CapitalistImperialistPig

Since Professor Motl seems to be under some sort of edict or ban of the Church, I have tried to avoid making comments that he might not be allowed to respond to. That doesn't mean he doesn't continue to writing interesting, controversial, and sometimes dubious stuff. A recent post in the first category is this one . It's about George Johnson's talk to the string therorati at KITP and their reactions. Amanda Peet explained that it had to be obvious that the authors of those books don't apply the same standards to their theories as they use for string theory - and she uses the obvious inconsistencies of loop quantum gravity as an example. George Johnson offered a truly bold hypothesis that "he thinks that no one would call [the author of the blue book] a crackpot". A massive laughter, led by Joe Polchinski et al., explodes in the room, indicating a rather strong disagreement with the journalist. ;-) I suspect that this argument mainly indicates that Peet ...

To be a Democrat in the Twenty-first Century is to be acustomed to failure. It's like being a fan of a perennially losing football or baseball team. Even when things look good, it seems likely that our candidates will whiff some crucial pitches, or drop that perfectly placed touchdown pass. The refs, of course, will miss those flagrant Republican fouls and spitballs. Despite some promising signs, I can hardly dare believe we might get a piece of this government back, pass a couple of good laws, and, above all, start holding this reckless and foolish government accountable for its actions. Whatever happens, Bush will control the executive for another two and a quarter years, and thus will have great power to continue damaging our country. Maybe, though, the most outrageous recklessness can be checked. Maybe some of the thieving war profiteers can be brought to justice. There are three guys in my head trying to sell me their predictions. The crazy optimist thinks that the Amer...

Depleted uranium weapons (using the uranium left over after fissionable U-235 has been extracted) were extensively used by the US in Bosnia and in the first Iraq war. Uranium is a very dense and hard metal - 1.6 times as dense as lead and almost 5 times as hard as steel. These qualities, and the fact that it burn in air, make it a very effective penetrating weapon against hard targets such as tanks or fortified underground bunkers. It has some adverse collateral effects. Use in Bosnia and the first Iraq war is linked to clusters of cancers that occurred in local civilians afterwards. Robert Fisk, writing in The Independent , reports on evidence that the Israelis used uranium weapons in the most recent war against Lebanon. Two oddities stand out: the weapons were used very close to the Israeli border, where winds are likely to carry the toxic dust into Israel, and the uranium used seems to be very slightly enriched in U-235 rather than depleted. Many Lebanese, however, long ago co...

Site Meter has this nice facility for displaying where your visits and page views come from. I'm always amazed to see the wide geographic distribution. At first I assumed that it was just some people getting unlucky with next blog , but apparently some of you seem to keep coming back. If you are a regular, or even an accidental next blogger, feel free to pipe up and let us know what you think. And, if you feel like it, let us know where you are!

As I was driving to work this morning Bush was talking about Nancy Pelosi's statement that Afghanistan was a legitimate part of the war on terror, but Iraq was not. Bush's critique: She should ask the people of Madrid, and London, and Bali, and Morocco, etc. How f****** dumb do you have to be to think this is a meaningful argument? Or how double-f****** ignorant? How many of the bombers or planners of any those attacks were Iraqis or had ties to Iraq? Zero! The 9/11 bombers, like Osama bin Laden, were mostly from the country ruled by Bush's kissy face buddy, Saudi Arabia. Yeah, he was from the bin Laden family, the family of Dad's former business partner. Yeah, the same family Bush hustled out of the country on a private jet right after 9/11. The London bombers were of Pakistani extraction. The Madrid bombers from North Africa. Bin Laden, last we heard, is still holed up in Pakistan, another Bush ally, where he continues to issue death threats against America ...

Despite total Republican control of all three branches of government, every week seems to bring a couple of new GOP scandals. A mistress strangler here , An attempted rapist and alien hider there , throw in some crooked land manipulations here , here , here , a bit of voter intimidation there , and pretty soon you start wondering about these guys. The GOP or the Soprano's? Add a couple of Republican Congressmen with a taste for same sex (male) pages and a Republican running for governor who allegedly has a felon for a boyfriend . Sounds like a moral, Christian group if I ever saw one. Of course Democrats have their own scandals. Harold Ford, running for Senate in Tennessee, is clearly guilty of supporting stem cell research and running for Congress while (partly) black . Josh Marshall has this collection of politico's and their friends who have actually been charged, indicted, or convicted. (There is actually a dem on the list, though he hasnt't been indicted yet). If...

One interesting point made in Thomas Rick's book Fiasco - The American Military Adventure in Iraq is that, calamitous as the actions of George W. Bush have been, he is not soley responsible for the debacle. Some of the other big blunders were made by his father, George H. W. Bush. The worst was that, after we failed to destroy Saddam's Imperial Guard divisions, he explicity encouraged the military and the cities to rebel against Saddam, and after they did, let American forces stand by while Saddam sent the Imperial Guards to destroy them. American airpower would almost certainly have been decisive if it had been used. The Iraqi's took the obvious lesson from this, that America could not be trusted. Saddam similarly concluded that the Americans lacked follow through and a coherent plan.