CapitalistImperialistPig

UPDATE: Doug has launched a vigorous attack on this post, and there is a real chance that the Pig may dine on crow on this one. To be Determined. Not to worry that we haven't had an NHL season this year, we still have one guy willing to play the thuggish hockey bully. Joe Barton, U. S. Representative from Texas, and Chairman of the House Energy and Commerce Committee is our man. Those who follow such things may recall some controversy over the so-called 'hockey stick' graph in climate science. Briefly, the hockey stick is a graph of world wide temperatures over the past 1000 years that looks a bit like a hockey stick, more or less flat for a long period, and bending sharply up (like the blade of a hockey stick) over the last several decades. The controversy, or rather pseudo-controversy, arises from an article by Steve McIntyre and Ross McKitrick in an industry magazine called Energy & Environment . The magazine is not peer reviewed, and neither author is a clima...

Mary Williams Walsh has an instructive article in the the Sunday New York Times analyzing How Wall Street Wrecked United's Pension . The short version: Wall Street talked United Airlines into following the pension strategy President Bush would have us all follow with Social Security. Of course there is no danger that the perps of this particular scam will be held to account by the Administration or the Republican Congress. While the money managers and other pension professionals who ran United's pension plan walked away from the wreck unscathed - indeed, they collected about $125 million in fees over the last five years alone, records show - the ones who will have to pick up the bill for the advisers' collective failure will be the airline's 130,000 employees and pensioners, the federal pension guarantor and probably, someday, the taxpayers. It's easy to forget that while the stock market is a crucial component of democratic capitalism, there are always many who ...

Friday's Washington Post has an editorial that is a modest step toward making the Post a responsible paper again. The Truth About Abu Ghraib lays out the case that the Abu Ghraib abuses were indeed orchestrated from the top of the Bush administration and expecially that Maj. Gen. Geoffrey D. Miller perjured himself in testimony before Congress and betrayed the soldiers that it was his duty to lead. FOR 15 MONTHS now the Bush administration has insisted that the horrific photographs of abuse from the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq were the result of freelance behavior by low-level personnel and had nothing to do with its policies. In this the White House has been enthusiastically supported by the Army brass, which has conducted investigations documenting hundreds of cases of prisoner mistreatment in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, but denies that any of its senior officers are culpable. For some time these implacable positions have been glaringly at odds with the known fact...

Re: previous post. Not sure I can recommend going to Lumo's web site in good conscience. His blog seems to send my computers into some kind of spastic fit. Not sure if that's a planned feature or what. Next: Return to our regularly scheduled political rant.

Lubos Motl has both exceeded and confounded my expectations by producing an extensive and (mostly) polite response to Lee Smolin’s article discussed below. His response is partly positive in that he seems to accept that background independence might be a good thing, but he also has plenty of objections to the “relativistic” program of Leibniz and Smolin. Unfortunately, his response demonstrates his tendency to create and demolish strawmen instead of the real arguements. First a point of philosophy: He doesn’t like Leibniz’s principle of “the identity of the indiscernible.” On the other hand, Leibniz's "identity of the indiscernible" - which says that the objects with the same properties must be identified - is technically wrong in all theories we've been using in the last 300 years. If two objects/states A,B are related by a global symmetry transformation, they have the same properties but they must still be considered as two distinct objects (configurations or...

Paging Tom Friedman. I actually sort of liked your column today . You use a contemporary sports analogy to argue that it might be nice to have a leader in this country. One might object that leading a country is slightly tougher than leading of team of bikers whose paychecks you control, but whatever. Wouldn't you think that if you were president, after you'd read the umpteenth story about premier U.S. companies, like Intel and Apple, building their newest factories, and even research facilities, in China, India or Ireland, that you'd summon the top U.S. business leaders to Washington to ask them just one question: "What do we have to do so you will keep your best jobs here? Make me a list and I will not rest until I get it enacted." Course if they said "cut my taxes," what's a Prez to do? Oh, well, maybe we have the leaders we deserve. Maybe we just want to admire Lance Armstrong, but not be Lance Armstrong. Too much work. Maybe that's the wri...

