William F. Buckley Betrays Country!

I'm looking for this headline. When Howard Dean made similar remarks two months ago, he was pilloried by a number of conservative pundits as a traitor. Somehow I don't think Buckley in the National Review is going to get equal treatment even though Buckley's remarks were a notch stronger than Dean's.

Gender Practices Inhibit Men From Being Better Dads

Male-supremacists, take that! Allowing men to be more involved with their children makes them better dads.

Stealth Jet Engines?

The same type of sound-cancelling technology that makes a luxury car quiet is getting scaled up. Are truly silent black helicopters very far away?

Natural Selection Proven

Another vindication of Darwin. Natural selection has always been suspected as the driving force in speciation. Now it's been vindicated.

Gitmo Occupants

Are the prisoners in Guantanamo really the "worst of the worst" as the administration (hswib) contends? Perhaps, and perhaps not. Given what statistics can be derived from the governments own documents there is reason to question that contention. There is anecdotal evidence that many prisoners are there just because a single informant turned them in to the Pakistanis. Later that informant himself was fingered. His original victims remain nonetheless.

And yet not a single one has had a fair and transparent hearing that demonstrates there is just cause for detaining them. All we have is the administration's (hswib) word for it. And its credibility has trended downward from the beginning.

Gregoire

Elected in a squeaker, this governor is proving to genuinely effective.

Campaign Financing That Works

Kevin Drum highlights a campaign reform plan that seems to fix many of the problems with McCain-Feingold. Unfortunately it looks like both candidates in the Maine gubernatorial race are going to do it the old-fashioned way, fat-cat financing.

The Grand Experiment Begins

And it begins in South Dakota of all places. If the SD law passes and eventually gets blessed by the new and improved Supreme Court, we will get to see once again the type of tragedies
that existed prior to Roe. Those who don't know the history are doomed to repeat it. Perhaps we will return to our senses when the current generation of women begin to pay the price.

Death Sentence

When Dilation and Extraction becomes illegal in all circumstances it will be a death sentence for the thousand or so women who have the misfortune of being pregnant with a fetus with hydrocephalus. The babies will die anyway and will take their mothers with them. Who gets to be the target of the wrongful death suits? The Supreme Court? The legislators that pass such stupid laws? Or the people that advocate them?

Hens Have Teeth!

Another arrow in the evolution quiver. Chickens have the genes to produce crocodilian teeth. Hens teeth not so rare after all.

Black Smokers as Mining Claims

A potentially rich new source of munerals could be the area around hot undersea vents.

Coral Dies

Another consequence of global warming is increasing acidification of the ocean as more and more CO2 get dissolved in the seawater. This isn't good news for coral that is already stressed by rising temperatures.

Rad Waste Technology

This is of interest to the local economy. A lower temperature alternative to the vitrification plant currently under construction may not be a bad thing.

Get out of Australia, 'radical' Muslims told

A friend of mine pointed me to this. Last year Australian Treasurer Peter Costello made an interesting public statement.

Treasurer Peter Costello, seen as heir apparent to Howard, hinted that some radical clerics could be asked to leave the country if they did not accept that Australia was a secular state and its laws were made by parliament.

"If those are not your values, if you want a country which has Sharia law or a theocratic state, then Australia is not for you," he said on national television.

"I'd be saying to clerics who are teaching that there are two laws governing people in Australia, one the Australian law and another the Islamic law, that that is false."

"If you can't agree with parliamentary law, independent courts,democracy, and would prefer Sharia law and have the opportunity to go to another country which practises it, perhaps, then, that's a better option," Costello said.

Do you think this is good way to go?

The Lessons of Counterinsurgency

Buried in all the disappointing news from Iraq, there are a few things being done right. Some of our forces have the smarts and the opportunity to make a genuine difference in this troubled nation. Unfortunately it is too few for too short a time.

Weird

A new experiment has now demonstrated “quantum telecloning” – transporting a whole laser beam to two separate places.link

You read right. With quantum entanglement a laser beam has been teleported instantaneously producing two copies some distance apart.

Tortured Memo

Dissension among administration lawyers:

One of the Pentagon's top civilian lawyers repeatedly challenged the Bush administration's policy on the coercive interrogation of terror suspects, arguing that such practices violated the law, verged on torture and could ultimately expose senior officials to prosecution, a newly disclosed document shows. The lawyer, Alberto J. Mora, a political appointee who retired Dec. 31 after more than four years as general counsel of the Navy, was one of many dissenters inside the Pentagon. Senior uniformed lawyers in all the military services also objected sharply to the interrogation policy, according to internal documents declassified last year.But Mr. Mora's campaign against what he viewed as an official policy of cruel treatment, detailed in a memorandum he wrote in July 2004 and recounted in an article in the Feb. 27 issue of The New Yorker magazine, made public yesterday, underscored again how contrary views were often brushed aside in administration debates on the subject.

Warming Faster than ever

These my indeed be the provebial "interesting times" of the Chinese curse. We may have compressed 10,000 years of warming into 300 years. Brace yourselves. It looks like the long-foretold apocalyptic disaster is upon us.

Faith-based Conservatism

Orcinus

draws together several aspects of the phenomenum quite nicely.

No irony here

Plame gets outed by officials at the highest level just to help bolster the weak case for the Iraq war. But if you blow the whistle on potentially illegal acts by the President you had better watch out.