Benedict XVI tries to repair relations with Muslims and Orthodox Christians

BBC NEWS | Europe | Pope makes Turkish mosque visit:
"The protest outside was linked to an Islamist-nationalist party, which said the pontiff's tour was an affront to the secularism enshrined in Turkey's constitution, as well as an attempt to stake a Catholic claim to the site."

Curious that the man is said to be in Turkey to atone for a slighting reference to the Muslim religion and is greeted by a protest which claims his visit is offensive to the secular nature of the Turkish government. The more so because, in his speech in Germany that was cited as the cause of so much rancor among Muslims, he did not make any slighting reference to the Muslim faith. Even more curious, the slighting references to Islam were alleged to have included the statement that its followers are violent as a matter of religious conviction - this being violently objected to by precisely the most violence-oriented elements of the Muslim world.

"BE ADEQUATE" - Lindsay Lohan

Lohan sends her condolences to Altman's family - USATODAY.com:
"I would like to send my condolences out to Catherine Altman, Robert Altmans wife, as well as all of his immediate family, close friends, co-workers, and all of his inner circle."

From that adequate beginning, the lovely and talented Ms. Lohan progressed to an apparently heartfelt appreciation for the opportunity to work with Robert Altman on his last film, A Prairie Home Companion. But her eloquence fails her and she ends with rambling thoughts on the vagaries of life and the admonition to "BE ADEQUATE."

Apparently Ms. Lohan is another victim of our education system - published reports say she was an "A" student. Someone should have introduced her to the works of Ralph Waldo Emerson who said, "Not failure, but low aim, is crime."

Truth about Global Warming

Substance and Action on Issues - Access to Energy - Pro-Science, Pro-Technology, Pro-Freedom :
"Attend a lecture by Dr. Robinson about global warming. This lecture was delivered at Southern Oregon University."

This 52-minute video by Dr. Art Robinson, founder of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, is well worth the time if you are interested in the subject of Global Warming. It is highly informative without being overly technical.

Also recommended is an essay - "Aliens Cause Global Warming" - by best-selling author and Hollywood writer/director (and Harvard-trained physician) Michael Crichton.

I offer these suggested materials as an antidote for the latest in gloom and doom - the claim by Prof. James Lovelock that it is already too late to prevent the collapse of the earth's ecosystem and a plunge in world population to no more than a half billion persons.

Judicial hubris

FT.com / World / International economy - Supreme Court clashes over climate change:
"The global political battle over climate change was also being fought at the US Supreme Court on Wednesday as judges bickered over the role of greenhouse gas emissions in global warming and disagreed on whether the Environmental Protection Agency had the power to refuse to regulate such emissions."

What a waste of time! And, worse than the waste of time is the fact that one bad precedent has already been set and another is likely.

This case should have been laughed out of court without a hearing on the merits of the case because it has none. No state or group of states has standing to sue a federal agency over what amounts to a policy disagreement. Back before the direct election of US senators, one of their major roles was to represent the interests of states, as states, in the federal legislative process. Now, the only recourse an aggrieved state has is to secede and adopt whatever policies it feels best serve the interests of its citizens.

Even if one concedes the point that a state has standing to sue over a policy dispute, the suit should still have been dismissed for failure to show that Congress ever intended to delegate power to EPA to regulate climate. While it has become fashionable to speak of GHGs as "pollutants," it is clear that was not what Congress envisioned when the EPA was formed, was not a role of any prior federal activity subsumed by EPA and has not been delegated to EPA since its inception.

Of course, no conceivable majority of the Supreme Court could ever consider a case like this in a constitutional manner - as their oath of office demands - because it would leave them without power to determine federal policy.

More on ballistic defense ... sweating the small stuff

Improved air defense system could be used to intercept rockets - Haaretz - Israel News :
"Lockheed carried out improvements of Skyshield so it will be able to intercept rockets, mortars and artillery shells."

"Star Wars" missile defense comes of age

India carries out anti-missile test - Yahoo! News:
"India has also been in talks with the Israel, the U.S. and Russia to buy a proven anti-missile defense system, and the Press Trust of India news agency quoted an unnamed defense officials as saying India would still pursue such options."

I remember when Gen. Daniel Graham and his associates got the Reagan administration to run with the idea of developing a missile defense system which they called the Strategic Defense Initiative and the commies, fellow travelers, useful idiots and Democrats ridiculed as Star Wars, telling us it would never work and if it would it would be a bad thing to have.

Well, here we are over 20 years later and the Chinese commies have threatened to destroy Los Angeles and San Diego with nuclear warheads, pieces of a North Korean test missile have fallen on Alaska, and the religious zealots of Iran are trying to build a nuclear warhead for missiles that can already reach as far as Italy.

It's a good thing that SDI has been puttering along - unappreciated and underfunded - all these years so that we are still seen as in the running as one of three countries that might be able to supply anti-missile defense systems to India.

"I've already told you more than I heard" - punch line of a joke about gossip

Women talk three times as much as men, says study | the Daily Mail:
"In The Female Mind, Dr Luan Brizendine says women devote more brain cells to talking than men."

This is another one for the "Somebody got paid to figure out what everyone already knows" file. However, Dr. Brize4ndine deserves a great deal of credit for following where the science leads her, even at the expense of her political principles.

"I know it is not politically correct to say this but I've been torn for years between my politics and what science is telling us.

"I believe women actually perceive the world differently from men."

