Who Is To Blame?

Charles Krauthammer asks the question; who is really to blame for the deaths of Palestinian civilians?

Answer: This is another example of the Palestinians' classic and cowardly human-shield tactic — attacking innocent Israeli civilians while hiding behind innocent Palestinian civilians. For Palestinian terrorists — and the Palestinian governments (both Fatah and Hamas) that allow them to operate unmolested — it's a win-win: If their rockets aimed into Israeli towns kill innocent Jews, no one abroad notices and it's another success in the terrorist war against Israel. And if Israel's preventive and deterrent attacks on those rocket bases inadvertently kill Palestinian civilians, the iconic "Israeli massacre" picture makes the front page of the New York Times, and the Palestinians win the propaganda war.

But there is an even larger question not asked. Whether the rocket bases are near civilian beaches or in remote areas, why are the Gazans launching any rockets at Israel in the first place — about 1,000 in the past year?

To get Israel to remove its settlers, end the occupation and let the Palestinians achieve dignity and independence? But Israel did exactly that in Gaza last year. It completely evacuated Gaza, dismantled all its military installations, removed its soldiers, destroyed all Israeli settlements and expelled all 7,000 Israeli settlers. Israel then declared the line that separates Israel from Gaza to be an international frontier. Gaza became the first independent Palestinian territory ever.

Given their own territory, certain Palestinians choose to launch rockets into Israel. They set the rockets up to launch near civilians. Who is to blame when Israel responds? Given their own territory, certain Palestinians choose to send people wearing bombs into Israeli fast food restaurants packed with innocent people. Who is to blame when Israel finds and kills terrorist leaders with a missile strike?

It's time to stop feeding the victimhood complex of the people who are really to blame here.

Certain Palestinians, most certainly.

Read the rest.

Explore Mars

Here's an interesting article about the Snows of Udzha which explains quite a lot about the Martian ice cap.

Near one edge of the northern polar cap stands a curious feature named Udzha. Named for a town in Siberia, Udzha, which is 45 km (28 mi) across, is classified as a crater. Yet it's almost hidden from view as its sharp-edged, rocky rim peeks from under the polar cap's layers.

A newly released image of Udzha was taken at visible wavelengths during local summer. It comes from THEMIS, the Thermal Emission Imaging System, a multi-wavelength camera on  NASA's Mars Odyssey orbiter. We see Udzha surrounded by dark, stratified layers mostly covered with bright deposits of water ice.

The polar caps of Mars, which are large enough to be glimpsed even in backyard telescopes from Earth, form an archive of the planet's recent climate history. The record is written in layer after layer of dust and ice.

Each polar winter sees an accumulation of carbon-dioxide frost, which falls as light snow, condensing directly from the atmosphere as temperatures plunge to minus 130 degrees Celsius (minus 202 Fahrenheit). This produces a thin "polar cap" that reaches down to about latitude 60 degrees north. This layer resembles the layer of snow cover that collects in Earth's northern hemisphere every winter.

On Mars, the frost condenses around dust particles brought by the winds from all over the planet. When the frost disappears the following summer, it leaves the dust behind, along with the residual polar cap, which is made of water ice.

As years pass, the dusty layers slowly accumulate, while major climatic events interrupt the sequence from time to time. These events—still poorly understood by scientists—prevent the layered deposits from displaying a monotonous regularity.

Even better than the article, though is finding the THEMIS site, which has a LOT of very cool pictures of Mars.

An “A” For Stupidity

A police officer decided to attend a baseball game, which is perfectly fine. What was not fine was the fact that the officer decided to bring one of his tools of the trade along and to leave it covered in the back seat of his car. While he was enjoying the game, someone decided to break into his car and steal the tool.

Said tool being a submachine gun.

The narcotics officer from Oakland County's West Bloomfield Township left the weapon covered in the back seat of his Jeep while he attended a Detroit Tigers game Wednesday night at Comerica Park, West Bloomfield Police Chief Ron Cronin told local TV stations.

"He gets an `A' for stupidity in this case," Cronin said of the officer, whom he did not identify. "You can bet he's gonna be disciplined."