Fundamental physics seems to have hit a bit of a flat spot, with Quantum Gravity being the most obvious target out there and proving rather obdurate. String Theory is what Sean Carroll called the "Microsoft" of quantum gravity theories, with a death grip on many prominent university faculties, while Loop Quantum Gravity plays the role of Apple. For reasons not entirely clear to me, the dispute between the theories has taken on some of the rancor and vitriol one expects in English or Sociology departments rather than physics. Each theory has found a few eloquent public expositors, but with little of the give and take one saw in the great physics controversies of the past - over relativity, quantum mechanics, the big bang, or even Regge pole theory. String Theory plays its Microsoft role to the hilt, rarely even deigning to admit the existence of competitors, aside from a few more or less rabid attack dogs. LQG, though, has produced a number of intelligently argued criticis...

The estimable Brad Delong has some good posts up, including one on the National Review's undiscovery of the statistical method and another one deconstructing yet-another-lame-oh review of Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel Emptying the ocean of stupidity is Sisyphian work, but Brad wields a bigger spoon than most.

Some noise machine has lately been promoting the notion that Supreme Court nominee John Roberts in not *that* conservative. I'm not sure what to think of that story, but the nominee has responded to several inquiries by saying that he has no memory of being a member of the secretive conservative legal "Federalist Society." Charles Lane reports in yesterday's Washington Post that John Robert's name appears in the society's 1997-98 leadership directory. This would be an odd type of thing to "forget." Roberts has burnished his legal image carefully. When news organizations have reported his membership in the society, he or others speaking on his behalf have sought corrections. Last week, the White House told news organizations that had reported his membership in the group that he had no memory of belonging. The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, USA Today and the Associated Press printed corrections. The oddity is that his widely reported memb...

The NYT has an important article on a growing discontent in the military. It seems that even a professional military gets tired of being the only ones asked to sacrifice. Neither Democrats nor Republicans have acquitted themselves honorably in this regard. Many Democrats who think the war unwise cravenly decline to openly oppose it. Republicans, who almost universally have backed, boasted upon and defended the war have largely been too corrupt or cowardly to insist on committment from the entire Nation. David C. Hendrickson, a scholar on foreign policy and the presidency at Colorado College, said, "Bush understands that the support of the public for war - especially the war in Iraq - is conditioned on demanding little of the public." Thus, much, or everything, is demanded of the professional military while the promoters of the war stay home and profit mightily from their huge tax cuts, even while the country careers toward financial, political, and moral ruin.

Our friends on the right continue to defy satire. You just can't make this kind of stuff up. Just look at the series of photographs they chose: young John in plaid pants, young John with his boys' school pals, young John in a wrestling suit with his fellow wrestlers, John with footballers, and -- the final pic -- John smiling in an all-male wedding photograph. Supposedly a lefty plot to make our justice nominee look gay. (Via Political Animal and a daisy chain of left-right links.)

Some oddaments in search of a theme: The new Scientific American has an article on the cosmic microwave background claiming that the power in the low spherical harmonics is less than inflation predicts. ( Is the Universe out of tune? ) Meanwhile, I have heard that the fact that the density fluctuations in the early Universe are sound-wave-like has caught the interest of the Intelligent Design crowd. From Genesis 1 2 And the earth was without form except for quantum fluctuations , and void (not counting the dilaton field) ; and darkness was upon the face of the deep. And the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 3 And God said, Let there be light: and there was light, or more technically, thermal radiation, subsequently redshifted by cosmic expansion to about 2.7 Kelvins . And the voice of God was propagated as sound waves on the deep. In combination with our first item, this would seem to imply that the Lord has a rather squeaky voice. Finally, I happened to catch Sean C...

