A very long, but interesting (and encouraging) video interview by Bob Wright with Eli Lake, embedded reporter for the New York Sun, and a major in Iraq.
“The people who think that the insurgents are fighting for a nationalist cause should go to Haifa Street right now.”
“In terms of the Vietnam analogy, these are people trying to seek My Lais every day, and our guys are trying to prevent it.”
A lot of ignorant morons call me a “neocon,” and I generally eschew labels in general, but here’s a new one (well, new to me) I just discovered that probably comes as close as any will for me. I’m apparently a neolibertarian.
Sweden and Finland are acting like they want to join NATO.
OK, I have to admit that this is great stop-motion photography. The choreography is great. But you still have to think–don’t these guys have lives? I’d be a lot more impressed if they were junior high schoolers.
[Via the Star-Trek conservative]
From Anne Applebaum. It’s not pretty:
…it’s a very important legacy: One of consistent scorn for the Anglo-American world in general and the English language in particular, of suspicion of Central Europe and profound disinterest in the wave of democratic transformation that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s, of preference for the Arab and African dictators who had been, and remained, clients of France. In his later years, Chirac constantly searched, in almost all international conflicts, for novel ways of opposing the United States. All along, he did his best to protect France from the rapidly changing global economy.
With the new president, let’s hear it for Friendship Fries (even if they were invented in Belgium).
From Anne Applebaum. It’s not pretty:
…it’s a very important legacy: One of consistent scorn for the Anglo-American world in general and the English language in particular, of suspicion of Central Europe and profound disinterest in the wave of democratic transformation that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s, of preference for the Arab and African dictators who had been, and remained, clients of France. In his later years, Chirac constantly searched, in almost all international conflicts, for novel ways of opposing the United States. All along, he did his best to protect France from the rapidly changing global economy.
With the new president, let’s hear it for Friendship Fries (even if they were invented in Belgium).
From Anne Applebaum. It’s not pretty:
…it’s a very important legacy: One of consistent scorn for the Anglo-American world in general and the English language in particular, of suspicion of Central Europe and profound disinterest in the wave of democratic transformation that swept the world in the 1980s and 1990s, of preference for the Arab and African dictators who had been, and remained, clients of France. In his later years, Chirac constantly searched, in almost all international conflicts, for novel ways of opposing the United States. All along, he did his best to protect France from the rapidly changing global economy.
With the new president, let’s hear it for Friendship Fries (even if they were invented in Belgium).
Let’s hope that this isn’t the beginning of a trend:
“After working with [the] Rocket Racing League for the past 17 months, we have concluded that our vision, business practices, and communications standards are incompatible with those of the league,” Robert Rickard, Leading Edge president and CEO, said in a statement. “We had very high hopes for this enterprise and tried very hard to find a common way forward.”
Or if it is, that the RRL makes whatever changes are necessary to keep things together. I should note that I’ve no idea what the creative differences are, so I have no opinions as to who is in the right and wrong here. With this drop out, though, it would be nice to get some more teams signed up to provide confidence in the future viability. Comments from people who know more is welcome. Uninformed speculation is less so.
We are at war with Iran (and really, have been for almost thirty years now), but we apparently have to continue to pretend otherwise.
Twice before the military has tried to present to the press overwhelming evidence of Iran
Tapping the jet stream?
And have we overemotionalized the climate debate? The most interesting thing about this article is the source.
[Update in the afternoon]
From comments:
What kind of an axe does Rand then have to grind here? It seems to be just hypocricy. We see a string of climate articles with his blurbs suggesting “Warmmongers are in trouble” or some such. Why oh why?
Because the policy outcomes, if global warming is admitted to be real, are something he is against in principle? And yet he advocates against denying evolution in a few posts to the side. Oh, the irony.
My “axe to grind,” if I have one, is that I am a skeptic (not a “denier”) on the need to up-end our economy for climate change, as I am on all religions. If global warming is “real,” we’ll deal with it as the effects become evident, and we’ll have a much better chance of having the resources in the future with which to deal with it if we don’t panic about it right now.
My “axe to grind” is against the overrighteous and hypocritical moralists who want to preach to the rest of us how to live while refusing to live by their own sermons, and purchasing indulgences for themselves. It is against the watermelon socialists who are using this new religion as a means to implement the collectivist (and ultimately totalitarian) social goals that they couldn’t achieve in the Cold War.
This long ago ceased to be about science. And, FWIW, evolution remains on much more solid footing than climate models.