The Daily Overdose of Logic for Thursday, 27 October 2011: NATO's Kabuki Theater

Last week, NATO said it would be out of Libya by Monday. Today, the UN Security Council told it it must be out of Libya by Monday.

By metaphorical show of hands, who thinks NATO will be out of Libya by Monday?

See, here is the problem with military (mis)adventures abroad: they always last longer than you think they will. There's a reason mission creep has become a named, identifiable phenomenon--the inexorable tendency of powerful actors to continue to meddle in affairs not their own, as long as they continue to be (or continue to appear to be) successful. (The natural consequence of this, of course, is that the only thing that arrests mission creep and finally ends the intervention is some sort of colossal fuck-up. It's basically the geopolitical equivalent of the Peter Principle.)

NATO, and therefore the United States (because fuck it, we all know who runs the show), will either find a reason to continue its presence in Libya, or it will find a reason to re-intervene later on. (Like, say, if Libya's brand spankin' government looked like it could be heading for domination by hard-line Islamists. Oh, wait.) I'd love to be wrong, and if I look like a galactic-scale moron five days from now, I'd be fine with that. But you forget--the American intervention in Afghanistan has lasted nearly half my life, and practically all of my politically engaged life. For more than one out of every three days of my life, this country has been at war in Iraq. If there is one thing that observing the travails of the United States military establishment, which fancies itself the world's police force, has taught me, it is that there is no such thing as too much cynicism.

In other insufficiently logical news:

America: If Steve Forbes had the slightest goddamn clue what he's talking about, the fact that he has just prognosticated that Rick Perry will be the Republican nominee for President would be sufficient grounds for all thinking people everywhere to commit seppuku. Which means we're all safe. (Seriously, has anybody besides me ever read that fucking magazine? I've seen better analysis and better writing in the Boulder Daily Camera, and if that isn't a stinging indictment, I don't know what is.)

World: Silvio Berlusconi's bank records reveal that, while his country was becoming a laughingstock on the Continent, he was spending million of euros on his female "admirers." In news that contains similar shock value: water wet, Pope Catholic, moon implicated in tides. (Does any supposedly First World country--and that may be a bit of a stretch when talking about Italy--have a more fucked-up brand of sexual politics? Okay, besides France.)

Technology: One of my all-time favorite computer services companies, Dropbox, announced that it will initiate a new service that will allow businesses to share up to a terabyte of data, with all kinds of exciting new bells and whistles as well. I love this idea, but there's a downside: it costs $795 a year for five people. Even so, if I were the sort of person who was working on a major project that required extensive sharing of large files, I might see if I couldn't scrape four similarly situated friends together and grab an account. (As it is, I have no such project because I'm a lazy fuck. Also, because I'm a 1L, and the Powers That Be in law school don't let us do any of the fun stuff anyway.)

Business: Facebook has decided it needs a data center in Europe. I'm inclined to agree with it, for the most part. Where I disagree with it is in where, precisely, it's decided to put that center: in a country that has what a lawyer for Google calls "the most privacy-invasive legislation in Europe." (Europe!) Facebook claims that Sweden's climate will help keep its servers cool and that its abundance of clean and relatively cheap hydro power will keep costs down; energy, i.e. running and cooling servers, is often the single largest line item in a data center's budget. I get that, and I also get that the city of Lulea has an IT economy whose size and sophistication are mind-blowingly disproportionate to the city's size and accessibility. But I also think that a company whose customers are forever paranoid about the security of their data (yeah, I know, the information they willingly put on Facebook--I never said it was well-informed paranoia) might do well to put that data someplace where the government won't be yet another party trying to get at them.

Colorado: Some Occupy Denver protesters were hypothermic over the past few days thanks to This the Finest of All States' first round of winter. Natural selection works, people.

Anti-depressant: The growth of the American economy still isn't going fast enough--but it's going a bit faster than it was.