Tom Friedman has an Op Ed column that starts out with a seemingly reasonable suggestion: We need to shine a spotlight on hate speech wherever it appears. The State Department produces an annual human rights report. Henceforth, it should also produce a quarterly War of Ideas Report, which would focus on those religious leaders and writers who are inciting violence against others. It's pretty clear that such a list could itself become a war propaganda tool, but maybe the times require that. His next suggestion feels a lot slimier though: We also need to spotlight the "excuse makers," the former State Department spokesman James Rubin said. After every major terrorist incident, the excuse makers come out to tell us why imperialism, Zionism, colonialism or Iraq explains why the terrorists acted. These excuse makers are just one notch less despicable than the terrorists and also deserve to be exposed. He doesn't give any examples here, but it's not a stretch to imag...

David Brooks, the reliable BushMob button man, makes disgusting love to the newly nominated Supreme Court Justice in his Op-Ed piece in today's New York Times: ...how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. A weak start, since math is not Dave's strong suit. He never does get a count. I love thee because this is the way government is supposed to work... ...I love thee because John G. Roberts is the face of today's governing conservatism Jeez Dave - take it to a motel will ya. How can I line my birdcage with this sheet if I've already barfed on it? Meanwhile, the nominee's slim paper trail is emerging. Hugh Hewitt weighs in to celebrate the Justice designate's sterling legal reasoning in the case of the 12 year-old girl busted for eating a french fry. Robert's constitutional conclusions, slightly paraphrased: "If you can't do the stir, don't do the fry." I know I'll sleep safer knowing our Capital's Metro is a fry free zone.

OK, so it was kind of nasty of me to make fun of Lumo's Deep Thoughts , even if he did ask for it by bringing in all sorts of irrelevant prejudices. So it's only fair that I give any readers an opportunity to return the favor by providing my own "deep thoughts." To be counted as "deep," I consider that an idea needs to be both non-obvious (deep in the sense of hidden) and foundational, i.e. it must unify and provide the foundation for explanation of many phenomena. I will cheat by giving very well established examples: 1) The atomic hypothesis. Feynman said that if only one scientific idea could be saved, this was the one. It was formulated by the ancient Greeks, more than two millenia before anyone could devise any ways to test it. 2) Mathematics as "the" tool for explaining nature. Pythagoras was the first, but only a little further progress occurred before Kepler. 3) The method of postulate and proof in Geometry. This third gigantic Greek...

Bush's nominee for the Supremes looks like a hard right anti-abortion guy. ...those who know Roberts say he, unlike Souter, is a reliable conservative who can be counted on to undermine if not immediately overturn liberal landmarks like abortion rights and affirmative action. Indicators of his true stripes cited by friends include: clerking for Rehnquist, membership in the Federalist Society, laboring in the Ronald Reagan White House counsel's office and at the Justice Department into the Bush years, working with Kenneth Starr among others, and even his lunchtime conversations at Hogan & Hartson. "He is as conservative as you can get," one friend puts it. In short, Roberts may combine the stealth appeal of Souter with the unwavering ideology of Scalia and Thomas. ( via Josh Marshall .) Should be interesting. I also suspect that Bush has hopes of distracting the press from Rove's political death throes. Fat chance.

Long now has the might of Lumo brooded and chafed under the leash of Harvard PC. And from that brooding anger, he has nourished his powers to deeply probe the depths of thought. Deep is his thought and deep are the lessons he has wrested from the Universe. Deep are the eigenvectors that Google uses to classify its links, and deep are the things upon which rich people choose to spend their money. Deep is String theory and Riemann's Zeta function. Not deep are communism, progressivism, Islam, discrete mathematics, Loop Quantum Gravity, and prime numbers. Deeply thinks the mighty Lumo and deeply does he write: Deep ideas are those that are unique among conceivable similar statements at comparable levels of complexity and that are able to cover a large set of particular examples (models, phenomena, metaphenomena) and explain a large number of patterns using a small number of independent assumptions and parameters, especially if the deep ideas are inevitable. Whether or not a given ...

