You have to see this video. You really, honestly have to see it. It is in wmv format, however, so some people might have a problem if they are not using Windows Media Player. Pamela Hess, the UPI reporter who I posted about a while back has just returned from Iraq. Her description of what she saw is important. Her description of why it is sickeningly wrong to simply walk away from the war is even more so. It is not about whether we should have gone to war in the first place. That debate is long over and meaningless now.
This is the war we have. Not the war we wished for or the war we didn't want at all. This is win or lose. And if we lose, and a withdrawal will be losing, a lot of innocent people will die as a result. The blood of those people will be on the hands of the people who forced the withdrawal. Period.
Iran has formally and publicly endorsed the publicly stated Democratic party agenda to force an American withdrawal from Iraq.
But Iran's deputy foreign minister for legal and international affairs, Abbas Araghchi, used the occasion to accuse the international forces in Iraq of playing a double game.
"It will help resolve the problem of violence if they set a timetable for withdrawal of their troops from Iraq," he said. He condemned attacks on religious places and gatherings five days after a double suicide attack on a crowd of Shia pilgrims killed at least 117 Iraqis in the central city of Hilla.
The meeting was a "test" of whether the United States was serious in trying to solve Iraq's problems. "Teheran stands ready to help bring peace and stability to Iraq," he said. Earlier, Mr Khalilzad and Iraq's prime minister, Nouri al-Maliki, had called on neighbouring countries to halt the supply of weapons and recruits to sectarian armed groups fighting in Iraq.
How very proud you must be to know you have such fine allies.
Courtesy of commenter Sean (which resulted in a longish battle with Google video to get it to post properly - Don't they own YouTube now? Get that little crimp worked out, guys.) here is the BBC program I mentioned the other day. It's called the Great Global Warming Swindle and it should be required viewing for everyone, true believer or "denier". Because it is vital to have a realistic discourse about this issue and not one framed by a political belief structure driven by a neo-religious zealotry that labels any dissent as heresy that must be suppressed. Some people are already trying to get people fired and blacklisted for failing to toe the line in the "consensus" opinion. Are re-education camps far behind? (Warning: This is the whole show and is over an hour in length. Stock up on popcorn.)
Tigerhawk notes something that a lot of people have missed. The Democrats, in a naked attempt to buy enough votes to get their "force surrender in Iraq" measure passed have stuffed $20 billion in pork barrel spending projects into the bill.
I, for one, find it both fascinating and unbelievably dispiriting that at least some Democratic Congressmen regard their vote to withdraw from Iraq as just another opportunity for legislative horse-trading, and that the Democratic Congressional leadership sees nothing wrong with pandering to that attitude.
Democrats seeking votes for their Iraq-withdrawal plan have stuffed the bill it's in with billions of dollars for farms, flu preparedness, New Orleans levees, home heating and other causes.
…….Democrats are, in effect, buying and selling the lives and limbs of American soldiers and countless Iraqis….
This is about the lowest I have ever seen politicians go in either party. Unable to muster the spine to actually go for a straight up or down vote, this is the route the Democrats have chosen.
It seems that every, single time there is a law passed allowing handguns to be used or carried, there are dire predictions from anti-gun zealots. The streets, they say, will soon run ankle deep in blood as a direct result of the passage of…(insert law). When Florida passed carry laws, the predictions were made. Nothing of the sort happened. Other states pass concealed carry laws, out roll the predictions. Nothing of the sort ever occurs. So it is today that the Washington Post predicts wholesale carnage in Washington, DC after the Federal Appeals Court decision striking down major parts of that city's draconian gun ban.
IN OVERTURNING the District of Columbia's long-standing ban on handguns yesterday, a federal appeals court turned its back on nearly 70 years of Supreme Court precedent to give a new and dangerous meaning to the Second Amendment. If allowed to stand, this radical ruling will inevitably mean more people killed and wounded as keeping guns out of the city becomes harder. Moreover, if the legal principles used in the decision are applied nationally, every gun control law on the books would be imperiled.
The 2 to 1 decision by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit struck down sections of a 1976 law that bans city residents from having handguns in their homes. The court also overturned the law's requirement that shotguns and rifles be stored disassembled or with trigger locks. The court grounded its unprecedented ruling in the finding that the Second Amendment right to bear arms extends beyond militias to individuals. The activities the Second Amendment protects, the judges wrote, "are not limited to militia service, nor is an individual's enjoyment of the right contingent upon his or continued intermittent enrollment in the militia."
I note, rather dryly, that there appears to be no obstacle to criminals getting guns in Washington whatsoever, since gun crime there is quite rampant. Gun laws in general only keep guns out of the hands of those who obey the laws in the first place. I'll be willing to predict that there will not be ankle deep blood in Washington, DC anymore than there have been in any other place that allows gun ownership. (What anti-gun zealots fear in this ruling is the confirmation of an individual right to bear arms, specifically and clearly stated. That will bring the screeching to a crescendo.)
Rumors are swirling in the technology industry that Apple is considering making a computer with no hard disk drive. Instead, the computer would use flash memory for data storage. This could spell real trouble for hard disk manufacturers.
