A few insightful quotes from Akira Kurosawa’s (黒澤 明) masterpiece Rashōmon (羅生門), spoken by the unnamed commoner:

But is there anyone who’s really good? Maybe goodness is just make-believe.

Man just wants to forget the bad stuff, and believe in the made-up good stuff. It’s easier that way.

It’s human to lie. Most of the time we can’t even be honest with ourselves.

Frankly, I’ve never been a big fan of the Westminster System of parliamentary government. Having a purely ceremonial figurehead as head of state strikes me as a waste of resources and having a hereditary head of state is undemocratic. Drawing the members of the executive (often referred to as the Prime Minister and the Cabinet in Westminster countries) from the ranks of the legislature leads to a weak separation of powers. Having unpredictable election cycles hampers citizen participation in the election and enables those already in power to time elections for political advantage. Allowing the legislature to dissolve the executive through a simple vote of no confidence often leads to instability, as was famously exemplified by the Weimar Republic.¹ Finally, the strict party discipline that the threat of no confidence votes engenders leads to a loss of independence for individual members of the legislature.

All of these factors, combined with the fact that Britain’s Labour Party had been in power for 13 long years, had made British politics rather uninteresting for me. Until this year, that is, as it became increasingly clear that Labour would almost certainly lose the election even before its date had been announced. Then, after the election was announced, came the UK’s first-ever televised prime ministerial debates, the first of which was widely seen to have been won not by either of the two big parties but by Nick Clegg, leader of the Liberal Democrats. Finally, the election itself was a rare nail-biter which resulted in the UK’s first hung parliament since 1974.

The 2010 election left the Conservative Party (often called the Tories) with the most seats in Parliament but just short of commanding a majority. The Labour Party technically came in second but with an overall loss of 91 seats, it clearly had no mandate to govern and only dim prospects² of forming a coalition government. The last of the major British parties, the Liberal Democrats, actually lost 5 seats in spite of leader Nick Clegg’s impressive performance in the debates but held on to enough seats to put the Conservatives over the top if included in a coalition. On May 12, the Liberal Democrats announced that they had agreed to form a coalition with the Conservatives.

Although it makes sense numerically given the results of the election, a Conservative–Lib Dem coalition is unusual to say the least. Often when coalition governments form in parliamentary countries, they are coalitions of parties with similar ideologies such as Angela Merkel’s center-right coalition in Germany. This new British coalition, on the other hand, is a right-left coalition. Obviously, such a coalition could not come into being without some compromises from both sides. Some of those compromises have been published:

• Trident: Lib Dems will drop opposition to replacing nuclear missile system but will be able to “make the case for alternatives” and funding will be scrutinised
• Heathrow: Plans for a third runway, opposed by both parties, will be scrapped
• Nuclear: Lib Dem spokesman will be able to speak in opposition to new power stations—and Lib Dem MPs will abstain from vote
• Higher education funding: Lib Dems allowed to abstain on votes—reflecting party’s promise to abolish tuition fees in the long term
• Spending cuts: Tory plans for £6 billion cuts this financial year will go ahead
• Tax: Tories sign up to Lib Dem plan to raise income tax threshold to £10,000 in the long term, which will “take priority” over Conservative inheritance tax cuts.
• There will also be a “substantial increase” in personal tax allowances for lower and middle-income people from April 2011—rather than the Conservative plan to raise employees’ NI thresholds
• But a plan to raise NI thresholds for employers will go ahead
• Voting system: Bill will be brought forward for referendum on changing to AV but parties will be able to campaign on opposite sides of argument
• Marriage/civil partnership tax breaks: Lib Dems will be allowed to abstain from votes
• Europe: Both sides agreed there would be no transfer of powers to the EU over the course of the Parliament and Britain would not join the Euro during that period
• Immigration cap: Lib Dems accept Tory plan for limit on non-EU economic migrants
• House of Lords: Both parties to back plans for wholly/mainly elected chamber elected by proportional representation. MPs will not be able to throw out the government unless 55% vote to do so—a higher threshold than currently
• ‘Pupil premium’: More funding for poorer children from outside schools budget, as demanded by Lib Dems

There is much to like and much to dislike about the specific policies but what I like most about all of this is the principled, pragmatic compromise that this agreement represents. It reminds me, in many but of course not all respects, of the compromises that lead to the Constitution of the United States. Neither side gets exactly what it wants but agrees to a position somewhere in between in order to promote the national interest. Sadly, while Britain embarks on this brave new voyage, America is trending in much the opposite direction. Recently, a three-term Republican Senator, known for reaching across the aisle, was rejected by his own party for not being ideologically pure enough. This is a shameful episode not because the Senator himself was or was not a great person but for the reason he was ousted.

