The White House has pointed out that, in attempting to persuade the world that we shouldn’t go after Saddam, France has essentially admitted that he has WMD programs.

Also,

In a backhanded slap at France, Fleischer also said the president wasn’t terribly surprised that some countries are advocating going easy on Iraq. Fleischer said the president has often viewed his own role as one of “putting spine” into the U.N. and the international community.

Boy, for all of supposedly being the people who invented diplomacy, the Frogs are sure off their game. And being outsmarted by a retarded cowboy, too. That’s gotta hurt.

Derek Lowe has an interesting post about bacteria that may hold the key to long-duration space travel. Unfortunately, it won’t be of much use to any of us, other than Bacterium-Americans…

But what about keeping spares around in a spare nucleus – a sort of “break glass in case of emergency” DNA vault? That would require biological engineering beyond our current capabilities, but if and when we get there, I can think of a good use for such an organism. For some years now, Freeman Dyson (yep, him again) has been advocating what he’s called an “astrochicken” space probe. That’s a part-living device that is hardened to survive in vacuum, use solar power, furnish its own propulsion, obtain its fuel from local sources, and so on. A satellite that needs to eat, in other words. (You can find one description of such a device in his book Infinite in All Directions)

I think he’s got a very good point, and that biotechnology might well turn out to be a key for space exploration. What better way to package such an organism’s DNA than to follow the durable example of Deinococcus radiodurans?

Mathematician John Allen Paulos (author of Innumeracy) has the numbers that show why Total Information Awareness won’t work, and will have a tremendous cost in both money and freedom.

…the system will arrest almost 3 million innocent people, about 3,000 times the number of guilty ones. And that occurs, remember, only because we’re assuming the system has these amazing powers of discernment. If its powers are anything like our present miserable predictive capacities, an even greater percentage of those arrested will be innocent.

Andrew Stuttaford points out that despite the popular perception, there’s very little about Arianna Huffington that could be properly labeled “conservative.” I don’t know if there’s this perception of her as right wing because of her history (a bizarre one, in which she was married to a rich Republican liberal who almost beat Diane Feinstein in her first Senatorial election, and then divorced him after he came out of the closet about his sexual preference for men), that’s simply hanging on from inertia, or what.

One possibility is that the press likes to have liberals who they can label as conservative, so that when the supposed “conservative” opposes some Republican position, they can say, “Gee, this must really be an egregiously neanderthal policy if even the conservative Arianna Huffington is against it…”

I was thinking about this the other day while listening to a radio program on KCRW (the LA NPR affiliate) called “Left, Right and Center.” It’s hosted by Matt Miller (former Clinton budget guy), with Arianna and Robert Scheer. I guess the idea was that Scheer was left (no question about that), Huffington was “right,” and that Mr. Miller represented the center. It was always kind of laughable, but today it just seems ridiculously so.

In fact, to demonstrate how sinister-tilted they all are, they had David Frum on to defend the Administration’s policy on affirmative action in general and the Michigan case in particular. All three sides of the supposed political spectrum proceeded to gang up on both him and the Administration (though Miller at least was willing to acknowledge that the Administration might have some merit in some of its arguments).

The show’s title should be “Left, Lefter and Loony.” But then, it’s NPR, where they have both kinds of politics–liberal and progressive.

[Update on Tuesday morning]

N. Z. Bear informs me that I’m behind the times–Frum is now a regular, and that he is the right. OK, that still begs the question, what the heck is Arianna?

Los Angeles has many restaurants. It even has many good restaurants.

I once wondered how long it would take to try them all. I started by estimating how many there were, and then calculating how many breakfasts, lunches and dinners I would have to consume to get through the list. But then I realized that it was almost certainly impossible to do so, because many of them would close before I had a chance to get to them, and others would open that I hadn’t gotten to yet. There simply was not enough time in a serial process (and I have only one mouth, so there’s no way to parallelize it) to accomplish the task.

I was reminded of this little mental exercise by the current discussion of whether the inspectors in Iraq are doing their job properly, or even can.

In my fury over Mr. Tisdall’s blatant lie, described in my previous post, I failed to get to the end of his article, in which I found this gem:

But the fact remains that proof of serious, serial deception is so far lacking; that there has been none of the predicted Iraqi obstruction; and that the inspectors, backed by Kofi Annan, want much more time to do their job properly. And even if a “smoking gun” were found in some Basra bunker, so what? This would be a success, meaning the investigations are working.