The maker of the popular iPod music player and Macintosh computers hopes to introduce so-called flash memory in small computers known as subnotebooks in the second half of 2007, Shaw Wu, an analyst at American Technology Research who has a "buy" rating on Apple shares and does not own any stock, said in investor notes on Wednesday and Thursday.
A shift to flash memory in place of much slower hard-disk drives would eliminate one headache for consumers: lengthy start-up times when turning on computers.
Apple of Cupertino, California, already uses flash memory in its iPod Nano and iPod Shuffle music players. Flash memory is lighter, uses less power and takes up less space than hard-disk drives.
Wu, who was among the first analysts to forecast the unveiling of Apple's iPhone music player/phone earlier this year, cited unnamed industry sources as the basis for his report.
"The time is right for the flash makers to make a move" as flash memory prices decline, Wu said by telephone. "Apple, from what we understand, is pretty much ready. The ball is in the flash vendors' court."
Apple spokeswoman Lynn Fox said the company does not comment "on rumor and speculation." Apple shares were up 60 cents, or 0.7 percent, at $88.32 in early afternoon trading on Nasdaq.
A transition to flash memory for computers could put pressure on makers of traditional hard-disk drives including Seagate Technology, the largest U.S. hard-disk drive maker, Wu said.
I've got a little (by today's standards) 1 gigabyte flash drive that I use a lot to transfer data between computers. It is a heck of a lot easier to use than the old floppy disks were and has an enormously larger capacity. It really is only a matter of time until a completely solid-state computer hits the market. The question is, can they make enough memory fit into the same amount of space as some of the monster hard drives that are available today? That will be the real challenge. Anyone else notice that Apple appears to be regaining its position as a technology leader?
The British, who have a rather long record of failure in Afghanistan, actually have a chance at being on the winning side there for a change. The Times of London examines how to win in Afghanistan. The answer is in that very trite and overused phrase, winning hearts and minds.
The British knew that the Taleban were a self-generating ball that would always bounce back, regardless of short-term defeat, unless the majority of Pashtuns in the south rejected the insurgents from within their own communities. To win the counter-insurgency campaign, the British aimed to cleave the Taleban from the local population through hearts and minds, as well as fighting operations.
Yet, as last summer dragged into autumn, the mission’s language was only that of the gun: reconstruction efforts in central Helmand, so crucial to winning over Afghan civilians with the promise of a better life, remained stymied amid heavy fighting.
However, the Taleban suffered a similar failure in their intent. The insurgents’ mistaken efforts last summer to concentrate their forces around Kandahar, the centre of gravity for southern Afghanistan — where in 1994 they had been well received by a population exhausted by civil war — were smashed by Nato attacks. More importantly, this time there was no groundswell uprising of locals in support of the Talebs.
There were a number of reasons for the Talebs’ inability to regenerate a popular jihad. The Pashtuns well remember the Soviet occupation, and most so far remain canny enough to realise that Nato’s presence and behaviour is totally dissimilar. The Soviets were an occupying force that alienated the entire country through their barbaric behaviour. By contrast, Nato was invited into Afghanistan to establish security by a president elected by the Afghan people. Though many of his former supporters are now sick of President Hamid Karzai’s ineffectual and remote leadership, Afghans have yet to lend their backing to the Talebs, whose tenure they recall as much for its feudal inefficiency as its austere disciplinarianism.
NATO forces have a chance to win the war there by using more than just force. This is the same recipe for success that the US commander in Iraq is calling for there, incidentally. The Afghan people are not looking back fondly at the rule of the Taliban. At least not yet.
Jeremy Bernstein, writing in the New York Times, offers a concise history of how uranium centrifuges and other nuclear weapons technologies proliferated since the end of of the Second World War. As he says at the end of his piece, if someone had written the real story as a novel, nobody would have believed it.
A third group, headed by a physicist named Max Steenbeck, investigated the centrifuge. Dr. Steenbeck, who had been arrested by the Soviets and put in a concentration camp in Poland, had previously been in charge of research for the division of Siemens that dealt with aircraft. While in captivity he wrote a letter to the Soviet secret police, the N.K.V.D., explaining his scientific background; he also ended up in Sukhumi. Dr. Steenbeck began with a small group and some antiquated Soviet centrifuges that certainly could not have been used to separate uranium isotopes.
In the summer of 1946 they were joined by an Austrian physicist named Gernot Zippe. Dr. Zippe had been in the Luftwaffe during the war and, after having been taken prisoner in the summer of 1946, he went from a prison camp to the relative luxury of Sukhumi, thanks to the initiative of Dr. von Ardenne. Neither Dr. Zippe nor Dr. Steenbeck had ever worked on centrifuges, but within two years they created the best centrifuge in the world — although at the time they did not know it. (To give some idea of its capacity, a typical laboratory centrifuge makes a few thousand rotations a minute. The Zippe centrifuge — this is the common name, although Dr. Zippe himself refers to it as the “Russian centrifuge” — can do 90,000 rotations a minute.)
Read the whole thing. It is impossible to know exactly how much, if any, involvement the Pakistani government itself had in the spread of the technologies. But certain official factions may well have been involved. We can't find out because Pakistan will not allow Abdul Qadeer Khan to be interviewed. But both North Korea and Iran got their centrifuge technology from Pakistan at Khan's nuclear flea market.
War | Gaius Saturday, 10 March , 2007 | 
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