General Science

A “Transitional” Species

Despite the date, I suspect that this is on the level. They’ve apparently discovered a link between fish and amphibians.

The fossil, a 365-million-year-old arm bone, or humerus, shares features with primitive fish fins but also has characteristics of a true limb bone. Discovered near a highway roadside in north-central Penn., the bone is the earliest of its kind from any limbed animal.

“It has long been understood that the first four-legged creatures on land arose from the lobed-finned fishes in the Devonian Period,” said Rich Lane, director of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) geology and paleontology program. “Through this work, we’ve learned that fish developed the ability to prop their bodies through modification of their fins, leading to the emergence of tetrapod limbs.”

I have the word “transitional” in quotes in the post title because it’s a meaningless, superfluous adjective. All species are transitional species, in the sense that they evolved from one and are likely (assuming they don’t go extinct) to evolve into yet others in the future. Or at least that was the case until we came along.

General Science

A “Transitional” Species

Despite the date, I suspect that this is on the level. They’ve apparently discovered a link between fish and amphibians.

The fossil, a 365-million-year-old arm bone, or humerus, shares features with primitive fish fins but also has characteristics of a true limb bone. Discovered near a highway roadside in north-central Penn., the bone is the earliest of its kind from any limbed animal.

“It has long been understood that the first four-legged creatures on land arose from the lobed-finned fishes in the Devonian Period,” said Rich Lane, director of the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) geology and paleontology program. “Through this work, we’ve learned that fish developed the ability to prop their bodies through modification of their fins, leading to the emergence of tetrapod limbs.”

I have the word “transitional” in quotes in the post title because it’s a meaningless, superfluous adjective. All species are transitional species, in the sense that they evolved from one and are likely (assuming they don’t go extinct) to evolve into yet others in the future. Or at least that was the case until we came along.

General

Demeaning Men

Glenn is having a little dispute with Josh Chafetz over whether commercials and programs that depict men as fools and/or weaklings (relative to women) are a good or bad thing. While I agree with Glenn’s point, I wonder how much of this is a backlash from previous days when the reverse was true. I’m going to be heretical here and say that I never “loved Lucy.” I never found it all that funny, but moreover, if I were a woman I would be appalled at the image that she represented–she was a perpetual adolescent, with no common sense, and values so shallow that they’d be swamped by a dry lake. I don’t watch the show, but on those occasions that I have, I was embarrassed for her.

On the other hand, this is anecdotal, because I can’t think of any other show, off the top of my head, in which women were depicted as such self-centered idiots as that one. I wonder if anyone has ever done any research on the relative depictions of men versus women on television and radio over the decades, to see if there has been any overall change. Could be a good topic for a sociology thesis.

War Commentary

Street Theatre

David Warren has a depressing column on Fallujah, and how our own media undermines our efforts.

…we come to the next stage of an unpleasant proposition. In its selective use of explosive imagery, the media have a power equivalent to that which the terrorists have in the selective use of explosive devices. There is an overlapping agenda, too: for the great majority of both terrorists and journalists consider the Bush administration to be their principal adversary. (On the other hand, they differ on the need for the imposition of Sharia law.)

But the bottom line remains:

In its recent experience in Iraq and elsewhere, the U.S. is finding what the Israelis have long since not wanted to know. Michael Oren is an Israeli veteran, and the brilliant author of the definitive history of the Six Day War. When I had coffee with him, recently, he said: “If you strike back, you will encourage terrorism. And if you don’t strike back, you will encourage terrorism.”

You let them walk over you, or you fight. It’s true that fighting makes them even angrier, but it helps to wipe them out.

In the face of such graphic images, it’s easy to forget that much of Iraq is now at peace, with prospects for future prosperity and freedom increasing daily.

Fallujah is the last stand of the Ba’athist regime, with a significant population of those who benefited from it at the expense of most, and who remain unwilling to yield their power. It is, in fact, a microcosm of what all of Iraq was a year ago, before the liberation. It is a gang of brutal thugs, holding hostage a majority of the populace within it, living in an unreality like Saddam’s–the notion that bluster, brutality, deceit and murder will somehow fend off the Americans. As they will find out shortly, it is they, not we, who are fighting the last war, having learned too well the false lesson of Mogadishu.

We are paying the price now for not conquering it when we went in last March.

As many (including me, and more eloquently, David Warren) pointed out at the time, last year’s military activities were less a war than the ending and resolution of a massive hostage situation, the removal of a gang of criminals that had gained sway over the territory of Iraq, maintaining their power by terrorizing its inhabitants.

Their territory, the so-called Sunni Triangle, has now been reduced to a very small portion of that original area, and what we did to the tyranny of Iraq at large then we must do to the thankfully much smaller one in Fallujah now. Like then, it will have to be done as precisely as possible, with as little damage to innocents and infrastructure as possible, but it must be done, and I think it will.

[Update]

They think they’ve identified at least some of the perps. And note this:

…they included former members of Iraq’s paramilitary forces and “non-Iraqi Arabs.”

Flypaper’s still working. More that we can kill there instead of having to defend against them here.

War Commentary

An “Elected” Leader

Speaking of spoiled children in Europe, now the EU is whining that Israel had better not kill the terrorist Arafat, because he’s an elected leader.”

What a crock. Even leaving aside the illegitimacy of his “election,” would they have said in 1943 that we shouldn’t have assassinated Hitler, because he was “an elected leader”?

