Canada -- and most other major western nations, with the notable exception of the US -- have an official called a "Privacy Commissioner." Among other things, their job is to investigate privacy complaints.

(Why doesn't the US have one? Short answer: there's no legal basis for one. The EU, Canada and Australia all have comprehensive data protection laws. The US doesn't.)

I met a few of the privacy commissioners briefly at various industry conferences about five or six years ago. The Canadian privacy commissioner back then was a gentleman named George Radwanski, a former newspaper editor, political operative, and longtime crony of Jean Chrétien, then Canada's prime minister.

( Radwanski had his quirks, though. )

Forgot to mention my favorite moment of the caucus. It was when one of my neighbors said, and I quote:

"Look, we know the Democrats are going to steamroller over McCain no matter who the nominee is. It's time that we start thinking about other alternatives."

It was right about there that I lost whatever remaining respect I had for Dennis Kucinich supporters.

Every third conversation you hear going down the street in Seattle today involves the words "Obama" or "Clinton" or "caucus." Welcome to political season.

I'd never been to a caucus before. In fact, I wasn't sure I wanted to go this year. But in Washington state, there's really no other way to have your voice heard during the primary election campaign, and the election is still too close to call. Civic responsibility won out.

The Democrats were evidently scrambling to get enough extra space to deal with a sudden influx of people to the caucus. (I'm hearing averages of 70-100 people per precinct. I gather those kind of numbers are nearly unheard of.)

We started the morning at the local elementary school. "Nope," they said, "your precinct has been moved down to the community center." So we walked down the hill, and watched as people crowded in...and in...and in....

Good thing there weren't any fire marshals around.

We ended up in, and I am not making this up, the community center's kitchen. A commercial-grade, not-enormous kitchen, packed in with over 110 people.

Democracy in action.

Still, it was a useful exercise. Our voices, or at least our votes, were heard. We saw some neighbors we hadn't run into in a long while. We got a sense of the neighborhood political landscape. We avoided asphyxiation. Victory, of sorts.

This got circulated around Unisys Corporation's headquarters back in the early 90s. It's accurate to a staggering degree.

"The basic informing philosophy for most vice-presidents is soak thoroughly, dry out thoroughly. Therefore, beware of overinforming. It is better to have the vice-president wilt than drown in too much information and never know it is happening until it is too late."

( Memo on the care and feeding of vice-presidents )

Very rarely, I've run into someone famous, rich, or important enough to have a bodyguard. The guards seem to fall into three types:

There's the bouncer, also known as the side of beef. Consider James Hetfield's bodyguard Gio, seen briefly in the Metallica documentary Some Kind of Monster. Gio is all solid muscle, no neck, and a fierce expression. He's about as subtle as an axe to the head. He'd be great in a crowd or a bar, but probably not much help against anything more devious than a drunken fan.

Then there's the agent. Dark suitjacket not really concealing the gun, sunglasses, an earpiece. If the Secret Service guys choose those outfits for intimidation purposes, it works. Even the cops get the hell out of their way. Then again, the agents don't blend very well.

Last, and rarest, is the Polite Guy.

He dresses normally. He's not built like a brick. He doesn't have any obvious hardware. If he's wearing a gun, he carries it well concealed. He stays around the person he's protecting, but not too close.

The Polite Guy is very hard to spot from a distance. Look around the famous person's entourage. Watch for the bland one, the one who doesn't say much and whose eyes never stop moving. That's the Polite Guy.

If you get up close enough, the Polite Guy's chi radiates from them like a blast furnace. But if you're that close, you've probably got other problems.

I've seen Polite Ladies, too.

One day a couple years ago I was walking around an unfamiliar Microsoft office building, trying to find a co-worker's office. I'd been walking in circles with a puzzled look for less than a minute when a Polite Guy walked up behind me, silently sized me up, and then spoke, making me jump. "Who are you looking for, sir?" he asked.

I looked him over. The Polite Guy was calm, centered, bland, a bored yuppie -- unless you looked in his eyes. He was about as safe as a rattlesnake lying in the sun.

I explained that I was lost, and needed to find so-and-so's office.

"Oh, that's just down this hall. I'll be glad to show you." The Polite Guy was too well trained to take my arm, quite, but he stayed in easy reach all the way down the hall. He only relaxed once I was introduced to the co-worker I was looking for. My co-worker treated the Polite Guy like a piece of furniture, but he spared the Polite Guy a nod: yes, I know this guy. It's OK. "Have a good day, sir," said the Polite Guy, closing the door behind him.

If you walk aimlessly too close to Bill Gates' office, you too will likely meet a Polite Guy.

The map of the Middle East, notoriously, was created by and for European interests. The diplomats who carved up the land paid little or no attention to the cultural or ethnic boundaries of the people who lived there. The world has been paying the price for that short-sighted greed ever since.

There's a peculiar irony in a Western scholar redrawing that map - and in the Armed Forces Journal, no less. I'm still fascinated.

Here's the map today.

Here's what the revised map might look like, with a full discussion.

(via The Map Room)

An acquaintance of mine was in the room when they told Bill Gates that Judge Thomas Jackson had ruled against Microsoft in the late 90s anti-trust case, and had ordered the break-up of the company.

Gates was, by my friend's account, absolutely devastated. Not just angry: surprised. He hadn't known it was coming.

Everyone else at the company did. Gates' performance in a videotaped deposition had been so memorably off that David Boies, the prosecutor, had been routinely trotting out clips of the deposition whenever the trial started to get dull. Boies had been ripping at Microsoft senior executives for months. Judge Jackson, as he later admitted, had a personal loathing for Microsoft and Bill Gates, and was eagerly awaiting the chance to deliver a damaging verdict. Many senior executives sold off large chunks of Microsoft stock shortly before the verdict came down.

But Gates didn't know, says my friend. He had faith. And he didn't like hearing bad news, so nobody wanted to give it to him.

I got to thinking about this while reading Newsweek's coverage of the White House response to Katrina. By Newsweek's account, one of the reasons Bush responded so slowly to the ongoing Katrina aftermath was that he didn't know about it.

Bush, notoriously, doesn't pay attention to news coverage, preferring his information in digest form from his aides. Since Bush doesn't like bad news either, his aides (and the bureaucrats beneath them) all painted rosy pictures of how well the federal response was working. It was only when he met with officials on a visit to Louisiana that he understood how badly the response had broken down.

Yes-men can be flattering, but they're an insidious curse. It's devastating to me that so many people had to die to teach Bush what Gates already knew.