Cuz We Said So

Gizmodo's iPhone Verdict

 "Wait a Little While."  Since that's what I was planning to do anyway, this aligns nicely with my personal confirmation bias.

Weird She Didn't Have a Name Before She Was Elected

India Names First Female President...

Global Warming

On Mars.

Apparently, so much CO2 is being produced on Earth that some of it is leaking to Mars and triggering global warming of that planet as well.

The article also makes another interesting point:

"It is no secret that increased solar irradiance warms Earth's oceans, which then triggers the emission of large amounts of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. So the common view that man's industrial activity is a deciding factor in global warming has emerged from a misinterpretation of cause and effect relations."

I'm no global warming denier - I just think there is a lot of reasonable doubt.  And the politicization of the issue - complete with a campaign to stifle dissent - is appalling.

How can it be that in 1975 we got it so totally wrong... and now we have it absolutely and unquestionably right?

I'm inclined to side with former Secretary of Energy James Schlesinger (from WaPo):

What has concerned me in recent years is that belief in the greenhouse effect, persuasive as it is, has been transmuted into the dominant forcing mechanism affecting climate change -- more or less to the exclusion of other forcing mechanisms. The CO 2 /climate-change    relationship has hardened into orthodoxy -- always a worrisome sign -- an orthodoxy that searches out heretics and seeks to punish them.

Ominously, Schlesinger wrote this well before the resease of the popular propaganda flick "An Inconvenient Truth."

He also points out better than I can:

In the Third Assessment by the International Panel on Climate Change, recent climate change is attributed primarily to human causes, with the usual caveats regarding uncertainties. The record of the past 150 years is scanned, and three forcing mechanisms are highlighted: anthropogenic (human-caused) greenhouse gases, volcanoes and the 11-year sunspot cycle. Other phenomena are represented poorly, if at all, and generally are ignored in these models. Because only the past 150 years are captured, the vast swings of the previous thousand years are not analyzed. The upshot is that any natural variations, other than volcanic eruptions, are overshadowed by anthropogenic greenhouse gases.

Most significant: The possibility of long-term cycles in solar activity is neglected because there is a scarcity of direct measurement. Nonetheless, solar irradiance and its variation seem highly likely to be a principal cause of long-term climatic change. Their role in longer-term weather cycles needs to be better understood.

Well, yeah.

Who is the Enemy of the Muslim?

We in the US know full well that the United States is not the enemy of the Muslim, though many Muslims might believe it is.

The US has no beef with Islam per se.  Nor do we wish to own or control or even establish a lasting presence in the Middle East.  While the flow of oil from the region may be vital to our national interests, we make no claim to it, the land it comes from, or the people who control the land.  All we want is a trading partner whom we can enrich by buying what God has seen fit to bless them with, and the security of knowing that the wealth isn't being used to train people to fly planes into our skyscrapers.  I would say that makes us a partner, not an enemy.

And we also know that Israel is not the enemy of the Muslim, although Islamist propaganda would have us believe it is.  Perhaps there is a legitimate complaint to be made on behalf of the former residents of the current state of Israel who are now marginalized, but this is less than 1% of the world's Muslim population.  We all know that Israel, whatever its ambitions, has no desire to enlarge its borders or subjugate Muslims generally.  There may be a local territorial dispute, but Israel is not the enemy of the Muslim (or even of the Palestenian, really).

And so it is with the Hindus and the Buddhists and the Kurds.  None of these groups are de facto anti-Muslim.  We all know that.

So who is the enemy of the Muslim?

I posit that it is the Muslim who is the enemy of the Muslim.  Specifically, the Islamists are the enemy of the rest of the Muslim population.  These people have hijacked a religion and turned it into a political ideology.

This is not a new view - but it is one which is often forgotten.  It is the fundamental cause of the overwhelming number of conflicts in the world today.  Until it is addressed, the conflicts will continue even if the US "wins" in or pulls out of Iraq, even if we capture Osama bin Laden, even if the Israelis pack up and move to Miami, and even if India retreats all the way to Bhopal.  Those are symptoms.  Islamism is the cause.

The question shouldn't be "how best to treat the symptoms."  It should be "how best to address the cause."

Christianity once had its own brand of Christian political radicalism, and it, like Islamism, was defective.  And I further posit that, like Christian political radicalism, Islamism will have to be contained from outside (primarily through military confrontation), but can only be defeated from the inside (through civil war).  There can be no other solution.  Like those of us of Euro-Christian descent, the Muslims must internalize this on their own.

If you can agree with my reasoning, then I think we must also agree with the comment by Rob Mandel to the thought-provoking post David linked to below (if you follow the link, it's comment #5).  While I would prefer to see the region wake up from its deep soul-sleep, I fundamentally believe that Islam (the religion) must somehow reclaim itself from Islamism (the political movement).  Until this happens, there will be no lasting peace in the Islamic world or anywhere it touches.

Mark Humphreys has an insightful analysis in which he reaches an opposite conclusion: that Islamism can only be fought by an overwhelming total war.  I admire his analysis (and his well-researched site in general, read it if you haven't already).  But I disagree with his conclusion.  Islamism is fundamentally ideological.  Destroying a state, capturing a territory, or killing people won't kill the idea.  People just have to decide it's a defective idea.

And so, we shouldn't fear a Muslim civil war.  In fact, we should welcome it.  For until it happens, the world just gets more and more dangerous.

VP Cheney Temporarily In Charge, Invades Iran

Vice Preseident Dick Cheney will temporarily be given executive control of the nation on Saturday while President Bush undergoes a routine colonoscopy.

His first action as temporary executive will be to invade Iran.

At least, that's what I'd do.

Stormy Weather

On Mars.

Seven Iraq Exit Scenarios

Courtesy of Austin Bay.  One of them I like.

Will This Make it Harder to Tell Which Corey is Which?

For those people that even remember who they are, I mean?   Corey Haim and Corey Feldman are getting their own reality show. 

Echolocation in Armenia

My friend Dan has taken his expertise in echolocation to Armenia; Via ArmeniaNow.com:

Daniel Kish, who is totally blind, walks freely along Yerevan’s bumpy and unfamiliar streets, feeling the sidewalks full of holes with his walking stick and occasionally clattering with his mouth to get the sense of what is surrounding him, to measure the distance of trees and columns from him, to understand whether he is surrounded by buildings or an open space.

He has developed a new method of sound signals due to which, as he himself says, he can see with his ears, understand through sound and its echo what is there in the place, just like bats do. 

...Kish, 41, of the United States, who was nicknamed Batman, came to Yerevan to show opportunities for the local blind to move freely and live independently. 

“World Access for the Blind” (www.worldaccessfortheblind.org) NGO Executive Director Daniel Kish had come to Armenia through the Armenian Eye Care Project, which will later organize trainings in Kish’s echolocation in Armenia.

Somebody's Knocking On the Door

Dodge this :

Raytheon's innovative satellite-guided 155mm artillery shell was used in operations in Iraq last weekend to kill a top local al Qaeda leader south of Baghdad. 

...The two-shell salvo fired by Soldiers from the Army's 1st Battalion, 9th Field Artillery Regiment is particularly significant because it could mean the re-emergence of field artillery as a viable weapon in the highly restrictive combat environment of an urban counterinsurgency. ...In combat testing before deployment, the weapon demonstrated accuracy within 20 feet (6 meters) of its target, a precision designed to minimize civilian casualties and accidental U.S. military deaths in a war that is increasingly urban....

That accuracy is after a 24 to 35 mile flight.  Pretty impressive.