Rusted Sky

Unfortunately, CA and NV are a bit far to go at lunchtime.

The Hidden In-N-Out Burger (aka In and Out Burger) - The Most Accurate Secret Menu

Looks like it'd be worth the trip, though. (Drool.)

J.

Civil War in Iraq? Or no? To listen to the MSM, it's just days before the Sunnis and Shi'as grab their rifled muskets and minie balls and start formin' up behind their respective Grants and Shermans. But is that what's really going on? Apparently, opinions differ.

New York Post Online Edition: postopinion

NO WAR IN THE STREETS

By RALPH PETERS - In Iraq
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

March 1, 2006 -- THE reporting out of Baghdad continues to be hysterical and dishonest. There is no civil war in the streets. None. Period.

Terrorism, yes. Civil war, no. Clear enough?

Yesterday, I crisscrossed Baghdad, visiting communities on both banks of the Tigris and logging at least 25 miles on the streets. With the weekend curfew lifted, I saw traffic jams, booming business — and everyday life in abundance.

Yes, there were bombings yesterday. The terrorists won't give up on their dream of sectional strife, and know they can count on allies in the media as long as they keep the images of carnage coming. They'll keep on bombing. But Baghdad isn't London during the Blitz, and certainly not New York on 9/11.

It's more like a city suffering a minor, but deadly epidemic. As in an epidemic, no one knows who will be stricken. Rich or poor, soldier or civilian, Iraqi or foreigner. But life goes on. No one's fleeing the Black Death — or the plague of terror.

The bombing made headlines (and a news photographer just happened to be on the scene). Here in Baghdad, it just made the average Iraqis hate the terrorists even more.

You are being lied to. By elements in the media determined that Iraq must fail. Just give 'em the Bronx cheer.

One - will it hurt Bush? ("Calling Dan Rather! Your print job is ready!")

Two - will it help ratings?

As I've said before - good news doesn't sell. Blood and pain get people to tune into network news, so the emphasis on ANY news, whether it be the local evening news or international, is going to be on things that are painful to someone else. A fire, car wreck, shooting, death, accident - THOSE are the attention grabbers. Any good news is presented at the end of the newscast, in a 30 second clip that'll be eminently forgettable.

Reality, or the perception of it, is malleable - and when the MSM is willing to twist reality to fit their own scripts... how are they different from the Ministry of Truth in '1984'? A lot of folks like to accuse Bush of running a '1984' style scam with the media... but it looks a lot more like the media is running it on us.

J.

Don't mind selling your soul to Bill Gates? Then go to Mystery Solved, read the three bullet points on Windows's licensing and click on the Flash Drive picture to the right of the points titled 'Valuable Information'. Log in through the Microsoft .net passport process, and answer 4 questions.

(And if you didn't pay attention to the bullet points, the question answers are B, True, True, and True. At least, in the test I took.)

And they'll send you a flash drive with info. How big a drive? Who knows? And I realize I'm trading personal info for a cheap USB flash drive - but what the heck. I'm one of those rare people who had a legal copy of Windows 3.1, who upgraded ton Win95, then upgraded to Win98, then upgraded to XP Pro - legally. If I ever have to start from scratch with a new drive, I'm screwed - I have no idea where my Win 3.1 disks are. Or the Win 95 and Win98s...

Ah heck. Might as well buy a full copy of Vista when it comes out. I know Lockheed'll be shifting to that in about three or four years anyway... (We've gotten all the bugs out of all the apps we use with XP. Time to upgrade!)

J.

Switchable paint. At least, at cell-phone frequencies.

United Press International - NewsTrack - New paint blocks out cell phone signals

ROCHESTER, N.Y., March 1 (UPI) -- A Rochester, N.Y., company has developed paint that can switch between blocking cell phone signals and allowing them through.

"You could use this in a concert hall, allowing cell phones to work before the concert and during breaks, but shutting them down during the performance," said Michael Riedlinger, president of NaturalNano.

Using nanotechnology, particles of copper are inserted into nanotubes, which are ultra-tiny tubes that occur naturally in halloysite clay mined in Utah. Combined with a radio-filtering device that collects phone signals from outside a shielded space, certain transmissions can proceed while others are blocked, the Chicago Tribune reported.

J.

An IBM T-40. It'll take a while to get everything loaded on. Pls be patient....

J.

Not like most users who read this will care, but there's been some lost packets lately while using Vonage while also surfing. (If you find them, just send them this way - I'll pay the postage due.) I searched around, and apparently Linksys routers (possibly others as well) have a QoS (Quality Of Service) setting that you can fiddle with to give priority to certain ports and devices.

It took about five minutes of fiddling, but I got things set so the Vonage box has the highest priority on the connection bandwidth. Quality of service is now fine, even with two high-speed downloads going on at the same time.

And I look at the above and realize I couldn't have made heads or tails out of that twenty years ago. Must have picked up something along the way, eh?

J.

But judging from what I've seen and what friends have reported - they're not.

Is We Educating Our Children Good? - The New Editor

The last couple of days have seen a number of news reports that don't reflect very highly on the state of our nation's educational system.

However, it's not the case that a few aberrant stories have been reported in the last few days -- they are part of a long-term trend, and should be of major concern.

The fact is, the overwhelming evidence indicates that our nation's various public school systems are not only not delivering, they are in horrible shape.

40 years back, you could get a decent education - but not up to the standards of 60 years back. Now, we've got the little guy in a private school because the state we live in ranks #49th in the nation. And we moved so we'd have a fallback school that wasn't in the bottom third of the state. Now, I've got my own problems with math, but being in a school that ranks in the bottom third of the 49th state just doesn't inspire me with a great deal of confidence in the education the little guy would get there, ya know?

And before you say "Well, you should get involved with the schools and help them improve" - no. We pay our taxes to fund the schools. The school, WITHOUT OUR INPUT, should be putting out students educated to at LEAST a certain level.

That criteria isn't being met.

The teachers' unions have fought tooth and nail to avoid testing of the students, they've successfully fought to avoid competency testing for teachers. They're turning out a substandard product, so to speak, and by all appearances the vast majority of them just plain don't care.

And if they don't care enough about the work they do - I don't see it's my job to force them. Instead, we opt out - at significant expense and trouble.

And in fifty years, we'll have a stratified society. On one level - those who are condemned to malfunctioning public schools. On the other - those who's parents valued education, and went out of their way to make sure their children got the best education possible.

It makes no sense that it should be so - but what is apparent is that it's what the educational establishment in this country will settle for.

J.

