Unqualified Offerings

By Mona
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This may be a harbinger of the warmongers’ new talking point. Iraq is no longer comparable with WWII, and certainly not with Vietnam.
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Iraq=Korea. And with that settled:

It will be interesting to see how the left plays this. How can anyone wish less than the success of South Korea for the [...]

I picked up Scott Ritter’s new book and have really just started it.
The premise is that the peace movement, such as it is, can learn a lot from the great military strategists. I don’t doubt that, but so far I’m having two problems with the book. First, he seems to suggest that the key to [...]

Heironymous Bosch Garden of Earthly Delights action figures. The Stiftung is inspired:
In all seriousness, the pieces do seem to be somewhat well done, and when collected might inspire one to build a mighty think tank yet to be. Interns, research fellows, the senior fellows and of course thoe with endowed chairs.

Phil Carter last week explained the logistics of a complete pullout from Iraq. It could be completed in weeks. There would of course be larger issues to manage that are outside the scope of his article.

Mona gives us just the facts, ma’am, below. Valerie Plame Wilson was a covert officer at the time several Bush Administration officials burned her, and had traveled overseas repeatedly in the recent past, under cover every time. (pdf of the Patrick Fitzgerald sentencing brief.) So let’s engage in irresponsible speculation, shall we!
A common right-wing talking [...]

By Thoreau
A little while ago on CNN I saw some footage of Adam Gadahn, the Al Qaeda spokesman who grew up in southern California. He seemed like a real loser just from his demeanor (and the fact that he chose the Al Qaeda career path sure confirms that). So I just checked out [...]

By Mona
I’ve been studiously agnostic on Plamegate, which ends today. The idea that Patrick Fitzgerald would make court filings pertaining to the Scooter Libby sentencing that are false is preposterous, and as Larry Johnson sums it up, Fitz sez:

Valerie Wilson was an operations officer working in the Counter Proliferation Division (CPD) [...]

By Thoreau
One final item of science blogging.  A guest columnist in The Onion writes that “I believe in evolution, except for the Triassic Period.”
We need to get the Triassic period expunged from our public schools’ evolutionary textbooks. I don’t want my children to be exposed to this blasphemous Triassic garbage, and I assume you don’t [...]

By Thoreau
A new paper in the Public Library of Science (open access, with a layman’s description here) suggests that if we suffer mass outbreaks of bird flu among humans, the initial survivors might hold the key to saving people subsequently infected:
For the new study, researchers at the Hospital for Tropical Diseases in Ho Chi Minh [...]

By Thoreau
Most of the extrasolar planets that have been found thus far have been very close to their parent star. That’s a problem for finding life if the parent star is bright, but it may not be such a problem if the star is dim. And the most common stars in our galaxy [...]