VISUALIZING THE IMPOSSIBLE
In this occasional series on science, which started a year ago (2/06) with The Search for Dark Matter, I discussed Einstein's concept of special relativity last August in A Personal Journey Through Relativity. Jack Wheeler provided an engaging account of it two years ago (2/05) in Aristotle, Einstein, and Ayn Rand. Einstein though did not have a Theory of Relativity -- ‘a' as in one. He had two. His Special Theory is about the relativity of time. His General Theory is about the relativity of gravity. The puzzles and paradoxes of the first pale in comparison to those of the second. So much so that most anyone can visualize clocks telling time at different rates and astronauts coming back from another galaxy much younger than the people they left on earth. The math and explanations may be hard but one can at least visualize the effects of special relativity. It seems well-nigh impossible to visualize gravity not as a force but as a manifestation of curved space.
TRUTH, CONSENSUS, AND INTELLIGENCE FAILURES
The Mother of All Corrections issued by the Washington Post Saturday (2/10) illustrates what is wrong with our intelligence agencies, and -- especially -- with news coverage of them. The inspector general of the Department of Defense had been asked by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee (and now, alas, its chairman), to determine whether the intelligence analysis on Iraq done by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans under then Under Secretary Douglas Feith violated the law. On Feb. 8, acting Inspector General Thomas Gimble issued his report. Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith wrote a story about it, which appeared on the front page of last Friday's paper. They managed to confuse the IG report with a press release sent out by Sen. Levin over two years ago.
LIGHTWEIGHT JACKASSES, HEAVYWEIGHT ELEPHANTS
All the CW (conventional wisdom) talk in DC here is about how the Republicans are deep in doom over their prospects for the presidency in 2008 while the Dems are high in the sky. Don't buy it. It's the Defeatocrats who are in deep kim-chee. There are now 9 - nine - of them running for their party's presidential nomination: Joe Biden, Wesley Clark, Chris Dodd, John Edwards, Dennis Kucinich, Bill Richardson, Tom Vilsack, Barack Hussein Obama Jr, and Hillary Clinton. Lightweight City. Only one of them can be taken seriously, possibly two. Kucinich is a pint-sized left-wing moonbat. Dodd is a tall left-wing moonbat who loves Fidel Castro. Clark is a flake on a ego-trip. Richardson has a room-temperature IQ. The Breck Boy (Edwards) is a Jay Leno joke (re: his rich/poor "Two Americas" campaign theme, Leno shows a picture of his $12 million mansion and quips, "We know which America he lives in"). None of them have an ounce of gravitas, political weight, heft, seriousness. Lighter than any of them, however, is The Obamarama. He is nothing but a media creation of hype and frenzy, stories about whom are more appropriate in the supermarket tabloids among the latest breathless revelations regarding Brad and Jen and Jolie. The PIAPS is as good as the Dems have got. Now let's look at the other party's roster.
THE SKELETON IN ISLAM’S CLOSET
I very much appreciated the responses and comments regarding The Fragility of Islamofascism posted in the TTP User Forum. I also received requests to explain the Koran's "Satanic Verses" more fully. The saga of the Satanic Verses starts with the earliest accounts of Mohammed's life written by accepted Islamic scholars such as Ibn Ishaq (died 767 AD) and al-Tabari (d. 923). "Accepted" means by Islamic tradition. Mohammed supposedly died in 632 and Ishaq wrote about him over 100 years later - so could not have interviewed anyone who knew him. Yet we only know of Ishaq through quotes of him by Tabari, who lived 300 years after Mohammed. Thus the earliest source of Mohammed's life and the alleged founding of Islam was written three centuries later. The saga of Mohammed is a myth for which there is no genuine historical evidence whatever. I discussed this in The Myth of Mecca, written a few days after the Moslem attack on America of September 11, 2001. So we are talking "sacred history" here, not actual history.
HILLARY IN DANGER
The 2008 Democrat presidential primary season has gotten off to a good start -- for the Republicans. As the Democrat Party presidential aspirants finished their speeches last week to the party's winter meeting, the early big political fact is the dangerous populist and anti-war pull that the candidates feel. This is particularly dangerous for Sen. Hillary Clinton as she ratchets-up, almost weekly, her anti-war Iraqi rhetoric and policy. Only Jimmy Carter after the Watergate scandal and her husband after the fall of the Soviet Union got a pass from the American electorate on their national-security shortcomings. Hillary won't be so lucky.