I'm pushing this to the top - and I'm sorry I think it's necessary to. (I've also rewritten it some, just to be honest with you. I know - the moving finger, having writ, moves on and doesn't backtrack, all that jazz. Well, sometimes it's just necessary to do a rewrite.)

Let's be honest here - most of us get some inkling of what's going on in the world through broadcast media, whether it be radio or television. We depend on the news readers to give us at least slightly accurate and unbiased information, that's more or less relevant to what's actually going on in the world - but lately it sure seems like we're going more for a 'scandal du jour' type of reporting that I'm not at all happy with. If I want that sort of reporting, I can get it at the supermarket checkout. I mean, I REALLY need to know that it was actually a battle between flying saucers during the height of hurricane Katrina that caused the levees to fail.

So when I start seeing stuff like this:

Associated Press Pop-up Link

WASHINGTON (AP) -- In dramatic and sometimes agonizing terms, federal disaster officials warned President Bush and his homeland security chief before Hurricane Katrina struck that the storm could breach levees, put lives at risk in New Orleans' Superdome and overwhelm rescuers, according to confidential video footage.

So - Bush was being briefed on Katrina. And Bush was supposed to... do what?

FEMA had already been alerted, and was creeping into position. Nagin and What'shername were busily ignoring their disaster prep plans.

A top hurricane expert voiced "grave concerns" about the levees and then-Federal Emergency Management Agency chief Michael Brown told the president and Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff that he feared there weren't enough disaster teams to help evacuees at the Superdome.

"I'm concerned about ... their ability to respond to a catastrophe within a catastrophe," Brown told his bosses the afternoon before Katrina made landfall.

Will this change the outcome? No. Does this have anything that wasn't known months ago? Nope. Will this change the planning for the next disaster? Not too damn likely, IMHO. So why is this suddenly headline news?

Oh, wait. Civil war hasn't broken out in Iraq, and it's starting to become apparent. Looks like the economy's actually doing pretty well. So - let's drag out something on Katrina!

Sigh. They really do think people are stupid and gullible, don't they? That we're going to be uncritical consumers of whatever they want to feed us.

Update: Powerline weighs in, looking at what the AP reported versus what they released that they supposedly have. There wasn't much similarity between the two. The ending is as follows...

Power Line: More Leaks; This Time, Katrina

The AP article is fatally compromised by its factual errors, and adds nothing to our understanding of the issues surrounding Hurricane Katrina. It also raises an important point about the leaks that form the basis for many news stories these days. The AP took what appears to have been a substantial quantity of leaked material, and turned it into a brief against the Bush administration. Whether the documents themselves contain anything noteworthy, and whether, on balance, they support the AP's tendentious interpretation, is impossible to tell. (because THEY aren't releasing their source material - ed.) In view of the fact that no one trusts the AP, the New York Times and other news outlets who make use of leaked documents and other materials to report on them objectively, here is a modest proposal: let us see them. If the AP will release the leaked materials, the rest of us will quickly figure out what significance, if any, they have.

After all - why would the Ministry of Truth lie? That would be doubleplus ungood. Prolefeed is goodthink, no badthink allowed...

Update 2: Captain's Quarters has additional info.

Most news agencies have reported on the AP's tape of a meeting involving President Bush, Michael Brown, and a number of other FEMA officials and local and state politicians during Hurricane Katrina. In the tape, most of the reports claim, Bush specifically heard warnings about levees being breached. However, that's not what the tape shows, at least the portion aired by the AP and NBC on their broadcast last night (available at MS-NBC at the above link). What is does show is an expert saying to the group, "At this point, we don't know whether the levees will be overtopped or not."

As Dafydd ab Hugh at Big Lizards points out, breaching and overtopping are two very different events. Neither are particularly desirable, of course, but overtopping would result in the release of excess water from Lake Pontchatrain, while the breaches released an exponentially larger volume, resulting in far more devastation. No one in this clip mentions the word "breach" at all, and the breathless reporting at the AP winds up being highly misleading. It's used to indict the president, who later said that no one imagined that the levees would be breached -- and if this clip is as good as the media has, then apparently the president is right.

(Psst: A word to all those MSM 'journalists' who think this sort of 'reporting' is enhancing their credibility - Dan Rather tried this sort of stuff with Bush's records - and you might want to consider what that did to his career prospects and what he did to your entire industry. We depend on you reporting TRUTH - not spinning off half-baked conspiracy theory garbage about teh EvIl Shrub. If we want that - there's always the Weekly World News. Keep this up, and you'll be right down there with Bat Boy.)

J.

* - FYI: There's three general levels of security classification. 'Confidential', 'Secret', and 'Top Secret'. Generally, 'Confidential' info is stuff that might be harmful if leaked, 'Secret' is stuff that could be harmful, and 'Top Secret' is stuff that'd be decidedly harmful if leaked.

For example - 'Confidential' would be the info that plans for an armor-plated porta-potty are in the works, 'Secret' would be a deployment schedule with locations, times and dates, and 'Top Secret would be an analysis of the design and flaws thereof, including the info that (until such time as a retrofit task force can be implemented) the external door to the quick-acting toilet-paper replacement dispenser mechanism is actually made of two-ply S-fiberglass and is 1/10th of an inch thick instead of the specified 3/4th inch Chobham armor plate, thus creating a system vulnerability that could be exploited by any enemies. Current recommendations, to be implemented in Fiscal Year '09, in lieu of replacing the door (to be contracted out in Fiscal Year '10, with the first prototypes to be ready in '13 and full deployment in '17), is to paint it the same tan camoflage as the rest of the Armored Porta-potty, instead of leaving it the fluorescent red with a black center as it comes from the factory.

I hope this clears things up.

(And I just noticed that the Armored Porta-potty would have the initials AP. Whoops. Might be a bad example there...)

J.

If you've ever done any D&D, you'll enjoy these.

The Order of the Stick - by Rich Burlew

J.

Splash Back - get all of the globs off the screen by pumping them

Yep, something to fiddle with. Have fun.

J.

CNN - EX-CNN ANCHOR BROWN: "THE NEWS IN THIS COUNTRY IS A BUSINESS"

Former CNN anchor Aaron Brown has suggested that television viewers are responsible for the deterioration of broadcast news as much as the TV networks themselves. "In the perfect democracy that I believe TV news is, it's not enough to say you want serious news, you have to watch it," he told an audience in Medford, OR this week. As reported by the Medford Mail Tribune, Brown, speaking to a First Amendment forum, noted that while CNN was spending a fortune covering the 2004 tsunami, Fox News was channeling its resources into the missing teenager Natalee Holloway. The contest, he noted, was won hands down by Fox. The result, he suggested, was not lost on his former employer, CNN. "The news in this country is a business," he said. "You might not like to think of it that way, but it is." He suggested that television, instead of being diverted by scores of late-breaking trivial stories, ought to focus on the 6-10 "really important stories" that occur each day.