Lebanon situation continiues to deteriorate

Corriere.it:
"As a precautionary measure, the authorities cancelled an Alitalia flight that was due to take 130 troops to Beirut to relieve some of the contingent."

For those who like to say that the problem in Iraq has something to do with Bush not being able to get the UN involved, look at the mess in Lebanon where the UN is in charge.

“'It could happen,' says General Franco Angioni, who knows Lebanon well, having led a contingent there in 1982, 'that the Hezbollah militia will take advantage of the chaos and attack Israel with encouragement from outside forces. Speaking cynically, we could say that such a development would not present any danger for our forces. The rockets would pass over their heads.'"

Fear of cheap Chinese imports ... guess where?

India, China Forge Ties, But Old Differences Fester - WSJ.com:
"... India remains wary of entering a free-trade agreement with China, mainly because trade officials fear a flood of cheap Chinese imports."

When absolute power is divorced from logic

Rwanda: Judge Bruguiere's Move Invalidated by ICTR:
"... Everard O'Donnell, spokesman for the tribunal tasked by the United Nations with judging the genocide, protested the French magistrate's methods: 'The ICTR prosecutor,' he said 'does not take instructions from anyone in the world.' Stressing that the prosecutor, Hassan Bubacar Jallow, was independent, even from the UN Security Council the spokesman rather gave to understand that this is not necessarily the case with all magistrates."

You probably remember the old joke about doctors thinking they are godlike; now it seems we have to add UN appointee Hassan Bubacar Jallow to that elite group. His spokesman, Mr. O'Donnell, assures us that Mr. Jallow is an unconstrained First Mover.

Of course, the logic of the situation suffers when one dares to ask how does one receive more power than the appointing authority possessed itself? To be fair, this is a problem for those staffing our own government, not just the UN.

But the logical fallacy I really want to point out here involves the official charters of the ICTR and Judge Bruguiere.

Here is Mr. O'Donnell giving the official justification for leaving the current leader of Rwanda unprosecuted for his past crimes: "The crash (of President Habyarimana's aircraft - Le Figaro editor's note) did not cause the genocide" and the late president's death (apparently regardless of criminality) is not a crime of the sort the ICTR was formed to prosecute.

Just so we all are on the same page, let's lay it out in one sentence. The assassination of President Habayarimana was a necessary step to allow the genocide of his tribe to proceed since he would have used the power of the government to prevent his fellow tribemen's murders.

So, Mr. O'Donnell and Mr. Jallow, let me suggest that the relevant point is not "did the plane crash cause the genocide?" - of course not. The appropriate question to ask is "did the genocide (i.e., the conspirators who brought it about and facilitated its devastation) cause the plane crash?" and here I think the answer may well be in the affirmative.

Paranoia in the desert

BREITBART.COM - Two-year-old Emirati boy held as airport threat:
"'They said they wanted my son, as the date of birth, the passport number and all other details in the system showed they had the correct Suhail.'"

Nice to know that airport security folks in Dubai are just as dumb as ours. They stop a two-year old from boarding a flight to Turkey with his parents on vacation because he was on a "watch list" that listed his name, date of birth and passport number.

The date of birth should have been a clue that the listing was bogus. How could a two-year old possibly appear on such a list except by error?

Among the many reasons I don't fly is that they let small children on airplanes. The noise and the smell with all those folks packed in like sardines was barely tolerable when you could smoke and get drunk - nowadays, forget it.

Neocons blame Bush, not themselves for Iraq debacle

Neo Culpa: Politics & Power: vanityfair.com:
"To David Frum, the former White House speechwriter who co-wrote Bush's 2002 State of the Union address that accused Iraq of being part of an 'axis of evil,' it now looks as if defeat may be inescapable, because 'the insurgency has proven it can kill anyone who cooperates, and the United States and its friends have failed to prove that it can protect them.' This situation, he says, must ultimately be blamed on 'failure at the center'—starting with President Bush."

One rather important point glossed over in the paragraph above is that any sufficiently ruthless adversary can accomplish this feat. While I fault Bush for taking us into Iraq on the fool's errand of turning the place into a liberal democracy, Bush's policies are not responsible for the terror campaign going on in Iraq. There was no set of policies which would have produced any other result - perhaps the best reason of all for not invading Iraq, but I can't claim to have considered that angle in opposing the invasion.

Back when Bush was gearing up for this misadventure, I was convinced that it wouldn't work just by looking at the sad state of democratic efforts in the region.

Turkey's democracy was founded by a classic man on horseback (Attaturk) at the head of an army (of Turks) and stumbles along with constant backstage pressure from the army and occasional extra-constitutional forays into military rule.

Pakistan's democracy has had a few fits of life against a backdrop of military rule.

Iran, after the Shah, utilizes democratic forms; but, no candidate may run, no official may serve, no policy may be implemented that does not conform to the wishes of a self-perpetuating clerical junta.

Egypt flirts with democratic reforms, but each move toward democracy only serves to empower the most ruthless segments of the ideological spectrum like the Muslim Brotherhood.

Algeria found the military had to intervene repeatedly to keep the crazies from taking power via the ballot box.

Against that kind of backdrop, I was amazed that anyone would think a foreign, especially an "infidel Crusader" army, could impose a stable democracy on an artificial state long held together only by extreme terror.

Read the Vanity Fair article for some interesting insights into neocon thinking about Bush and the war.