I'd say  it was an A+.

We’re Going To Disneyland

That's what one member of the University of Alabama-Huntsville team said at the 19th annual concrete canoe contest. Yep, it's exactly what the name says it is - a contest to build a concrete canoe. Teams from colleges all over the country enter and there is actually a national championship.

The 19th annual competition is organized by the American Society of Civil Engineers.

The teams competing for the championship put their boats through aesthetic, presentation and swamping tests on Thursday, with technical presentations on Friday and, finally, a series of races Saturday on Boomer Lake in Stillwater. Teams came from coast to coast and from Canada to the Gulf.

Mike Carnivale, chairman of the national competition committee, said designing, building and floating these concrete canoes pushed students to learn in a way they might not elsewhere.

"They learn about concrete, design, project management, the works," Carnivale said.

Matt Kinney, leaning against The Arrrgregate, a boat adorned with skulls-and-crossbones, said his team couldn't begin to calculate the hours that went into designing their boat. Just getting it from the University of Maine to the competition took 37 hours on the road.

"Our goal was to get here," Kinney said.

Interesting teaching tool, isn't it? These engineering competitions can get very creative. There's also one called the "Power Drive" for electric vehicles.

But the concrete canoe guys are aiming too low, I think. After all, there are a fair number of concrete ships still floating an various places. (The linked site is fascinating, by the way).

This Is Pretty Straightforward

Iran's foreign minister announced that Iran would ""use nuclear defense as a potential" if "threatened by any power." Which pretty well clears up any doubt about Iran's intentions with their nuclear program. Any apologists can now stop trying to cover for them.

Speaking following a meeting with his Syrian counterpart Hassan Ali Turkmani in Teheran on Thursday, Iranian Defense Minister Mostafa Mohammad Najjar emphasized that Iran "should be ready for confronting all kinds of threats."

Teheran has denied accusations by the US and its allies that Iran was seeking uranium enrichment technologies in order to develop nuclear weapons, saying its program was only meant to generate electricity.

Meanwhile, Turkmani told reporters that Syria and Iran's "policy is the policy of strengthening resistance and tackling the threats of United States and Israel."

He added that he wouldn't give details of joint defense plans against Israel, although the plans were "not secret."

Although I am sure there are some people busily trying to prove that the foreign minister was mis-translated and actually said something along the lines of, "Iran will use glow in the dark bonbons", I think the rest of us can pretty well trust what this means.

Sacrificing Your Human Decency…

…On the alter of partisan politics. (Via Jeff Goldstein. Thankfully, that means I don't have to link directly.)

Original Statement:  "Small wonder his mother killed herself.  Once she discovered what a despicable soul she had spawned she apparently saw no other way out".

"Improved" Statement: "This could explain why his mother killed herself. Once she discovered what a despicable soul she had spawned she apparently saw no other way out".

Either the original or the improved version is beyond the boundaries of civilized behavior and basic human decency. Period. Larry Johnson has crossed a line here. That this person is trotted out by the media as an "expert" whenever there's a need for an anti-administration quote shows how trumped up and phony their "outrage" over Ann Coulter is. Jeff puts it this way:

And yet these people—thanks mostly to their enablers in the press—are often trotted out as serious critics of the administration, and seldom shown for the vile and vicious anti-intellectual thugs that they are.  Whether it’s Howard Dean calling Republicans evil and saying he “hates” them; or John Murtha convicting soldiers of murder in advance of a full investigation; or a low-rent castoffs like Johnson, who the MSM routinely turns to when they need a good anti-war intelligence source, mustering up the guts to say that Karl Rove is responsible for his own mother’s suicide—the bile is there for all to sample, if only the MSM weren’t so good at controlling the information flow.

I have said before that while I agree with some of the points Ann Coulter has made in the past, I disagree with her way of saying those things. What Johnson wrote is much, much worse.

Anyone on the left care to denounce this? Or is it just too easy to be a hypocrite and denounce Coulter for less while giving someone on your side of politics a pass for much worse?