J.

Maybe it's just me - but I don't see the difference between overtopping the levee and breaching the levee as being a 'minor semantic quibble'. But the majority of the folks posting here don't seem to comprehend the difference.

Metafilter -- Bush wasn't lying after all..

Engineering terminology evolved to describe and specify certain conditions. I'm sorry, but if even I can tell the difference between the two words and find the difference very significant, I don't see how these folks are missing it. Unless they prefer to ignore that the two words mean very different things because it fits the ideology they prefer.

Reality doesn't care what your political persuasion is. Neither does engineering terminology. And one point that is very much missed is that 24-48 hours before Katrina hit, there wouldn't have been time to do ANYTHING to remedy decades of neglect and corruption when it came to the levee system.

J.

But is it too late?

Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | Timothy Garton Ash: We must stand up to the creeping tyranny of the group veto

It was a bright cold day in February, and the digital watches were blinking thirteen. Across the street from the concrete skeleton of a large building, a noisy crowd was repetitively chanting "Stop the Oxford animal lab! Stop the Oxford animal lab!" Just around the corner, at least 500 demonstrators, among them many Oxford university students, gave their vocal reply: "Stand up for science! Stand up for research! No more threats, no more fear! Animal research, wanted here!" A student wordsmith had obviously worked hard on the chants, which continued with "Pro-science! Pro-gress! Pro-test!". Then there crackled through an oldfashioned electronic megaphone the voices of Oxford academics, a doctoral student and, most movingly, the mother of a disabled child. They explained howprogress in medicine depends on carefully regulated animal tests and called on us to resist the "animal rights terrorists". A large banner held aloft in the middle of the crowd proclaimed "Vegetarians against the Alf". Alf stands for Animal Liberation Front, the extremist animal rights network which has attempted (sometimes violently, sometimes successfully) to intimidate universities into not doing research on animals.

Standing at the corner of Mansfield Road, I was proud of the demonstrators who were reminding my university what, at best, it is still about: the pursuit of truth and the defence of reason. Protests against student loans or higher rents - these we expect. But here were students turning out on a chilly Saturday morning to stand up for science.

.....

If someone says "the Nazis didn't kill so many Jews and had no plan for their systematic extermination", he is a distorter of history who deserves to be intellectually refuted and morally condemned, but not imprisoned. If, however, someone says "kill the Jews", or "kill the Muslims", or "kill the Americans", or "kill the animal experimenters", and points to particular groups of Jews, Muslims, Americans or animal experimenters, they should be met with the full rigour of the law. That's why, of all the recent high-profile cases where free speech has been at issue, that of the London-based hatepreacher Abu Hamza is the only one where I feel a criminal conviction was justified. Not because he was a Muslim rather than a Christian, a Jew or a secular European. No. Because he was guilty of incitement to murder. This is the line on which we must take our stand. Facing down intimidation, backed by the threat of violence, is the key to resisting the creeping tyranny of the group veto. Here there can be no compromise.

And that, I think, is what those students had instinctively understood when they turned out for a very English little demonstration on a bright, cold morning in Oxford. Orwell would have been proud of them.

Using rights of free speech to deny others theirs... isn't that what so many have warned us about over the years? Yet there's folks who wouldn't hesitate about denying the rights of others to speak freely.

J.

Let's see. There was a big flap about Valerie Plame, who outed her, when she was outed, and what effect her outing had. Then, there were people screaming for the heads of the folks who leaked her name... then it devolved down to a point where it looked like it could be her husband who leaked it and the media hared off in other directions.

But in the meantime, there've been some pretty severe leaks which DO affect the efforts of the WoT. These are legitimate (in that they're verifiable), definite leaks, which are very much illegal (as in against US Code) and require invesitgation.

White House Trains Efforts on Media Leaks

I'm sorry, but it doesn't work both ways here. Leaked info needs to be traced back to whoever leaked it - and that person needs to be prosecuted. You don't insist on one set of rules for cases like Valerie Plame's name being leaked to the press, and one set for things like the NSA intercepts. If leaking Valerie Plame's name was wrong and deserving of prosecution, then so was leaking the NSA info, and thus the prosecution of whoever leaked that is right and proper.

And over at "The Corner on National Review Online#091618"

Keller's own newspaper led the fight for the Valerie Wilson CIA leak investigation, cheering the appointment of a special prosecutor with powers that exceeded even the old independent counsels. And what happened? That special prosecutor went to the White House and got government sources to waive confidentiality restrictions on their talks with journalists. Then he went to journalists and said, "See? I've got these waivers. You can testify or you can go to jail." And then he sent one of them to jail and threatened others. And so far, at least, he hasn't found enough evidence to charge anyone with a national-security crime.

Too late, the Times and its allies realized that a terrible precedent had been set. Now some of them try to argue that the Wilson leak was an act of retribution, while the NSA and secret prisons leaks were the work of good-government whistleblowers, so one should be vigorously prosecuted while the others are ignored. It won't work. Leaks are leaks, and the NSA and secret prisons leaks were, by any estimation, far more damaging to national security than the Wilson leak. (In that case, the special prosecutor said in court recently that he did not intend to show that any damage occurred from the leak.)

So now there are more investigations going on. The Times and its supporters wanted this kind of thing. Now they've got it.

J.

AWST STORY

Speculation, anyone? (And this is the first I've ever heard of 'chipmunk cheek' C-5s, too.)

J.

Found these tonight - Stargate Sounds - maybe there's something there you'd like. That's sounds of special effects - if you're looking for others, check out the page here.

(My personal favorite quote is this one. I'm thinking of putting it in as a general error sound. And this one for mail.)

J.

We're getting close to the point where we have materials good enough to do something like this.

The Great Space Elevator - Gizmodo

There are startups and then there are startups. Web 2.0 is all fine and dandy and I love AJAX as much as the next person but let’s face it, as amazing as Flickr, del.icio.us and MeasureMap are, they and the rest of the new web apps combined and taken to the tenth power aren’t even half as sexy as the Space Elevator. The what? Business 2.0’s Georgia Flight explains:

In this case - I think so. We need a dream, a frontier of some sort. The promise of open horizons, of room to expand. And short of colonizing Antartica, there's no room left. (Admittedly, Antarctica is a sunny beach compared to the rest of the Solar System. But then again, there's the Hyperdrive supposedly in development...