Let’s not even bother to point out that the first sentence is blithering nonsense, as both Rumsfeld and Powell pointed out on the Sunday talk shows this weekend.

This is the latest disingenuous tactic of those opposing the removal of Saddam from power. Heads I win, tails you lose.

If the inspectors fail to find anything, it means that there’s nothing there to find, or that they aren’t looking hard enough, so the inspections must continue for months, or years.

If the inspectors find something, it means that the “inspections process is working,” and so the inspections must continue, for months, or years.

It depends, of course, on continuing to misrepresent both the clear language of last October’s UN resolution, and the purpose of the inspectors. As Rumsfeld pointed out, they are inspectors, not “finders.” They are supposed to be inspecting and verifying weapons described and displayed by a cooperative Iraqi government (weapons, that is, that the Iraqi government declared in December didn’t exist). They are not supposed to be playing cat and mouse, and “catch me if you can.”

If it is their job to find weapons, in a country the size of Iraq, that the Iraqi government continues to try to hide, often in a shell game of moving them from one palace to another, they don’t have enough “inspectors” and even if they did, they will all be old and dead before the job is complete. They’ll never “eat at all the restaurants,” per my example above. Saddam will have ample time to develop not just nukes, but fusion weapons, and even photon torpedos and planet-busting death rays.

Purely and simply, “the inspections must go on” is the mantra of those who want Saddam to go on as well, because under such a scenario, short of natural causes, there will be no means to remove him, any more than there has been over the past decades.

Glenn points out an article by “Simple” Simon Tisdall in the Daily Wanker, in which he whines about the apparent ineffectiveness of the UN in saving Saddam from the Evil Amerikans.

What I found interesting in the article is this statement:

For those who have doubts but remain undecided, a second UN resolution has also assumed a key importance. UN authorisation of force would go a long way towards salving many consciences troubled by the prospect of yet more western violence aimed at the Iraqi people.

This is a common tactic among anti-war types–to state, as though it’s a fact, that we are going to war against the Iraqi people, that we “aim violence” against them, when the reality, of course, is that we are going to war against the Iraqi dictator, in support of the Iraqi people. It’s a similar lie to the one that they repeated about Afghanistan.

In fact, in a sense, our policy toward Iraq for the past decade of sanctions could be more accurately said to be making war on the people of Iraq–certainly they’re the ones who’ve borne the brunt of the pain of it, not Saddam.

And the further reality is that not only are we not aiming violence at the Iraqi people, but we are taking great pains and expense to aim violence away from the Iraqi people, and we are doing it in order to end the violence that has been visited upon them for many years by their own rulers. That’s why we spend billions developing and procuring (and restocking over the past year) the smart weapons that were so effective in Afghanistan in taking out targets with precision while sparing structures and people to either side.

The simple response to such idiotic bloviation as that above is to point out that if our goal was to “aim violence” at the people, we could simply nuke Baghdad, Mosul, Basra, Tekrit, and other Iraqi cities. It would save a lot of money, and would be risk free to our men in arms.

Instead, as Israel did in Jenin, we will put our own men and women at risk in order to strenuously avoid innocent casualties to the Iraqi citizenry, in the process of overthrowing the monsters in human form who have been terrorizing them for decades. Our goal, in fact, is to remove Saddam without a major war at all–letting his own commanders do the job for us.

No nation in the history of the world has taken as much care as the U.S. in avoiding needless innocent casualties in the exercising of its foreign policy, particularly in the past half century, and when someone accuses us instead of wishing to maximize them, it’s a vicious calumny.

There are sincere and rational cases to be made as to whether or not we should be removing Saddam from power, but when someone can make a statement like the above, they are either terminally deluded and incapable of simple logic, or a vile liar.

I’ll let the reader judge which.

I find it more and more frustrating over time to continue to see Germany and France labeled our “allies” in the “War on Terrorism.” As I’ve said in the past, I don’t believe that we’re in a War on Terrorism, and whatever war we are in (I think it’s a war against fundamental Islamism and Arab nationalism), they are clearly not behaving as allies, in any sense of the word. The label seems to be a holdover from the Cold War, and with that conflict well over a decade behind us, it really no longer applies. I wonder who would complain if reporters at the NYT and WaPo simply stopped using this term as descriptive to countries that don’t walk the walk?