Sadly, many of them probably would. And for those who say that assassinations are a bad idea because they may result in retaliatory assassinations, phooey. You have to consider the asymmetry of the situation.

Hitler’s brutal Germany (and Saddam’s Iraq–he was “elected” too, with almost a hundred percent of the vote) were those people personified. Kill Hitler or Saddam, and you kill the regime. On the other hand, in a true constitutional republic, a state consisting of laws rather than men, killing the head of state would simply result in a smooth transition to his replacement, and the war would continue with renewed ferocity.

Now arguably, unlike the Nazi Party, the PA might survive Arafat’s demise, but that’s no reason not to remove him. He is the murderous enemy of the state of Israel just as surely as bin Laden is ours, and he makes himself a legitimate target by his continued actions.

I suspect that what the EU is really worried about is that, with Arafat’s death, as with Saddam’s downfall, a lot of dirty laundry may come out in terms of the depths of the corruption of their dealings with him. Old Yasser reputedly has a some pretty sizable European bank accounts. How much of his thievery has he been kicking back to the Eurocrats?

[Update at 1 PM PST]

With whitewashes like this, we probably won’t find out as long as Arafat, or someone like him, continues to run the Palestinian Authority. Iraq was hardly the only swamp that needs to be drained over there.

She said: “This form of assistance has been subject to more scrutiny than any other area…No one has proven a direct link, it is as simple as that”.

Pointing to the lack of convictions of the people who money is suspected of being transferred to, she added that no link has been found between them and terrorist organisations.

However, Parliamentarians remain divided over whether this legalistic definition of evidence accurately reflects the situation.

War Commentary

An “Elected” Leader

Speaking of spoiled children in Europe, now the EU is whining that Israel had better not kill the terrorist Arafat, because he’s an elected leader.”

What a crock. Even leaving aside the illegitimacy of his “election,” would they have said in 1943 that we shouldn’t have assassinated Hitler, because he was “an elected leader”?

Sadly, many of them probably would. And for those who say that assassinations are a bad idea because they may result in retaliatory assassinations, phooey. You have to consider the asymmetry of the situation.

Hitler’s brutal Germany (and Saddam’s Iraq–he was “elected” too, with almost a hundred percent of the vote) were those people personified. Kill Hitler or Saddam, and you kill the regime. On the other hand, in a true constitutional republic, a state consisting of laws rather than men, killing the head of state would simply result in a smooth transition to his replacement, and the war would continue with renewed ferocity.

Now arguably, unlike the Nazi Party, the PA might survive Arafat’s demise, but that’s no reason not to remove him. He is the murderous enemy of the state of Israel just as surely as bin Laden is ours, and he makes himself a legitimate target by his continued actions.

I suspect that what the EU is really worried about is that, with Arafat’s death, as with Saddam’s downfall, a lot of dirty laundry may come out in terms of the depths of the corruption of their dealings with him. Old Yasser reputedly has a some pretty sizable European bank accounts. How much of his thievery has he been kicking back to the Eurocrats?

[Update at 1 PM PST]

With whitewashes like this, we probably won’t find out as long as Arafat, or someone like him, continues to run the Palestinian Authority. Iraq was hardly the only swamp that needs to be drained over there.

She said: “This form of assistance has been subject to more scrutiny than any other area…No one has proven a direct link, it is as simple as that”.

Pointing to the lack of convictions of the people who money is suspected of being transferred to, she added that no link has been found between them and terrorist organisations.

However, Parliamentarians remain divided over whether this legalistic definition of evidence accurately reflects the situation.

War Commentary

An “Elected” Leader

Speaking of spoiled children in Europe, now the EU is whining that Israel had better not kill the terrorist Arafat, because he’s an elected leader.”

What a crock. Even leaving aside the illegitimacy of his “election,” would they have said in 1943 that we shouldn’t have assassinated Hitler, because he was “an elected leader”?

Sadly, many of them probably would. And for those who say that assassinations are a bad idea because they may result in retaliatory assassinations, phooey. You have to consider the asymmetry of the situation.

Hitler’s brutal Germany (and Saddam’s Iraq–he was “elected” too, with almost a hundred percent of the vote) were those people personified. Kill Hitler or Saddam, and you kill the regime. On the other hand, in a true constitutional republic, a state consisting of laws rather than men, killing the head of state would simply result in a smooth transition to his replacement, and the war would continue with renewed ferocity.

Now arguably, unlike the Nazi Party, the PA might survive Arafat’s demise, but that’s no reason not to remove him. He is the murderous enemy of the state of Israel just as surely as bin Laden is ours, and he makes himself a legitimate target by his continued actions.

I suspect that what the EU is really worried about is that, with Arafat’s death, as with Saddam’s downfall, a lot of dirty laundry may come out in terms of the depths of the corruption of their dealings with him. Old Yasser reputedly has a some pretty sizable European bank accounts. How much of his thievery has he been kicking back to the Eurocrats?

[Update at 1 PM PST]

With whitewashes like this, we probably won’t find out as long as Arafat, or someone like him, continues to run the Palestinian Authority. Iraq was hardly the only swamp that needs to be drained over there.

She said: “This form of assistance has been subject to more scrutiny than any other area…No one has proven a direct link, it is as simple as that”.

Pointing to the lack of convictions of the people who money is suspected of being transferred to, she added that no link has been found between them and terrorist organisations.

However, Parliamentarians remain divided over whether this legalistic definition of evidence accurately reflects the situation.

Biting Commentary about Infinity…and Beyond!