All things considered - I'd rather see NASA throw money at space elevator ideas than redoing Apollo - and it'd be a real kick if this drive works, but it has to be outside 5 planetary diameters to function.

(Two points to whoever identifies the stories where the '5 planetary diameter' requirement was a continual plot point.) (Cripes. I just googled it. Too easy by far.)

J.

At least, in my humble opinion.

My Way News - S. Dakota Legislation to Ban Most Abortions

PIERRE, S.D. (AP) - Gov. Mike Rounds signed legislation Monday that would ban most abortions in South Dakota, a law he acknowledged would be tied up in court for years while the state challenges the 1973 U.S. Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion.

If something like this ever comes to a vote in Georgia, I'll be voting against it. This is a matter of personal choice, and should be left to the woman who is pregnant. Such an act may well be the best of a limited number of bad options (or at least, so she might think), and shouldn't be made unavailable to her by legislative fiat.

J.

The spammers have tried a new trick - and it worked for a little while.

The normal syntax for a hyperlink (which MT is configured to block from a lot of spam addresses) is (along with precursor info that I won't display, but if you know HTML, you know what it is) 'href="http://www.wherever.com" with a right arrow, the text you want displayed, then a '/a' appended.

You'll notice the ' 'href="http:' string. That signals that the next thing's a link. And MT flags on that. However, MT won't flag it if the string is ' 'href=http:', and stuffs it into comments without ANY hesitation at all. After all - no link, no foul, right?

I've had 10 of those pop up in the last hour, all missing the " mark in the crucial place. It's easily blocked - you just put the string ' 'href=http:' in as an example of what you want blocked, and that takes care of it. Or should - I'll let you know if it doesn't.

Blasted spammers. They're not legal prey, are they? You could classify them as vermin, I suppose...

J.

But in this case, I think they need to leave the covered dishes at home...

ABC News: EXCLUSIVE: Iraq Weapons -- Made in Iran?

March 6, 2006 — U.S. military and intelligence officials tell ABC News that they have caught shipments of deadly new bombs at the Iran-Iraq border.

They are a very nasty piece of business, capable of penetrating U.S. troops' strongest armor.

J.

Wow. Varga knew how to draw 'em big, didn't he?

(It's real big for a pinup.^*)

(^*Pins, nails, ropes, scaffolding, screws, glue - you name it, they likely needed it to get it up.¹)

(¹Except for Velcro. That hadn't been invented yet.²)

(²Neither had Viagra, but I digress.)

(SFW, BTW. It's historical.)

J.

Out in California there's a valley. In that valley, there's a runway, and a 'lake'. The 'lake' is dry, at least according to Google Earth, and it's called Carricut Lake. It's in the China Lake Naval Weapons Center range - and at the north end of that runway is something I can't quite identify.

36 02'56.83N 117 30'25.10W

Anyone got any guesses?

(Note - it's only visible in Google Earth. I think the Windows Live Local pic of that was taken earlier, judging by areas that haven't been cleared. And it's not there in the Terraserver.microsoft.com image of the same area - seeing that Windows Live Local uses the same database, that's not surprising...)

J.

Looks like this site might have a lot of good tips...

Free Money Finance

Enjoy!

J.

Hmm. Who knew? (PS - it's free.)

God's Debris

Frankly, this is the hardest book in the world to market. When it first came out in hardcover, booksellers couldn’t decide if it was fiction or nonfiction. Was it philosophy or religion? It’s a religion/science book written by a cartoonist, using hypnosis techniques in the writing. It’s a thought experiment. It’s unlike anything you’ve ever read. How do you sell something that can’t be explained?

Nonetheless, the hardcover version of God's Debris was a solid success. I lost count of how many people e-mailed me to say it was the best book they’ve ever read. By way of comparison, I’ve published over thirty Dilbert™ books, two of them number-one New York Times best-sellers, but I’ve never gotten the kind of excited responses that I did from readers of God's Debris.

It's... interesting. Enjoy!

J.

Jokes in English for the ESL/EFL Classroom - Riddles (I-TESL-J)

I'd better not let the little guy see these...

J.

In the small dead animals: Capitalist Piglet - Who's Suckling Whom? thread was an interesting comment. The argument's on capitalism vs socialism - and those who've lived under a socialist government in Saskatchewan don't seem too impressed with the idea. But one post was thought-provoking...

How come we never idealize capitalism. For centuries we have idealized the theory of socialism, and when it failed in practice we blamed falible mankind. But just for mo, fancy capitalism idealized. All children would be educated to the best of their ability, the better to serve the system. Medical treatment would be based on the profit motive but working on the margins that the market would impose. All would recieve treatment, for it is advatageous to the system not to waste human capital. Art would have to appeal to the public and not just an acredited elite. Those who fall through the cracks would recieve effective treatment based on theories that work as opposed to treatment which keeps them where they are, and provides employment for "social scientists". I could go on. The point is why is socialim the only path to a heaven on earth (not that I belive in such a thing)? Why can't we have a fanciful capitalism to counter the equally fanciful socialist ideal?

Just a thought.

Posted by: jason at March 8, 2006 01:02 PM

It's an interesting thought, isn't it? Makes you wonder what might have occured if Marx had been persuasive about Capitalism, instead of going all out for his modified feudal system. (Everything belongs to the Lord of the State, and you'll get what he thinks you need, and you'll give everything to the State or be sent somewhere unpleasant.) (Yes, I know that's not how Socialism/Communism is supposed to work. Sure seems to end up like that, however.)

And there was this towards the end...

I have lived in both provinces. Born and raised in Alberta, I moved to Saskatchewan in my mid twenties and have been in Saskatchewan for almost twenty years. I have seen both sides and Saskatchewan is failing from government interference, competition and controls.

Many people on this thread are very hard on "lefties". Those who feel that Saskatchewan is the right model for the future. Judge for yourself.
I have sent two sons to Alberta for education. One because we don't have the population to hold training for the trade anymore. The other because there were not enough spots avaiable in his area of choice.
The U of S and other institutions that continue to teach the wonders of socialisn are doing a disservice to the best and brightest in this province.

We could be so much more.

I am tired of being someones lab rat!

Posted by: Daniel at March 9, 2006 10:39 AM

J.

Just another step...

Sandia's Z machine exceeds two billion degrees Kelvin

ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. — Sandia’s Z machine has produced plasmas that exceed temperatures of 2 billion degrees Kelvin — hotter than the interiors of stars.