Of course, as Stephen Den Beste points out, continuing use of such a label makes it possible for the press to help reign us in, and prevent us from intensifying the war with Iraq (which never really ended), by making it appear that we are in it alone, which is of course unacceptable.

Which, of course, makes it clear that many in the mainstream press are not our “allies” either.

One of the classic debating tricks is something called “attacking a strawman.” It consists of putting forth a flawed argument that the opponent has never made, but implying that she has, and then knocking it down. It allows a cheap rhetorical victory while sidestepping the real issues, and unfortunately, it’s often effective.

That’s exactly what the DEA is doing with their series of commercials in an attempt to convince people of the nonsensical notion that drug use equates to support of terrorism.

The commercial template is a hapless fool attempting to defend his drug use, putting forth dumb arguments, which are easily slapped down by his more intelligent (and virtuous) friend. (And of course, one of the subthemes is that because he’s a drug user, he can’t think well, unlike his teetotaling companion.)

The latest one is what Mr. Idiot calls the “might” loophole. He only “might” be supporting terrorism by using drugs, so it’s OK. This is indeed a dumb argument, which is shot down by simply rephrasing it more graphically: “So, you might be helping terrorists murder kids, or you might be helping them do something so horrible that we can’t even conceive of it.”

Of course, if this were a real debate, rather than a mindless strawman exercise in a propaganda campaign, the appropriate response would be, “Yes, just like when you gas up your car, you “might” be funneling money to the Saudis and their madrassas that teach children to go on Jihad against America, and when you purchase clothes made in Pakistan, you “might” be providing profit to a factory owner who funds similar activities there.”

This whole campaign is stupid, for the reason described above: anything that we purchase has the potential to go to funding nefarious activities. Not all drug purchases do so, any more than all gasoline purchases do so, and to the degree that drug purchases do so, it’s largely because our War on (Some) Drugs has put criminals in charge of the enterprise. It would be just as accurate (indeed, perhaps more so) to say that, given that some people are going to purchase drugs regardless of their legal status, it is the DEA and the federal drug policies that are helping the terrorists.

Apparently, judging by this ad campaign, they don’t have any good arguments. And the need to resort to spending taxpayers’ money in such a blatantly dishonest way is just further evidence of the moral and intellectual vacuity and bankruptcy of those policies.

We may be in one very soon, if this article is anything to go on. [Link requires registration]

In what one expert has called ?the Baghdad scenario?, the regime of Kim Jong Il is expected to wreak maximum damage on American policy by timing any move at a critical moment, such as the entry of US soldiers into the Iraqi capital.

?They are choreographing this step by step with the Iraq crisis,? said one diplomat. ?It?s straight from the works of Sun Tzu to strike while your enemy is weak.? Sun Tzu, the classical Chinese military strategist, also advocated deception and guile to win victory without battle.

In an article about today’s protests, by Dana Hull of the San Jose Mercury News, he describes the Workers World Party, one of the groups behind today’s protests,

Some of the WWP’s more controversial positions are its support for the governments of Iraq and North Korea; its backing of former Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic; its claims that reports of Serbian atrocities against Muslims and Croats were overblown; and its defense as recently as 2000 of the Chinese government’s deadly crackdown against pro-democracy demonstrators in Tiananmen Square in 1989.

Looking at the web site, they also support the Palestinians over Israel, and Hugo Chavez. Oh, and of course, they want to Free Mumia!

The mind boggles. What heuristic would one use to predict what or who this group is going to support? You could say they promote socialist causes, but that doesn’t really tell one how to square their positions on Palestinians versus Israel and Milosevic versus the Muslims. After all, Israel tends to be socialist itself, while the Palestinians don’t really have an economic system to speak of.

Is it a White Male European against Islam thing? Hmmmm…that would explain opposition to Israel, but then it’s hard to reconcile with support for Milosevic, who’s also white, and male, and European and was murdering Muslims.

Oh, wait! The light goes on above the head. Now I get it.

It’s a very simple algorithm. If the US government is for it, they’re a’gin it, and vicey versey. Very reliable predictive technique.

And it tells you all you need to know about this group, and their fellow travelers.

Now here’s a question to ponder. Can a group whose basic premise seems to be that the US government under its constitution is the source of all evil in the world, and that all of its initiatives are to be opposed, in a knee-jerk fashion, be said to be in any way patriotic?

Hey, I’m just asking…