About one out of two times I access Drudge, his stupid site crashes my IE. What's up with that? Yeah, Yeah, I know - don't read him - but sometimes I do want to know what the right wing trash is talking about.

Is Karl Rove's bumbling lawyer Robert Luskin any relation to Donald Luskin, the guy who plays an inept economist in the National Review and other rightwing venues?

Many Shakespeare plays have a character who is seemingly wholly twisted and sinister. The characters may be motivated by envy and hatred, but mostly they just embody evil. Karl Rove might be a good choice for that role when Shakespeare writes up the current Administration. Nicolas Lehmann's New Yorker profile The Controller: Karl Rove is working to get George Bush reelected, but he has bigger plans tells a little of his history. Frank Rich has a nice New York Times OpEd today that lays out the fundamentals of Rove's current scandal: Follow the Uranium. Rich reminds us not to pay any attention to the crowd behind the curtain blowing smoke and talking loudly. The story isn't really Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Joe Wilson, Matt Cooper, or even Bob Novak. This scandal is not about them in the end, any more than Watergate was about Dwight Chapin and Donald Segretti or Woodward and Bernstein. It is about the president of the United States. It is about a plot that was hatche...

Caught a little of Ken Mehlman vs. John Podesta on MTP, and of course Mehlman's job was to keep on saying that up is down. Podesta was pretty weak about pointing this out, though. Can't the Dems find some good litigator to do a better job of presenting their case? Mehlman had zero - zip - nada, but Tim Russert (of course) was more interested in throwing him meaningless batting practice "What would Republicans have said if this had happened in the Clinton Administration," than pursuing obvious falsehoods and Podesta rarely roused himself from him torpor enough to contradict Mehlman. How hard can it be to find somebody who can cut up a guy whose main talent is lying glibly? And why can't the Dems find a few?

I don't have anything special against Hillary. Based on her enemies, I should even like her, but I can't back her for President, at least not in 2008. There is a nasty dynastic streak creeping into US politics, and I really don't approve. The first clear modern hint might have been when Nixon's daughter married Eisenhower's grandson. With the Kennedy family, the dynastic tendency was clear, but it was the Bushs who achieved the Presidential one-two. It's very clear that the third Bush is already prepping for a run. It would be a disaster for democracy in America if one of the most secretive, corrupt, and dishonest families in our political history were to take control. Hillary is not a threat of the same magnitude, but her candidacy against Bush, or even preparatory to a later Bush run, would validate the dynastic impulse, and make it much harder to run against a Bush dynasty. There must be somebody else the Democrats can run.

The scientific basis of the origin of life is not yet understood. If the intelligent design (ID) crowd wants to stake a claim there, they have my blessing, for what it's worth (nothing). It would be nice if they made a testable prediction. Meanwhile, scientists will continue to try to understand the biology, chemistry, and physics of the origin of life. I expect substantial progress along this line of attack in the next two decades or so. Concerning the evolution of life since that long ago origin, ID has got nothing. All the known data on the origin and development of species are consistent with Darwinian evolution. In the unlikely event that any IDers read this, please try to understand the second law of thermodynamics before you start citing it. A couple of good places that should provide adequate explanation are Sear's An introduction to thermodynamics, the kinetic theory of gases, and statistical mechanics or Kittel and Kroemer's Thermal Physics . Talk to me whe...

Who is the master of The Big Lie? Stalin and Goebbels are probably still the champs, but Rove and the Republican "noise machine" are competing vigorously. Josh Marshall has some of the current details . An excerpt: I think it's only late in the evening, when the email traffic slows and the other distractions fade, that I can really see and marvel at the collosus that is, as Brock calls it, the Republican noise machine, with its ferocity that is only surpassed by its nihilism. Now we can see in full view what we've seen again and again in recent years, the favored tactic: terror by grand moral inversion, the lie so total and audacious that it almost knocks opponents off their feet.