The unexpectedly hot output, if its cause were understood and harnessed, could eventually mean that smaller, less costly nuclear fusion plants would produce the same amount of energy as larger plants.

The phenomena also may explain how astrophysical entities like solar flares maintain their extreme temperatures.

The very high radiation output also creates new experimental environments to help validate computer codes responsible for maintaining a reliable nuclear weapons stockpile safely and securely — the principal mission of the Z facility.

“At first, we were disbelieving,” says Sandia project lead Chris Deeney. “We repeated the experiment many times to make sure we had a true result and not an ‘Ooops’!”

The results, recorded by spectrometers and confirmed by computer models created by John Apruzese and colleagues at Naval Research Laboratory, have held up over 14 months of additional tests.

Basically, at this point we're in a race between the advancement of science and our consumption of easily-produced energy. I'd feel a hell of a lot better if we hadn't turned away from nuclear power twenty, thirty years back.

Think of this as a SimCity/SimEarth sort of simulation. You start out with wood, find coal, then oil - then develop on to nuclear fission, then use the fission to bootstrap yourself to fusion - at which point you've won the game. You can jump a level (from wood, for example, to oil) but it takes a hell of a scientific leap to imagine the next level, then comprehend it, then develop it and implement it. And to get to the next level takes X amount of energy/research - but to jump a level takes X² amount. It's possible to do it from wood to oil, or from coal to nuclear, and even oil to fusion - but it always takes a minimum of X² to get there.

Oh, not that I think we'd run out - there's technologies to use oil shale and oil sands - but that's like six months of emergency cash put into a safe-deposit box. You don't tap into it unless you absolutely have to.

Thankfully, we're not at that point yet. We've got a few decades left of oil before we need fission on line - but it could be we're jumping a level here... or maybe hitting something completely unexpected.

Time will tell.

J.

CHairforce.com
Sit. Push Buttons. Mission complete!

Sounds like my civilian job...

Check out the videos under 'Fun' - especially the 'Falcon Love Song'. "The odds are good but the goods are odd"... that says it all!

J.

Or, why the NHS in Britain isn't living up to the designed function.

Guardian Unlimited Politics | Special Reports | Simon Hoggart's sketch

Every month Patricia Hewitt, the health secretary, arrives at the House of Commons and tries to explain that the NHS is not crumbling to bits - it only looks that way.

Every month, MPs - not all from the opposition - tell her about cancelled operations, closed wards, unpaid contractors, inflated administration, huge overspending, the resignation of the chief executive and yesterday, dentists who are paid £80,000 a year but can't get round to seeing NHS patients.

I wouldn't be surprised to see it dismantled. The Brits are pretty patient and long-suffering - but that patience does have limits.

J.

Goodbye, you sorry waste of oxygen.

Milosevic found dead in prison cell - Europe - MSNBC.com

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands - Slobodan Milosevic, the former Yugoslav leader who orchestrated the Balkan wars of the 1990s and was on trial for war crimes, was found dead in his prison cell near The Hague, the U.N. tribunal said Saturday.

Milosevic, 64, apparently died of natural causes, a tribunal press officer said. He was found dead in his bed at the U.N. detention center.

The world is a bit brighter today.

J.

Or, study insurgency as Al Quaeda and Zarqawi do it, and do the exact opposite.

By targeting the people who nominally supported their efforts in Iraq when they started questioning what they saw as Al Quaeda trying to take over everything, apparently the Sunnis got on Z-man's shit list, turning them into fair targets.

But instead of this having the desired effect, which was (apparently) to make the Sunnis understand that they should let Al Quaeda control everything because, well, they were Al Quaeda and therefore holier (and more deserving to run things, I guess) it's really pissed off the Iraqi insurgents.

And Al Quaeda's worn out their welcome.

Telegraph | News | Sunni insurgents 'have al-Zarqawi running for cover'

Insurgent groups in one of Iraq's most violent provinces claim that they have purged the region of three quarters of al-Qa'eda's supporters after forming an alliance to force out the foreign fighters.

If true, it would mark a significant victory in the fight against Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the head of al-Qa'eda in Iraq, and could partly explain the considerable drop in suicide bombings in Iraq recently.

Al Quaeda's getting to the point where they badly need the presence of the 'infidel occupier' to justify their existence. Without them, they have no justification for forcing others in Iraq to do their bidding, aside from a shakey theology, and they're finding that Iraqi nationalism is starting to build and become thicker than the Islamic factionalism they've been expoliting.

The claims were partly supported by the defence ministry, which said it had evidence that Zarqawi and his followers were fleeing Anbar to cities and mountains near the Iranian border.

It is this move that is believed to have prompted a statement a fortnight ago from the insurgent groups in the central city of Hawija that they were declaring war on al-Qae'da. It is being interpreted by intelligence experts as a response to an unwanted influx of foreign fighters seeking refuge. Iraq's Sunni Muslim insurgents had originally welcomed al-Qa'eda into the country, seeing it as a powerful ally in its fight against the American occupation.

But relations became strained when insurgents supported calls for Sunnis to vote in last December's election, a move they saw as essential to break the Shia hold on government but which al-Qa'eda viewed as a form of collaboration. It became an outright split when a wave of bombings killed scores of people in Anbar resulting in a spate of tit-for-tat killings.

In reaction, the insurgent groups formed their own anti-al-Qa'eda militia, the Anbar Revolutionaries. The group has a core membership of 100 people, all of whom had relatives killed by al-Qa'eda. It is led by Ahmed Ftaikhan, a former Saddam-era military intelligence officer.

It claims to have killed 20 foreign fighters and 33 Iraqi sympathisers. Many more are said to have fled. The United States has confirmed that six of Zarqawi's deputies were killed in Ramadi.

Osama al-Jadaan, a tribal chief, has claimed that with the support of the Iraqi army his supporters have captured hundreds of foreign fighters, and has sought to prevent jihadis entering the country from Syria.

Sucks to be Al Quaeda these days... but you won't find any sympathy for the bastards here.

Update: Especially after stuff like THIS...

Attacks kill at least 44 in Iraq - Conflict in Iraq - MSNBC.com

BAGHDAD, Iraq - The feared resumption of mass sectarian violence erupted Sunday in a Baghdad Shiite slum when bombers blew apart two markets shortly before sundown, killing at least 44 people and wounding about 200.

The bloody assaults on Sadr City came only minutes after Iraqi political leaders said the new parliament will convene Thursday, three days earlier than planned, as the U.S. ambassador pushed to break a stalemate over naming a unity government.