America has lost its spirit of principled, pragmatic compromise and we need to get it back before it is too late.

This morning, former New York City Mayor Rudolph Giuliani was a guest on ABC’s This Week, hosted by ABC News Senior White House Correspondent Jake Tapper. During the interview, Mr. Giuliani proved once again why he should not be President of the United States:

TAPPER: I want to ask you a question about, in the trial of Richard Reid in 2003, Judge William Young said to Richard Reid in 2003, “You’re not an enemy combatant. You’re a terrorist. You’re not a soldier in any war. To give you that reference, to call you a soldier gives you far too much stature. We do not negotiate with terrorists. We hunt them down one by one and bring them to justice.”

That’s a different attitude than the one you’re talking about. Some people say that by making somebody like [accused terrorist Faisal] Shahzad, who is certainly less successful than several of the mobsters you put away, who did far more heinous things than Shahzad actually was able to accomplish, but were tried in a criminal court, they say that what you’re proposing would elevate somebody like Shahzad.

GIULIANI: Well, that’s absurd, of course. I mean, you get more rights as a civilian defendant than you do as an enemy combatant, so that’s a matter of semantics. Maybe you’re giving them more status in terms of semantics, but you’re giving them less rights, which is really important.

I mean, look at this whole thing with Senator Lieberman’s recommendation that citizenship be revoked and look at the reluctance of the attorney general to support that. It shows a sort of sense of, I don’t know, not understanding the magnitude of the problem.

I mean, why shouldn’t we revoke the citizenship of someone who’s been designated the — an agent of a foreign — of a foreign power or an agent of a — of a terrorist group? Of course we should. Of course we should be able to revoke it. And I’d be happy to test the constitutionality of that.

Instead we have an attorney general who’s studying that, also. They’re at war with us, and we’re spending time studying what rights they have. This doesn’t make much sense, Jake. We’re worried more about the rights of the terrorists, it seems — or at least pondering that — more than we are urgency about actually curing some of these things that will keep us safe and not have us rely on luck, which is how we got — got through these last two ones.

The “recommendation” of Senator Lieberman to which Mr. Giuliani referred is the “Terrorist Expatriation Act” that Senator Lieberman co-sponsored last week. That bill would expand a program first enacted in 1940 which allows the State Department to revoke the citizenship of anyone engaged in certain activities in support of a foreign government. The Supreme Court later narrowed the scope of the 1940 law by requiring evidence of a voluntary renouncement of American citizenship before said citizenship could be revoked.

Mr. Giuliani should be ashamed of himself for being so cavalier about fundamental American rights. Allowing the Executive Branch to revoke the rights of citizenship without due process is not only a Very Bad Idea™, it is also clearly unconstitutional¹. Democracies fail when their constitutions are not heeded and the last thing America should ever do is repeat the mistakes of the past. That someone has been accused of a crime, even a heinous crime, is not enough to deprive that person of his or her fundamental rights and those accusations must first be proved in a court of law before any punishment can be meted out.

It is indeed a sad day for the Republican Party when Glenn Beck, of all people, is the lone voice of reason among them on this issue. He recently said, “It’s easy to follow the Constitution when you benefit from it or you’re not affected by it. But what happens when you go against what you want to do, when you want to strap this guy down to the rack and make him talk, but you don’t because it violates the Constitution? That’s what makes this country different.”

From the official IEBlog:

The future of the web is HTML5. Microsoft is deeply engaged in the HTML5 process with the W3C. HTML5 will be very important in advancing rich, interactive web applications and site design. The HTML5 specification describes video support without specifying a particular video format. We think H.264 is an excellent format. In its HTML5 support, IE9 will support playback of H.264 video only.

Brandon Loomis, reporting in The Salt Lake Tribune about research by Tom Vanderbilt that merging late when faced with a lane closure is best:

But one day, as his wife sat shamed in the passenger seat, the New Yorker decided to stay in the far-left lane till the very end, zipping past the queue of crawling cars until the barricade ahead forced him over. Bothered by the glares he got the one time he decided to be selfish on that New Jersey highway, he decided to find out what was the “right” approach to the imminent ending of a lane.