After playing nice for a few days Emily is starting to show the potential to become a real bitch.

According to the New York Times, Bush Says He Might Consider Newcomers for High Court. In fact, said Bush: "Would I be willing to consider people who had never been a judge?" Mr. Bush said. "And the answer is, 'You bet.' " Mr. Bush said he had had "a very good meeting" on Tuesday with Senate leaders of both parties, who had encouraged him to look beyond the federal judiciary for candidates to replace the retiring Justice Sandra Day O'Connor. "We're considering all kind of people," Mr. Bush said after a Cabinet meeting today. "Judges, non-judges. Laura gave me some good advice yesterday, which is to consider women. Which, of course I'm doing." First Lady Laura Bush said she would be pleased if... nominated to fill Justice O'Connor's seat. We have received word that, should Chief Justice Rehnquist also leave, Karl Rove is likely to nominated for the post. He is considered a dependable conservative, but a recess...

The news this morning that the London Bombers were apparently suicide bombers of British citizenship and Pakastani descent is very bad news indeed - bad news for Britain, Europe, the US and especially for all their Muslim populations. It severely undermines the thesis outlined in my two preceeding posts and suggests that al Quaeda terrorism is indeed morphing into the religious war bin Laden has always coveted. At the minimum, this will probably cost us all some civil liberties, and for Muslims living in Europe, the ultimate threat is expulsion.

Via Kevin Drum Michael Scheuer, the former CIA analyst and author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror reviews Robert Pape's book Dying to Win : The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism. Pape and colleagues have made a study of all the suicides terrorist incidents of recent history, and the facts compelling refute the glib nonsense spouted by Bush and friends. Some excerpts from Scheuer's book review : In scholarly and low-key prose, Pape delivers the results of his own extensive research and that done by the University of Chicago's Project on Suicide Terrorism. In so doing, Pape demolishes the relentlessly repeated assertion of the neoconservatives and Israeli politicians that Islamist suicide attacks against America and other counties are launched by undereducated, unemployed, alienated, apocalyptic fanatics who are eager to kill themselves because Americans vote, have civil liberties, and allow women to drive cars. This assertion always has bee...

If you are the type to occasionally tire of our President's endless hypocritical nonsense, subject as above, you might want to check out Juan Cole's Jerusalem and Terrorism. I consider Cole an indispensable resource on all things Middle East and Muslim, doing, among other things, the work that Tom Friedman could do if he wasn't such a shit. Sorry Tom, that just slipped out. I'm sure your study of the Flat Earth will, sometime in the future, be deservedly forgotten, allowing your more substantial works to be once again appreciated. I strongly recommend Juan's post, which starts with The Ariel Sharon government in Israel has announced that it will build a huge wall on someone else's land through Jerusalem, cutting off 55,000 Arabs from the city (they'll have to go through nasty Israeli checkpoints every day to get into their own city!) However you feel about the morality of this And, folks, this sort of thing, which the Washington Post didn't even not...

I once heard that some survey had asked a bunch of people: If you could have one superpower, either the ability to read minds or the ability to fly, which would you choose? Now the interesting part for me was that younger people mostly chose mind reading, while older ones strongly preferred flying. I think I understand this pretty well. There is probably some good evolutionary region why young people care about what others think. Us oldsters, on the other hand, feel we pretty much know what other people are thinking, and it's just not that interesting. Gravity, on the other hand, is getting to be a bigger and bigger nuisance.

Via Kevin Drum , the LA Times apparently has a lame-name ( Current ) new Sunday Op section today, featuring pieces by various nutbags of several stripes plus aspiring humorist Joel Stein's Hogwarts fans, you're stupid, stupid, stupid. Stein's column has a few mildly amusing lines: I read 50 pages of the first "Harry Potter" book, and it seemed witty, imaginative and fast-paced...has a reading-level that is only slightly above this column. You won't have to wait in line for "Ulysses." Having twisted the tiger's tail, Joel might want to be a bit careful next time he goes into a bar in Knockturn Alley. Or anywhere else.