The attackers struck with car bombs, including a suicide driver, and mortars at the peak shopping time, destroying dozens of market stalls and vehicles as the explosives ripped through the poor neighborhood as residents were buying food for their evening meals.

J.

For instance, this service....

Ship 'n' Shred : Home Paper Shredder and Office Document Shredding Service

I get between 5 and 15 credit card applications a week, and have been ripping the things up and throwing them away.

We now have a shredder next to the kitchen trash can.

J.

Let's face it. Terrorists, by definition, want to create terror - and thus influence the thinking of a group or country to do what they want, that the country wouldn't particularly care to do if they had a choice. So this is an indication that the expected result didn't exactly materialize after a spate of bombings.

Gateway Pundit: Terrorist Plan Spoiled as Indian Hindus & Muslims Join in Protest

Hindu and Muslim women shout slogans during a rally against Tuesday's string of bomb explosions that killed 20 people at a temple and train station in Varanasi, India, Saturday, March 11, 2006. About 150 Hindu and Muslim residents marched Saturday through the streets of Varanasi, a city fames for its shrines on the banks of the River Ganges, shouting slogans against terrorism and urging Pakistan to foster friendship with India. (AP Photo/Rajesh Kumar Singh)

Terrorist attempts to divide the Varanasi and create communal havoc in the Hindu Holy City and beyond seems to have failed:

Not only did the people foil the nefarious designs of the terrorists but they also snubbed the political leaders who tried to gain political mileage out of the situation.

Leading citizens, intellectuals, businessmen, youth activists, social workers and cultural bodies organised a number of peace marches, meetings and candlelight processions to drive home the message of communal harmony and unity. Mahant Bhawani Nandan, chief of the Haathiyaram Math, has taken the lead in organising prayers for those killed in the blasts.

J.

With the occasional interesting bit...

Tapes reveal WMD plans by Saddam?-?Nation/Politics?-?The Washington Times, America's Newspaper

Audiotapes of Saddam Hussein and his aides underscore the Bush administration's argument that Baghdad was determined to rebuild its arsenal of weapons of mass destruction once the international community had tired of inspections and left the Iraqi dictator alone.

In addition to the captured tapes, U.S. officials are analyzing thousands of pages of newly translated Iraqi documents that tell of Saddam seeking uranium from Africa in the mid-1990s.

Me, I'm still interested in the reports of drums of 'insecticide' being found in armories...

J.

Tom Fox went to protest, and protect - in a pacifist manner - the Iraqi people from the US.

So he gets snatched by the insurgents, tortured, and killed. He exposed himself to his enemies, trusting that his pacifism would protect him. So ends a would-be Ghandi, tortured, shot, and dumped by railroad tracks. I can't say it much better than what follows.

the will to exist - a blog about life

Well, the end result was torture, injury and death, but it was you that got dehumanized by the enemy, Tom. It wasn’t U.S. troops who dehumanized you. It was evil Iraqis with the same mindset that has existed in this part of the world for a millenium, a mindset that isn’t compatible with modern notions about human dignity and the value of an individual human being. The same mindset is responsible for the lack of progress in building infrastructure and bringing Iraqis basic services. The same mindset is what forces U.S. troops to suspect everybody and “dehumanize” Iraqis. This is war, and it continues because of the mindset of fundamentalists who are theologically motivated, not because American soldiers like fighting and killing. Generally speaking, most of us would rather be at home enjoying whatever it is we love about being American.

To the Christian Peacemakers, I would say - you are misguided. Iraq does not produce the kind of enemies Ghandi fought. Ghandi’s non-violence worked because his enemies had a conscience. His enemies believed in human dignity and fairness. The insurgency in Iraq doesn’t give a shit about those things, to be quite frank. These are people who will sell their own mother to the devil if they think it will get them something they covet in return.

Tom lasted as long as he did because he had value to the people who snatched him. When that value was gone - so was Tom.

RIP, man. You didn't do anything to make the situation better, but at least you gave the Jihadis some thrills while they tortured and killed you. And maybe, at the end, you realized that rolling over and baring your throat to the wolf that wants to kill you doesn't earn you respect or safety.

I wonder sometimes if the folks who, as pacifists, go to places like this with a near certainty of being killed aren't indulging in a convoluted deathwish. It's certainly a somewhat suicidal action, no matter how you try to pretty it up.

"We mourn the loss of Tom Fox, who combined a lightness of spirit, a firm opposition to all oppression, and the recognition of God in everyone," Doug Pritchard and Carol Rose, co-directors of Chicago-based Christian Peacemaker Teams, said in a statement.

When they went to Iraq pre-war, it was with the intent to protect 'the Iraqi people'. However, there's no record of them trying to protect the Iraqi people from Saddam or his goons. I guess even they realized that pacifism wouldn't be protection from that regime, and that all they'd be would be entertainment for the torturers.

I can't say I fault their idealism - but again, I think that idealism should have been tempered with the knowledge that the people they're trying to 'protect' would kill them in a heartbeat if they saw an advantage to it... or if simply they got tired of holding one of these people as a hostage.

Sorry - pacifism against a group that will kill you is a sure way to get your numbers reduced to an ineffective level, not that pacifism is very effective against people who kill without hesitation in the first place. All it does is make you an easier target for people who literally want you dead.

J.

Is McDonald's building in Iraq yet?

Michael J. Totten: The Last Village in Iraq

What do you think? I asked him. Should Iraqi Kurdistan declare independence?

“If the West stands with us, we want independence for all the Kurds in the world. We are one people. Kurds in Turkey, Syria, and Iran, are exactly like us.”

I wanted to know: What’s the one best thing the West can do for the Kurds? He told me the same old answer that has been bouncing around in this part of the world for decades:

“We want Kurdistan to be the 51st American state.”

Wouldn't THAT piss off the Islamists... not to mention the mullocracy in Iran and various other groups that don't want to see democracy or freedom in that area.

J.

WorldNetDaily: Clooney uses F-word to thrash Democrats

Taking aim at leading Democrats, Clooney writes, "The fear of been criticized can be paralyzing. Just look at the way so many Democrats caved in the run up to the war. In 2003, a lot of us were saying, where is the link between Saddam and bin Laden? What does Iraq have to do with 9-11? We knew it was bulls---. Which is why it drives me crazy to hear all these Democrats saying, 'We were misled.' It makes me want to shout, 'F--- you'; you weren't misled. You were afraid of being called unpatriotic."

