Some history, and advice for the future, from Charles Krauthammer:
So we have this half decade of American assertion. And it was an astonishing demonstration. In the mood of despair and disorientation of today, we forget what happened less than half a decade ago. The astonishingly swift and decisive success in Afghanistan, with a few hundred soldiers, some of them riding horses, directing lasers, organizing a campaign with indigenous Afghans, and defeating a regime in about a month and a half in a place that others had said was impossible to conquer; that the British and the Russians and others had left in defeat and despair in the past. It was an event so remarkable that the aforementioned Paul Kennedy now wrote an article, “The Eagle has Landed” (Financial Times, Feb. 2, 2002) in which he simply expressed his astonishment at the primacy, the power, and the unrivalled strength of the United States as demonstrated in the Afghan campaign.
After that, of course, was the swift initial victory in Iraq, in which the capital fell within three weeks. After that was a ripple effect in the region. Libya, seeing what we had done in Iraq, gave up its nuclear capacity; then the remarkable revolution in Lebanon in which Syria was essentially expelled. And that demarks the date that I spoke of. March 14 is the name of the movement in Lebanon of those who rose up against the Syrians and essentially created a new democracy
This is old news, and pretty inside baseball for new blog readers, but I would never have guessed who Stephanie Dupont was.
Great stuff, Will. It was hilarious. And kudos to Brian Linse as well, for putting it together. And if you weren’t around, you might want to follow the link from his site to Stephanie’s archives before reading the denouement.
Boy, the copy editors must have had a blast with those.
That last one is kind of ambiguous. I think that “plastic eating” should be hyphenated. As written, one could interpret it as the man was saving plastic while it was eating dolphins, or that he was saving plastic while he was eating dolphins. Neither of which is the actual story.
I used to have an hilarious book of journalism bloopers, including miswritten headlines. The book’s title was “Milk Drinkers Turn To Powder.” It included the classic from the Jimmy Carter era, on one of his speeches: “More Mush From The Wimp.”
This could be huge. I’d like to see it replicated as soon as possible. Some researchers may have come up with a cure for diabetes. And it’s an unconventional one, out of left field:
Dr. Dosch had concluded in a 1999 paper that there were surprising similarities between diabetes and multiple sclerosis, a central nervous system disease. His interest was also piqued by the presence around the insulin-producing islets of an “enormous” number of nerves, pain neurons primarily used to signal the brain that tissue has been damaged.
Suspecting a link between the nerves and diabetes, he and Dr. Salter used an old experimental trick — injecting capsaicin, the active ingredient in hot chili peppers, to kill the pancreatic sensory nerves in mice that had an equivalent of Type 1 diabetes.
“Then we had the biggest shock of our lives,” Dr. Dosch said. Almost immediately, the islets began producing insulin normally “It was a shock ? really out of left field, because nothing in the literature was saying anything about this.”
The only problem I see is that this is worse than stem cells from a human sacrifice standpoint. How many people will a small band like the Hot Chili Peppers be able to cure? Just how much capsaicin can they produce, and how fast?
This won’t put an end to the humans versus robots debate, but it should.
Via emailer Jon Bossard, who notes:
The argument that robotic missions are far cheaper and more effective than human missions is belied by the fact that, even with more than half a dozen robotic missions to Mars, we still don
The idea of people sitting at home in sweatpants watching a big TV while shoveling in the Haagen-Daz mortifies the social engineers; they can practically feel the planet wobble on its axis from the cumulative weight of so much freedom and prosperity.
The preferred model for a nice, controlled population is a dense city where your small apartment has a tiny fridge st0cked with bean curd molded into pleasant, food-like shapes. Trains take you to your job, which is either building trains, fixing trains, designing public service posters for trains, cleaning trains or writing software to operate trains. Once a week you’ll pull on your best taupe-hued hemp jumpsuit and take the train to the biweekly Culture Expo to hear something held up to enlightened ridicule (anything’s game, except Islam and Global Warming).
It may sound like hell itself, but at least it’s sustainable.
Makes me want to get in the SUV and head to McDonald’s. And I don’t even like McDonald’s.