Well I just took one of those stupid online personality diagnostics and it revealed (once again!) that I am boring. This is a pretty serious downer for me since one of my problems with most people is that they are so boring. Boring is a grim diagnosis with not much hope of recovery. Is there psycho-surgery for being boring? I'd like to spend more time agonizing about this but that would be too boring. What's the worst thing about being a termite? Boring! What do people hate about termite parties? Boring! What weighs 8000 pounds and is really boring? An elephant telling termite jokes.

Nile Gardiner, Ph.D., and John Hulsman, Ph.D., have produced a bombastic bit of Heritage hackery-flackery about the London Bombings (via Kevin Drum). Their feckless posturing would actually be comical, if the subject weren't so tragic. By striking London, al Qaeda hoped to achieve a three-pronged propaganda success. First, it planned to disrupt the Group of 8 (G-8) meeting, a symbol of the most powerful Western leaders in the world. As is already clear, that aim has failed. Second, it hopes for the ‘Spanish effect,’ to alienate the British public from its government, as was so successful in Madrid. Here, too, the terrorists are bound to fail, for they have underestimated the strength and resolve of the British people. Given your insight into motive and plan guys, could you maybe come up with names and addresses of the perps? ...when the chips are down the U.S. and UK, like Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, come out shooting together. I guess they must think they have some con...

Gauge freedom to be specific. Charles H. Lineweaver and Tamara M. Davis wrote a nice article in the March Scientific American on Misconceptions about the Big Bang . One of their unifying themes was the idea that expansion of the Universe should be seen as "expansion of space" rather than "expansion through space." This is also a theme for Brian Greene in his excellent popular book The Fabric of the Cosmos as well as for blogger and cosmologist Sean Carroll in his textbook Spacetime and Geometry: An Introduction to General Relativity (also excellent). Nonetheless, it bothered me, and I even got into a debate on the subject on Lubos Motl's blog. Thus I was gratified when this month's Scientific American included a letter from James Bjorken (yes, that James Bjorken) stating ...the concept of expansion of space as opposed to expansion through space is a "gauge choice" - it depends on the coordinates chosen. One of the cardinal principles of Einst...

I'm sure some will be disappointed, but I personally am somewhat relieved that the Catholic Church, in keeping with its long tradition, has come down firmly on the side of ignorance and superstition in the matter of Darwinian evolution. Cardinal Schonbrun, Archbishop of Vienna and lead author of the 1992 Catholic Catechism, explains it all in the above linked New York Times Op-Ed. He pretty forthrightly ties the ID albatross around the Church's neck as follows: Evolution in the sense of common ancestry might be true, but evolution in the neo-Darwinian sense - an unguided, unplanned process of random variation and natural selection - is not. Any system of thought that denies or seeks to explain away the overwhelming evidence for design in biology is ideology, not science. Perhaps this will cheer up the IDers, but it should also remind the rest of us what a backward and decadent force this institution created in imitation of the Roman Empire really is. The Cardinal adds: N...

Out for a postprandial stroll this evening, I spotted four young people on the opposite side of the street, coming in my general direction. When they changed course to cross the street toward me, my primitive reflexes activated and I did some quick mental computation - four of them, one of me (ok, so two of them were girls); they looked youthful and muscular, I was old and fat; on the other hand, this is a safe neighborhood, I'm still big, and my hiking staff has a (dull) point. Their apparent leader, a muscular and shirtless youth, accosted me with a greeting and a leaflet. I was invited to a Bible study group in someone's apartment; and, did I "have a personal relationship with Jesus?" This was a bit of a tough question for me. The truth is, I only know the guy from his books, movies, and television commercials. On the other hand, whatever they claimed, I was pretty sure the same was true of each of them. My reptilian brain reviewed the arithmetic, cravenly sai...