The actor says Americans need to united and find things on which to agree.

So here we have someone giving his thoughts, someone who creates his living out of the ability to be someone he isn't, who depends on scriptwriters to make him look intelligent, who is surrounded by a culture which has elevated the coddling and cosseting of celebrities to high art while absolving them of any responsibility for their actions and opinions, saying people need to agree on things. (Said 'things', apparently, to include validating his opinions and feelings so he doesn't have to do more than come out with the 'f-word' to express himself.)

And I contrast this 'star' with stars in the past like Jimmy Stewart and Clark Gable... People who actually did things (the two actors mentioned were both in the Army Air Corps in WW2) instead of faking their way through life. (Well, I can't exactly criticise faking your way through life - that's what I've done with computers for the last 20+ years. Talked my way into the first computer job, and have been faking it ever since - but I don't just act like I'm fixing the problems, when I get done the problem's solved.)

And I'm not saying he's not intelligent - a quick look at his bio on Wiki shows he's not stupid by any stretch of the imagination.

But when you're immersed in a culture which takes image for substance, which constantly alters what's perceived as reality to make a good story, in which you KNOW that the vast majority of what you're seeing isn't real but an artfully crafted illusion - and you actively participate in the making of those illusions and that culture - it just seems a bit odd that he should be calling for people to 'agree on things'... when it would seem that quite a few of them already HAVE.

Then, there's this bit from OpinionJournal - Peggy Noonan

Which gets us to George Clooney, and his work. George Clooney is Hollywood now. He is charming and beautiful and cool, but he is not Orson Welles. I know that's like saying of an artist that he's no Rembrandt, but bear with me because I have a point that I think is worth making.

Orson Welles was an artist. George Clooney is a fellow who read an article and now wants to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.

More important, Orson Welles had a canny respect for the audience while maintaining a difficult relationship with studio executives, whom he approached as if they were his intellectual and artistic inferiors. George Clooney has a canny respect for the Hollywood establishment, for its executives and agents, and treats his audience as if it were composed of his intellectual and artistic inferiors. (He is not alone in this. He is only this year's example.)

And because they are his inferiors, he must teach them. He must teach them about racial tolerance and speaking truth to power, etc. He must teach them to be brave. And so in his acceptance speech for best supporting actor the other night he instructed the audience about Hollywood's courage in making movies about AIDS, and recognizing the work of Hattie McDaniel with an Oscar.

Was his speech wholly without merit? No. It was a response and not an attack, and it appears to have been impromptu. Mr. Clooney presumably didn't know Jon Stewart would tease the audience for being out of touch, and he wanted to argue that out of touch isn't all bad. Fair enough. It is hard to think on your feet in front of 38 million people, and most of his critics will never try it or have to. (This is a problem with modern media: Only the doer understands the degree of difficulty.)

But Mr. Clooney's remarks were also part of the tinniness of the age, and of modern Hollywood. I don't think he was being disingenuous in suggesting he was himself somewhat heroic. He doesn't even know he's not heroic. He thinks making a movie in 2005 that said McCarthyism was bad is heroic. (ed. - McCarthy was right in that there WERE a lot of Communists - but he was also a publicity seeking moron who didn't do the US any good at all. And 50+ years later, with the collapse of the USSR and China modifying THEIR Communist tendencies, something about him really hits the "Eh, so what?" button for pretty much everyone outside of Hollywood... )

How could he think this? Maybe part of the answer is in this: The Clooney generation in Hollywood is not writing and directing movies about life as if they've experienced it, with all its mysteries and complexity and variety. In an odd way they haven't experienced life; they've experienced media. Their films seem more an elaboration and meditation on media than an elaboration and meditation on life. This is how he could take such an unnuanced, unsophisticated, unknowing gloss on the 1950s and the McCarthy era. He just absorbed media about it. And that media itself came from certain assumptions and understandings, and myths.

Most Americans aren't leading media, they're leading lives. It would be nice to see a new respect in Hollywood for the lives they live. It would be nice to see them start to understand that rediscovering the work of, say, C.S. Lewis, and making a Narnia film, is not "giving in" to the audience but serving it. It isn't bad to look for and present good material that is known to have a following. It's a smart thing to do. It's why David O. Selznick bought "Gone With the Wind": People were reading it. It was his decision to make it into a movie from which he would profit that gave Hattie McDaniel her great role. Taboos are broken by markets, not poses.

And judging from the numbers (over at Boxofficemojo) there's enough people who feel the same way that the influence of Hollywood's kind of dropping... and dropping fast. (If you get to $50 mil in the theaters, it's pretty much considered a blockbuster movie. When did the bar get moved so low?)

Hollywood exists because the studios and stars produce entertainment that people want to see, not lectures that they don't. The falling revenues would be enough to convince other business types that they might be going down the wrong path with regards to customer service - but it doesn't seem like it with Hollywood.

J.

Hmmm. Maybe...

RealClearPolitics - Articles - Myths of Iraq

During a recent visit to Baghdad, I saw an enormous failure. On the part of our media. The reality in the streets, day after day, bore little resemblance to the sensational claims of civil war and disaster in the headlines.

No one with first-hand experience of Iraq would claim the country's in rosy condition, but the situation on the ground is considerably more promising than the American public has been led to believe. Lurid exaggerations and instant myths obscure real, if difficult, progress.
I left Baghdad more optimistic than I was before this visit. While cynicism, political bias and the pressure of a 24/7 news cycle accelerate a race to the bottom in reporting, there are good reasons to be soberly hopeful about Iraq's future.

But the foreign media have become a destructive factor, extrapolating daily crises from minor incidents. Part of this is ignorance. Some of it is willful. None of it is helpful.

The dangerous nature of journalism in Iraq has created a new phenomenon, the all-powerful local stringer. Unwilling to stray too far from secure facilities and their bodyguards, reporters rely heavily on Iraqi assistance in gathering news. And Iraqi stringers, some of whom have their own political agendas, long ago figured out that Americans prefer bad news to good news. The Iraqi leg-men earn blood money for unbalanced, often-hysterical claims, while the Journalism 101 rule of seeking confirmation from a second source has been discarded in the pathetic race for headlines.

To enhance their own indispensability, Iraqi stringers exaggerate the danger to Western journalists (which is real enough, but need not paralyze a determined reporter). Dependence on the unverified reports of local hires has become the dirty secret of semi-celebrity journalism in Iraq as Western journalists succumb to a version of Stockholm Syndrome in which they convince themselves that their Iraqi sources and stringers are exceptions to every failing and foible in the Middle East. The mindset resembles the old colonialist conviction that, while other "boys" might lie and steal, our house-boy's a faithful servant.

