This essay, on the power of faith in waging war is extremely provocative. Here is the final sentence:
That is the weakness of reason, Winston Smith’s weakness: to stop when there is no reason to continue. And that is the power of faith: to go on without the answers, but to go on.
On of the criticisms [...]
Austin Bay at TCS Daily
Diplomats and military analysts continue to debate The War of the Rockets. The conventional wisdom — or more accurately, the wisdom of first impressions — said Israel lost the military war and Hezbollah won by surviving.
I don’t think we will have a clear answer on who won and who lost (or [...]
MIT’s inconvenient scientist – The Boston Globe
This is the criminalization of opposition to global warming,” says Lindzen, who adds he has never communicated with the auto companies involved in the lawsuit. Of course Lindzen isn’t a fake scientist, he’s an inconvenient scientist. No wonder you’re not supposed to listen to him.
Read the whole thing.
I worry [...]
Christopher Hitchens recaps in Slate Magazine
Well worth reading.
I, along with many others, find David Corn’s phrasing:
one of the ironies of the Plame investigation: that the initial leak, seized on by administration critics as evidence of how far the White House was willing to go to smear an opponent, came from a man who had no [...]
The media didn’t exactly cover itself with glory during the Israeli-Hezbollah confrontation, as the abulance episode I linked to previously showed. Townhall.com has a round-up of several other examples.
First off, I don’t think that the media as a whole is trying to lie, rather I think this sort of thing the result of a bunch [...]
Experts make robotic welly wanger
Thankfully we no longer have to manually wang our wellys, those of us that have wellys anyway.
Random Gemini Weirdness and Bruce Schneier have very similar posts that make the claim that over reactions to terror threats, or people that might be terrorist threats are ‘giving the terrorists what they want’ and doing their work for them.
I certainly won’t argue that some of the recent airline news has obviously been an overreaction [...]
The Red Cross Ambulance Incident
On the night of July 23, 2006, an Israeli aircraft intentionally fired missiles at and struck two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances performing rescue operations, causing huge explosions that injured everyone inside the vehicles. Or so says the global media, including Time magazine, the BBC, the New York Times, the Los Angeles [...]
Bloomberg.com
France will contribute an extra two battalions — 1,600 soldiers — to a United Nations peacekeeping force in Lebanon and is willing to lead it, President Jacques Chirac said on national television late today.Chirac said he has received enough guarantees about the role of the UN Interim Force in Lebanon in creating a buffer between [...]
CNN.com
Leading astronomers declared Thursday that Pluto is no longer a planet under historic new guidelines that downsize the solar system from nine planets to eight.After a tumultuous week of clashing over the essence of the cosmos, the International Astronomical Union stripped Pluto of the planetary status it has held since its discovery in 1930. The [...]