I don't often like Tom Friedman's NYT columns, but he has good points today . If, as seems likely, the London bombings were the work of Islamic jihadists, like those in Madrid, Bali, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere, then it's every Muslim's problem as well as ours. Every Muslim living in a Western society suddenly becomes a suspect, becomes a potential walking bomb. And when that happens, it means Western countries are going to be tempted to crack down even harder on their own Muslim populations. Friedman's message is that every Muslim must start seeing this as his or her problem: ...it is essential that the Muslim world wake up to the fact that it has a jihadist death cult in its midst. If it does not fight that death cult, that cancer, within its own body politic, it is going to infect Muslim-Western relations everywhere. Only the Muslim world can root out that death cult... ... the greatest restraint on human behavior is never a policeman or a border guard. The gre...

Kevin Drum had two posts up on the London Bombings, the first a link, and the second: A WISH....If I could have one small wish for today, it would be for the blogosphere on both left and right to refrain from political point scoring over the London attacks. Just for a day. Isn't tomorrow soon enough to return to our usual arguments? Needless to say, this was not a wish the tooth fairy could grant. Instead the right (and subsequently, the left) spewed out their furious hatred - not of the perpetrators, but of their fellow Americans. A few samples: It's liberals like you which caused the bombings in London. Your constant clamoring about how America is losing in Iraq has only emboldened the terrorists to attack us only more because they believe they can win now... And perhaps it was Yoda who said: Dumbass bastards you are. Got that low life, spineless libs? And from the fair sex: FOR ANY LIBERAL LEFT WHO HAD NO CLUE, IRAQ AND SADDAM HUSSEIN FUNDED THE SUICIDE BOMBERS THAT BL...

Michael Sheuer, the former CIA analyst and author of Imperial Hubris: Why the West is Losing the War on Terror was on NPR this morning, saying that the London transit attacks look like the result of Blair's and Bush's lies and failures to confront the true nature of al Quaeda and failure to focus on destroying it. He also warned that other countries are even more vulnerable. The threat will remain as long as our leaders continue to feed us nonsense like the idea that al Quaeda is attacking "freedom itself" and fail to even acknowledge its real motives and base of support.

Suppose God decided to give evolutionists a subtle hint that they had been barking up the wrong tree in failing to believe the account in Genesis. What kinds of clues could he give that don't change everything we've already learned? I have a couple of ideas, but maybe others could contribute their own. 1) A new species of non-microscopic animal or plant is found which has no relation to existing species - different genetic code, different cellular mechanisms, etc. 2) Remains of modern animals are found in, say, pre-Cambrian rocks - and have pre-Cambrian radiodates. 3) A Biblical age manuscript is found in which God outlines his reasons equipping all life with the same genetic codes and systems, and creating a perfect simulacrum of evolution, i.e., why he is working so hard at fooling us. This is hard work. It's very hard to think of possibilities that haven't been checked and rechecked.

George Bush projects to the world the image of a slow and inarticulate dolt, though some have suggested that this superficial impression is misleading. Tony Blair is very much opposite, quick-witted and highly articulate. I suppose it's possible that this impression is equally unfounded. The Downing Street memos seem to confirm, though, that whatever their IQs, both are devious, unprincipled and dishonest. Terry Gross had an interview on today (recorded yesterday) with Michael Smith, the reporter who broke the story of the memos. It's a good interview and I recommend it. It's clear now that Blair had been amply warned of the bad consequences of the war and the war's illegality. Nonetheless, Bush and Blair were determined to have their war, apparently for political reasons. I'm not sure how or whether Labour is likely to dump Blair, but a new Zogby poll shows that a lot of Americans think Bush should be impeached if he misled us into war, as surely he did. ...

