Palestine finished it’s election on Thursday, and guess who they voted for? Yup, Hamas, the radical Islamist movement responsible for hundreds of suicide bombings against Israel over the last twenty years. And this isn’t some watered down, cuddly, more electable version of the organization either. They refused to bend on any of their tenants and continue to affirm their stance on Israel: mainly that as a nation it has no right to exist and must be destroyed. This single event is likely to derail any hope for a sustained peace process, and will likely cut off most, if not all, aid coming into the country. This kind of thing is exactly what Democracy has come to mean: Tierney of the Majority, or as I like to call it, Most People are Idiots. It’s easy to just write off Palestine at this point. Whatever comes next, they’ve got coming to them, right? I mean, they voted for it. Well, sure they did, collectively, but in reality, not even half of the population voted for these guys. So now more then half the Palestinian population, plus all of Israel who I doubt had much of a say in this whole process but now get to enjoy a barrage of attacks, have to suffer because a minority of Palestinians are religious zealots who are unable to think rationally about just what their votes will mean. We all saw democracy fail in the US when every state who had a same-sex marriage ban passed it in 2004; why did we have to try to export those same failures to the middle east?

I was talking to a non-geek friend of mine today about a laptop he wanted to buy. He wanted this crazy-expensive tablet PC because the thought of writing on a touch screen instead of typing was to him the greatest concept yet in computing. After a little bit of explaining to me what was so great about this little computer he told me, with heavy regret in his voice, that the processor it used was Intel rather then AMD. At hearing this I snapped my head around and immediately started interrogating him about why exactly he wanted an AMD chip when it’s Intel that has the little blue men dancing all over his television every day. He told me that AMD makes faster chips then Intel. Now, that’s definitely a subjective statement, and I’m not sure where he got the information, but does this maybe signal a new era for processors? Does AMD finally have brand recognition among non-geeks despite their paltry marketing budget compared to Intel? It could be interesting to see how this plays out.