REPUBLIC TO OLIGARCHY: A History of America
At the close of the Constitutional Convention of 1787, Benjamin Franklin, then 81, had gained a reputation for shrewd realism. The handiwork of the Continental Congress impressed him, but he believed it imperfect; he knew it was better than any other plan for government on earth but he feared the plan might not survive. As he left the Convention for the last time, a group of anxious citizens asked him what kind of government the delegates had created. The deliberations were secret and, so, the curiosity of Philadelphians had reached a fever pitch. Responding to the inquiry, Dr. Franklin replied, "a republic, if you can keep it." Sadly, 220 years later, we have lost it. Today our nation is largely run by the unelected heads of the federal independent regulatory commissions. Those heads are the most powerful political leaders in the United States, more powerful than the President, any member of Congress, and any federal judge. Their will is very much the law. In their hands rest legislative, executive, and judicial powers which they wield daily without having to answer to anyone for the consequences. They rule as oligarchs. A simple legal fix could put an end to their unconstitutional rule.
HANGING UP ON ALGORE
To say the earth is as warm as its ever been since the invention of the thermometer isn't as scary as alarmists think. The mercury thermometer was invented by Gabriel Fahrenheit in 1714. That was in the middle of the Little Ice Age (AD 1350-1900). Of course temperatures are warmer now than they were then. Dr. Bob Carter, a paleoclimate researcher at James Cook University in Australia, notes that for most of the last six million years, average global temperatures were as much as five degrees Celsius warmer than they are today. As each new piece of evidence weakens their argument, global warming alarmists try to shut off debate. They claim a consensus which does not exist. The National Registry of Environmental Professionals took a survey last November, which indicated two thirds of its members think global warming is a serious problem. That means a third do not. So much for consensus. Skeptics are, global warming alarmists say, a "fringe" who are paid by CO2-spewing corporations to express doubt. But numbered among the skeptics are some of the world's most renowned climatologists, such as Richard Lindzen of MIT and Patrick Michaels of the University of Virginia. All have better credentials than does the divinity school dropout who invented the Internet and from whom alarmists take their cues.
HEDGED IN BY BUREAUCRATS
What is a "hedge fund"? If you have trouble answering the question, you are not alone, because the term is commonly used to describe many types of pooled investments that may have little in common with each other. Yet despite the lack of agreement about what exactly are hedge funds, a host of politicians, commentators and financial regulators now advocate more regulation of them. I am sure you are just so surprised.
REGIME CHANGE IN KOREA
Note that neither "North" nor "South" is prefixed to Korea, for we are talking about coming regime change in both. The current ruling anti-American, anti-capitalist, pro-appeasement party ruling South Korea is about to be replaced by its opposite: pro-American, pro-capitalist, anti-appeasement. Its leaders are determined to precipitate the collapse of North Korea's communist tyranny. They plan to do it with the help of the Communist Chinese. And George Bush.
THE REAL SURGE AND THE PHONY CIVIL WAR
The Traitor Media and their Democrat allies are so fond of chanting the mantra of "the civil war in Iraq." Google "civil war" plus "Iraq" and you'll get 3,800,000 hits. Barack Hussein "The Apostate" Obama and other lefty Senators condemn Bush for sending Americans to "die in someone else's civil war." The truth is that there is no civil war in Iraq. A real civil war is two armies or armed militias fighting each other for control of a government or country. They fight each other. This is exactly what Sunni and Shia terrorists are not doing. They are engaged in committing terrorist atrocities upon each other's civilian population. What is going on in Iraq is terrorism, pure and unadulterated. You can call it "sectarian" terrorism and violence, but it's not civil war. Neither Sunni-Baathist-AQI (Al Qaeda in Iraq) terrorists nor Shia-Moqtada terrorists are fighting to topple the elected Maliki government and seize governmental power. Neither is fighting the other. Meanwhile, Senators and Congressistas and the Media are all blathering on about the 21,000 extra troops to be positioned mostly in downtown Baghdad. But that's really a diversion, a small part of the real surge.