Kevin Drum has three posts up on his Political Animal blog taking down Diane Ravitch's Wall Street Journal Op-Ed take down of "Ethnomathematics," which is apparently some new conservative bugaboo, if more or less invisible in schools. Ravitch made the mistake of actually including a couple of specifics in her piece, based on some sloppy scholarship by some Hoover Institute propagandists, and which Kevin was able to show was total crap. This was cool, of course, but even more interesting was the discussion of education, algebra books, and math teaching that followed in the comments. One thread was the size, cost and general bloat of textbooks, even those for elementary students. Another was the ever changing fads that sweep education. Education, in the US at least, is a fashion industry. Textbook publishers and their co-conspirators, the education colleges, are always looking for a new gimmick to make the old books (and other media) obsolete. This is actually a bad ...

Brad Delong has a post up on the US China "rivalry" . It contains a lot of good stuff, including examples of where accomodation worked and failed. He argues: The most important point, however, is that both Germany's and Japan's decisions to go to war were catastrophic mistakes. They lost. Moreover, Norman Angell was right: the decision to risk war was overwhelmingly stupid. They would still have been catastrophic decisions even had Germany or Japan won: nothing Germany could have gained from victory in World War I or Japan from victory in World War II would have been worth the suffering. Worth it to whom is always the question. For most of human existence, a major cause of premature adult death has been homicide. There is plenty of anthropological and zoological evidence that warfare is a basic instinct of humans and their close relatives, the chimpanzees. Economics uninformed by biology and anthropology can't explain warfare. For various reasons modern warfa...

Alex Tabarrok has whipped himself into a froth over a recent Paul Krugman column occasioned by the Chinese bid for Unocal Krugman: Illiberal Demagogue. I've linked approvingly to his stuff in the past so it pains me to say that his post is total crap, and dishonest crap at that. His agrievement: Paul Krugman used to be a liberal economist; no longer. His abandonment of economics has long been plain, Krugman's abandonment of liberalism was announced in yesterday's commentary on China. What really upset me about Krugman's column is not the bizarre economics but the illiberal politics... In support of the charge of his second sentence, he invokes this (in my opinion, totally dishonest) "Open Letter" posted by Arnold Kling. So never mind that first slander, lets get on to what really gets Alex's panties in a knot: In the last twenty years China's economic growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people out of poverty and nearly unspeakable deprivat...

Aaron Aardvark, a commenter on this Kevin Drum post suggests of the fingering of Rove that This whole thing is sounding more and more like a typical Rovian preemptive strike. Rove "leaks" a story that is soon discredited. The result slops over to the whole Plame affair. Same thing he did with the Texas ANG papers. Kevin has a new post on the Michael Isikoff Newsweek story and there's not much there there. I think Aaron may be right. I hope not, but the fingerprints look familiar.

Lawrence O'Donnell at The Huffington Post (via Kevin Drum ): I revealed in yesterday's taping of the McLaughlin Group that Time magazine's emails will reveal that Karl Rove was Matt Cooper's source. I have known this for months but didn't want to say it at a time that would risk me getting dragged into the grand jury. ...I know Newsweek is working on an 'It's Rove!' story and will probably break it tomorrow. If Rove really is the protectee, then Cooper and Miller should go to the slammer. That would make them part of the conspiracy. (That's an angry reaction, not a legally informed opinion).

It's usually not a good sign when Federal agents break the locks to search your house. So when it happens to a congressman, you might think it would be big news in DC - but not so to the Washington Post. Fortunately, Josh Marshall is all over this one . He's getting a lot of his information from this Mark Walker story (and other stories) in the North County Times , so at least part of the Fourth Estate is on the job, even if the NYT and WaPo have chosen to sit this one out. With evidence piling up, U.S. Rep. Randy "the Dukester" Cunningham (R, San Diego) looks increasingly like he might have a long term assignment with the Federal government even if he does lose his Congressional seat. The former "top-gun" fighter pilot and business associates have drawn coordinated raids in several locations - see Josh for the rundown.