In his book, Fulbright offered an analysis of American foreign policy:

Throughout our history two strands have coexisted uneasily; a dominant strand of democratic humanism and a lesser but durable strand of intolerant Puritanism. There has been a tendency through the years for reason and moderation to prevail as long as things are going tolerably well or as long as our problems seem clear and finite and manageable. But… when some event or leader of opinion has aroused the people to a state of high emotion, our puritan spirit has tended to break through, leading us to look at the world through the distorting prism of a harsh and angry moralism.

Fulbright also related his opposition to any American tendencies to intervene in the affairs of other nations:

Power tends to confuse itself with virtue and a great nation is particularly susceptible to the idea that its power is a sign of God’s favor, conferring upon it a special responsibility for other nations – to make them richer and happier and wiser, to remake them, that is, in its own shining image. Power confuses itself with virtue and tends also to take itself for omnipotence. Once imbued with the idea of a mission, a great nation easily assumes that it has the means as well as the duty to do God’s work.

He was also a strong believer in international law:

Law is the essential foundation of stability and order both within societies and in international relations. As a conservative power, the United States has a vital interest in upholding and expanding the reign of law in international relations. Insofar as international law is observed, it provides us with stability and order and with a means of predicting the behavior of those with whom we have reciprocal legal obligations. When we violate the law ourselves, whatever short-term advantage may be gained, we are obviously encouraging others to violate the law; we thus encourage disorder and instability and thereby do incalculable damage to our own long-term interests.

I’ve had it for about two weeks now and have been using it during my trip to Germany.  The screen is excellent.  My main fear with the screen was that it would take too long to refresh.  I got this impression from many reviews of the Sony devices and the Kindle 1.  However, the Kindle 2′s screen refresh takes about a second, and once I thought about it, it takes no longer than it does to actually flip the page of a book.  I also think there is an inherit aesthetic value in the page flash and refresh.  When you flip a book page, your eyes are basically unfocused for a small amount of time, as there is no text for them to look at.  The screen flash and refresh produces the same effect, which I believe helps with eye fatigue. 

Getting books on the device is pretty easy.  I have only bought a couple of (free) books from the Kindle Store so far, which are automatically pulled down through Whispernet (but can also be downloaded from Amazon’s site and uploaded via USB).  I’ve also uploaded some ebooks I have in text and Mobipocket format which work fine.  Mobipocket format is nice because if the book is created correctly it will have a table of contents, something a plain text file lacks.  However for just getting the text itself, plain text files work fine because the Kindle reflows all the text anyway.  Mobipocket has a free program available, Mobipocket Reader, for converting PDFs and text to the mobi file format.  This seems to work ok, although I’ve had some issues getting the metadata (title and author) correct.  The Kindle 2 will use this if it’s there, else it uses the filename (e.g. for text files). 

Whispernet uses Sprint EVDO for access, which works fine for me.  There is a handy page for checking EVDO coverage as well.  The wireless can be turned off to save battery life and for airplane usage.

I have not used the built in web-browsing and Kindle Store access very much, and I doubt I will.  From what I’ve seen so far I haven’t been really impressed, plus the web browser takes a long time to start up.  Mobile web browsing is pretty much what my iPhone is for. 

On that topic, Amazon released a Kindle iPhone app recently, which I downloaded.  It works great – it can read the Amazon Kindle format, you can access the Kindle Store through it, and the app syncs itself with your Kindle (Amazon calls this Whispersync).  The app is free so anyone can download it – but it makes a great companion to the Kindle if you have an iPhone.

Overall, I am very impressed by the Kindle 2.  I’ve been using it on planes, in airports, in cars and at my hotel and it just works.  I’ve been using it to re-read the Honor Harrington saga starting from the beginning, and thanks to Baen Books releasing almost all the Honorverse books for free all I had to do was upload them to the Kindle.  I’ve already finished the first one and am plowing through the second very quickly and I’m sure I’ll use the Kindle to finish them all.