Ahmadinejad has never said that the Holocaust didn't happen. He has questioned its continuing significance, asserted that there is a myth of the Holocaust that has eclipsed the reality of the historical Holocaust, and stated that if Europeans are responsible for the extermination of six million Jews then they, the Europeans, should be the ones atoning for it — not Muslims.

It's an ignorant, parochial view, but is it anti-Semitic? For one thing, it should go without saying that a Persian saying that the Holocaust is not his people's problem is very different from a German saying the same thing. But that aside, Ahmadinejad's criticism is directed at the conduct of the modern Israeli state and its supporters. Israelis themselves have begun seriously questioning whether their country can lay claim to any moral high ground anymore — though Americans don't hear much about that debate because it doesn't play well to the armchair warriors over here. Criticism of Israeli politics and policies, ignorant or otherwise, is never in itself anti-Semitic. We know anti-Semitism, and this ain't it.

More saliently for Americans who are trying to understand Middle Eastern politics, Ahmadinejad is articulating the same view that Arabs and non-Arab Muslims alike have about Israel — "Why are we having to deal with all this crap? We didn't exterminate anyone." It's a somewhat disingenuous question — Israel's neighbors are dealing with Israel as an enemy because they lack the statesmanship to be friends. But Israel has the same problem — her last great statesman was assassinated by right-wing Jews. So it goes on both sides of the divide.

Iran is ultimately a threat to Israel because of one basic fact: there are Shi'ites willing to die to avenge the ongoing displacement of Arabs in the Occupied Territories. (There were Zionists back in 1948 who warned that it would come back to haunt Israel, but they, too, were assassinated by right-wing Jews. Seeing a pattern, yet?) Iran can't do anything about that basic fact, even if it wanted to (which, let's be clear here, it doesn't particularly). But Israel can.

What the American right wing wants you to believe, of course, is that the reverse is true — that if only Iran could be reduced to radioactive glass everything would be fine for Israel. They want this because they have serious problems with reality, and so long as they can keep picking fights far from home they can avoid having to come to terms with the truth.

So kudos to Columbia for standing up to these guys. War with Iran is not good for anyone, and the people who think it is are insane. But they care a lot about their delusion, and you, readers of Salon, will have to do more than just shake your heads in disbelief and turn the page if they are to be disabused of it.

It's hardly news that the US has historically met its need for cheap labor through immigration, and that we need cheap labor as much as we ever have and use the status of "illegals" to circumvent wage laws.

What isn't as obvious is that the vast tide of Latin American immigrants includes a substantial pool of skilled labor. Mexico is crying for need of skilled blue collar workers, and yet the US slurps them all up — and yet again, here in the US skilled blue collar workers can't find jobs because they all "went south."

In part it's just good old-fashioned shifts in industrial sectors. It was manufacturing jobs that went south, and skilled trades (construction, mechanical, etc) that the north needs so much.

But clearly the exchange was imbalanced if manufacturing hasn't brought enough wealth into the Mexican economy to support the rest of the labor market there. It's ironic that the situation is such a loss on both sides of the border. It's tempting to lay it all at the feet of American unions, which refused to touch Mexican labor with a ten-foot pole and thereby sowed the seeds of their current predicament, but in all likelihood if Mexican autoworkers had been part of the UAW Detroit would probably just have skipped straight on to China or Malaysia or wherever is next.

Regardless, it's a striking demonstration of the economic cost of prejudice, cultural separation, and lack of real labor organization.

The discovery that the confidence levels of the men in the test group was totally unrelated to their actual ability to get the job done (that is, using the debugger) is what really interested me. That reminds me more of the programmers (men and women) that I've known and worked with. Of course they can get the job done, they say! Half of them can't, actually, but when they run into a wall they start asking around, doing research, cribbing someone else's algorithm — sooner or later they've thrashed their way through to a solution.

The confidence comes first, in other words, because it's a general confidence in problem-solving ability, and is unrelated to the specific task at hand.

The women in the test group are in a narrow sense being more realistic. They're looking at the task in terms of what it takes to get it done — the ones who don't think they can use the tools also don't think they can complete the work, and they're right.

This shouldn't come as much of a surprise — women in general are taught and socialized to be careful, meticulous, task-oriented workers, and men are socialized to jump into problems, not sweat the small stuff, and work out the details later. It's widely assumed that the latter attributes are better suited for programming, but then the people who are part of that culture also produce crappy spreadsheet interfaces, so I wouldn't say it's at all given.