule-of-law country outside of the EU and US (just in case they do start censoring blogs). Anguilla perhaps.
4. Remote management

Content

The blog is for short-attention span information, and is weak for serialization. Which forces serious posts to become very long, deterring all but the most committed readers. I tried to solve this for my Granita Tapes and Loss of UK by breaking them up into bite-sized chunks, but that loses continuity.

So my requirements are:

1. Books component, accessible directly from entry screen without scrolling, or linkable from posts. That way, books can be evolved over time, with posts simply announcing each new chapter.
2. Books should support full Word-style presentation, including images and video. Mrs G tells me I need Content Management, so I’ll start there.

Presentation

Blogger is designed around 800 pixel screens, IE fixed font sizes, no memory. And the screen has a lot of information you usually don’t need 99% of the time: blogrolls, blogger bio, previous posts, archives, search. And this takes up about 40% of the screen all the time!

So my requirements are:

1. Display width automatically adapting to fully utilize >800 pixel screens.
2. That means customizable font scaling, with memory.
3. IE, Opera and Firefox support.
4. Show/hide sidebar. Ideally an extra menu bar at the top that doesn’t scroll.
5. Bookmark feature so I can jump to where I left off reading the blog or book.

Publication

Editors are hard to do, and thin client ones are even harder. The Blogger editor is 90s style, buggy, and has clunky formatting and image management. And if you paste in from Word you lose format effectors. But we all have some sort of Word processor on our publication devices, including our poncey phones.

So my requirements are:

1. Publication direct from Word, with fancy formatting, text editing, spell- and grammar-checking, image and movie embedding with decent text wrapping, and hyperlinking not only to external URLs and also to bookmarks within the current post or book.
2. A Word template that mimics the Blog presentation layer.

Navigation, Bio, Etc

Currently on the sidebar. Navigations is Most Recent Posts, Archives, Search (this blog or web). Functionality is not bad, although Blogger search is poor and takes up a display line. Technocrati is good, but sits in the horrible sidebar. Bio is vital, but ridiculous to waste the entire sidebar on. Stats vary by Blog.

So my requirements are:

Search in a dedicated command bar, as per Opera, together with buttons that pop up the other sidebar features.
– Bio
– Most Recent Posts
– Archives
– Statistics

The Linking Kerfuffle

Commenting, trackback and blogroll seem to have evolved from genuine feedback to a barter currency. Which has led to enormous blogrolls, which the blogger can’t possibly keep track of & trackbacks that add zero value. I can see how this works for folks who blog as a business, or who get kicks from climbing TLB levels, but don’t need that. Add to which, the Trackback mechanism is the mots horrible user experience I’ve ever encountered.

I just need feedback and something that shows Depleted Uranium readers a bit about eachother.

So my requirements are:

1. Comments with moderation applicable from the published blog.
2. No trackbacks
3. A blogroll of the 20 or so the news & blogs I read regularly.
4. User visible displays showing geographical location of readers (like the unavailable-to-new-users hitmaps feature, see Jacobs Room).

So, that’s what I’m off to look for. Meanwhile, I’ll hack this site to align it better with my spec. I’d like to kill Trackback, but can’t without losing past Comments, darn it.