The result is that we're being told what Iraqi stringers know they can sell and what distant editors crave, not what's actually happening.

That the emphasis on blood doesn't do Iraq any good doesn't matter.

J.

When your regiem is on the ropes, you grab for straws. Any straw.

Foreign Affairs - Saddam's Delusions: The View from the Inside - Kevin Woods, James Lacey, and Williamson Murray

When it came to weapons of mass destruction (WMD), Saddam attempted to convince one audience that they were gone while simultaneously convincing another that Iraq still had them. Coming clean about WMD and using full compliance with inspections to escape from sanctions would have been his best course of action for the long run. Saddam, however, found it impossible to abandon the illusion of having WMD, especially since it played so well in the Arab world.

Ali Hassan al-Majid, known as "Chemical Ali" for his use of chemical weapons on Kurdish civilians in 1987, was convinced Iraq no longer possessed WMD but claims that many within Iraq's ruling circle never stopped believing that the weapons still existed. Even at the highest echelons of the regime, when it came to WMD there was always some element of doubt about the truth. According to Chemical Ali, Saddam was asked about the weapons during a meeting with members of the Revolutionary Command Council. He replied that Iraq did not have WMD but flatly rejected a suggestion that the regime remove all doubts to the contrary, going on to explain that such a declaration might encourage the Israelis to attack. [See Footnote #1 below]

Ironically, it now appears that some of the actions resulting from Saddam's new policy of cooperation actually helped solidify the coalition's case for war. Over the years, Western intelligence services had obtained many internal Iraqi communications, among them a 1996 memorandum from the director of the Iraqi Intelligence Service directing all subordinates to "insure that there is no equipment, materials, research, studies, or books related to manufacturing of the prohibited weapons (chemical, biological, nuclear, and missiles) in your site." And when UN inspectors went to these research and storage locations, they inevitably discovered lingering evidence of WMD-related programs.

In 2002, therefore, when the United States intercepted a message between two Iraqi Republican Guard Corps commanders discussing the removal of the words "nerve agents" from "the wireless instructions," or learned of instructions to "search the area surrounding the headquarters camp and [the unit] for any chemical agents, make sure the area is free of chemical containers, and write a report on it," U.S. analysts viewed this information through the prism of a decade of prior deceit. They had no way of knowing that this time the information reflected the regime's attempt to ensure it was in compliance with UN resolutions.

In the end, he severely screwed up by trying to play both sides. The rest of the article... wow. He gutted his military leadership in a coup-proofing maneuver, the army was undertrained and underequipped - all in all it almost looks like a comic farce.

A close associate once described Saddam as a deep thinker who lay awake at night pondering problems at length before inspiration came to him in dreams. These dreams became dictates the next morning, and invariably all those around Saddam would praise his great intuition. Questioning his dictates brought great personal risk. Often, the dictator would make a show of consulting small groups of family members and longtime advisers, although his record even here is erratic. All of the evidence demonstrates that he made his most fateful decisions in isolation. He decided to invade Iran, for example, without any consultation with his advisers and while he was visiting a vacation resort. He made the equally fateful decision to invade Kuwait after discussing it with only his son-in-law.

In a wide-ranging discussion with his closest advisers in the fall of 1990, Saddam provided an insight into his "unique" abilities:

"America is a complicated country. Understanding it requires a politician's alertness that is beyond the intelligence community. Actually, I forbade the intelligence outfits from deducing from press and political analysis anything about America. I told them that [this] was not their specialty, because these organizations, when they are unable to find hard facts, start deducing from newspapers, which is what I already know. I said I don't want either intelligence organization [the Iraqi Intelligence Service or the General Military Intelligence Directorate] to give me analysis -- that is my specialty. . . . We agree to continue on that basis . . . which is what I used with the Iranians, some of it out of deduction and some of it through invention and connecting the dots, all without having hard evidence".

After 1991, Saddam's confidence in his military commanders steadily eroded, while his confidence in his own abilities as a military genius strengthened. Like a number of other despots in history who dabbled in military affairs, Saddam began to issue a seemingly endless stream of banal instructions. He could not resist giving detailed training guidance.

Dozens of surviving memoranda echo the style and content of a 2002 top-secret document titled "Training Guidance to the Republican Guard." These documents all hint at the kind of guidance military officers received from Saddam on a regular basis. One chapter of the "training guidance" document, called "Notes and Directions Given by Saddam Hussein to His Elite Soldiers to Cover the Tactics of War," charged officers to do the following: "Train in a way that allows you to defeat your enemy; train all units' members in swimming; train your soldiers to climb palm trees so that they may use these places for navigation and sniper shooting; and train on smart weapons."

Little evidence exists that any of the politicized Iraqi generals understood the advantages in maneuverability, speed, command and control, or training that the U.S. forces enjoyed. By the time the military was ready to brief Saddam on the lessons of the Persian Gulf War, however, they did fully understand the danger of presenting him with claims other than those he already believed. Truthful analyses therefore gave way to belittlement of the U.S. victory and denials that the United States had any advantage over Iraq other than in military technology. One comment made by an Iraqi general during a mid-1990s conference was typical: "After the liberation of our land in Kuwait, and despite the fact that more than 30 countries headed by the occupation forces of the U.S. rushed madly upon our Republican Guard, our performance was heroic."

Read the whole thing. It's amazing.

J.

From... the GUARDIAN of all places? Wow.

Guardian Unlimited | Guardian daily comment | We were right to invade Iraq

The failures of the occupation are legion: delayed elections, inadequate security, eroding infrastructure, complacency over the tortures at Abu Ghraib, and a heavy death toll among Iraqi civilians and our troops. But had we allowed Saddam's regime to persist, in defiance of its obligations under 17 UN security council resolutions, the consequences would have been an unalloyed catastrophe. The Uday-Qusay dynasty would have ensured further extreme oppression, unless and until the regime collapsed in chaos. It is a fine judgment whether a rogue state or a failed state, prey to the barbarities that jihadists are trying to inflict on Iraq now but without hindrance, would have been the worse prospect. The notion that terrorism has been brought to Iraq uniquely by the west's overthrow of Saddam, who bankrolled it and was the most likely conduit for Islamist groups to obtain WMD, is astonishingly ahistorical.
Against those disastrous scenarios, there are clear advances. We no longer have to bear one major risk: a psychopathic despot overcoming a porous sanctions regime, and using oil sales to pay fo