Merge early, with all of the decent citizens who put the common good ahead of themselves?

Nope. It turns out, Vanderbilt found, that those selfish buzzards who fly past on your left and then slide into line at the last possible second are doing everyone a favor. His research took him to states such as Pennsylvania, where traffic flowed 15 percent better after transportation officials encouraged late merging through electronic signs. It’s better to use the highway’s full capacity by going to the end of a lane, he said.

I think it worth pointing out that if more people recognized how merging late benefits the overall traffic flow, the soon-to-be-closed lane wouldn’t be left empty and therefore using it wouldn’t seem so rude.

Louis Gerbarg on Apple’s change in the iPhone OS developer agreement that prohibits apps written in third-party development environments, including Adobe’s Flash CS5 which includes an iPhone cross-compiler:

It is easy to blame all this on Apple, and you will find no end of blogs screaming about their monopolistic power-hungry tendencies. I certainly agree that Apple should probably be more open, and that they are the party with the power to resolve this. If people want to complain about that, you will not hear me defending Apple. The developers using Flash, Unity3D, and MonoTouch have my sympathy, and I understand their anger with Apple. The Adobe evangelists writing screeds get none though.

The reason is that I think Adobe holds much more of the blame. Adobe is a large company with a significant, and complicated, relationship with Apple. They have frequent high level contacts and meetings. Adobe has known for quite some time about Apple’s desire not to have Flash on the iPhone. There is no doubt in my mind that if they asked Apple to bless this they were rebuffed, and if they didn’t ask the only reason they didn’t was because they knew Apple would say no. In either event, they announced the product to their customers and sold them on an idea they were not in a position to deliver, hoping Apple would be unwilling to piss off developers by not fulfilling Adobe’s promises. They tried to force Apple’s hand by putting Apple in a position where in order stop the Flash they would have to do it publicly in front of Adobe’s users. That was a bad call on Adobe’s part.

Bloomberg reports that Palm, Inc. is putting itself up for sale:

Palm Inc., creator of the Pre smartphone, put itself up for sale and is seeking bids for the company as early as this week, according to three people familiar with the situation.

The company is working with Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Frank Quattrone’s Qatalyst Partners to find a buyer, said the people, who declined to be identified because the sale isn’t public. Taiwan’s HTC Corp. and China’s Lenovo Group Ltd. have looked at the company and may make offers, said the people.

Not long ago, I would have thought that Palm would be a good acquisition target for Research in Motion, the maker of the famous BlackBerry mobile devices. The BlackBerry has a large and loyal following but the technology it runs on has not made the move to iPhone-style touch screens with much success, as evidenced by the lackluster Storm and Storm2. Palm is in the opposite position, with only a small user base but with a touch screen based OS (webOS) that has been well-received by critics. Alas, if RIM was looking to buy a new OS through acquisition, it may have already done so.

The TypeKit team has been experimenting with embedded web fonts on the iPad, and on Mobile Safari in general, and it looks like its not quite there yet:

We’re excited to roll out Typekit support for the iPad, and it looks like we should be able to do that in the next couple of days. However, because of these quirks in Mobile Safari’s support for @font-face, we’ll release this as an experimental feature that will be disabled by default — you’ll be able to enable support per kit in Kit Settings. We’ll post about it here as soon as it’s available, and we encourage you to experiment with it.

Cameron Moll:

At one point in time, J2ME (now Java ME) and WAP were the starting points for a discussion on mobile strategy and the web. Then, for a brief period of time, you talked about HTML/CSS. Now, for a growing majority of mobile strategies that don’t require a global presence on widely varying devices, the discussion begins with iPhone. Smart client is now iPhone app, and in many cases, the app is primary to the experience, not secondary to the browser. And iPad app may soon replace iPhone app as the starting point.

This American Life is a radio series on NPR (National Public Radio) which recently aired an episode exploring the joint-venture between General Motors and Toyota called New United Motor Manufacturing, Inc. or NUMMI. The venture started in 1984 with General Motors providing a recently closed plant in California and Toyota providing its now legendary manufacturing process. NPR Automotive Correspondent Frank Langfitt tells how Toyota’s processes turned one of the worst automobile plants in the world into one of the best and how GM’s stagnant corporate culture utterly failed to embrace change and copy this success to its other plants.