I haven't posted to this blog since last February--just too much to do lately. My Google Reader links blog is updated numerous times daily. The five most recent posts in my links blog appear in the left hand column of this page.

In "Trial in Error," Victoria Toensing "indicts others who were not indicted by a grand jury, but could have been.

Now that the "Libby trial about process not outing an agent" is over, what will the media write about the outcome? Libby would seem to be the loser either way due to the massive costs of his defense.

In "Against the grain: Some scientists deny global warming exists," Astrophysicist Nir Shariv describes his passage from man-made climate change believer to his present opinion. He has recanted: "Like many others, I was personally sure that CO2 is the bad culprit in the story of global warming. But after carefully digging into the evidence, I realized that things are far more complicated than the story sold to us by many climate scientists or the stories regurgitated by the media. "In fact, there is much more than meets the eye."

The article continues: Even doubling the amount of CO2 by 2100, for example, "will not dramatically increase the global temperature," Dr. Shaviv states. Put another way: "Even if we halved the CO2 output, and the CO2 increase by 2100 would be, say, a 50% increase relative to today instead of a doubled amount, the expected reduction in the rise of global temperature would be less than 0.5C. This is not significant."

Two takes on the politicization of science here and here.

Indiana Jones 4 will be filmed in 2007, and hit the screen in May 2008. Harrison Ford, 64, says that he is still fit enough to play the character.

I certainly hope that this movie is not the flop that the three Star Wars "prequels" were. The Indiana Jones sagas are terrific movies. I will definitely watch any of them should I happen to catch them on TV at virtually any time.

One of the great mass murderers of the twentieth century has paid the ultimate price for his crimes against humanity. Saddam Hussein was executed by the Iraqi government after a trial that by all credible accounts was much fairer than any that took place under his regime.

Reactions of all sorts are coming in. Many Iraqis, including Iraqi-Americans, are rejoicing. Extra security and higher alert status are in place to guard against Sunni/Baathist violence from any "Saddam dead-enders", or those who would use his death as a pretext for violence.

There has been an apparent car bombing at an airport parking garage in Madrid, Spain. As I type this at 1:02 AM Pacific time, CNN International reported the bombing, but did not report any claim of responsibility. It could have been done by Basque separatists, or another terrorist group.

The hope, slim though it may be, is that Saddam's death will remove some of the initiative for Sunnis to oppose peaceful progress in Iraq. The coming days will tell whether those hopes were pipe dreams or whether they may come to fruition someday.

Traditionally, the MSM and some in the blogosphere write about the biggest stories of the year and make predictions for the next. Wretchard writes a must-read treatise on "The Blogosphere at War" that is much more useful than the former.

Happy New Year, everyone!

Lileks points to two interesting posts. I'm not sure I believe that the dots connect in the first, but the second makes a great deal of sense.

Michael Hirschorn's article for the The Atlantic Online, entitled "Get Me Rewrite! A modest proposal for reinventing newspapers for the digital age," does an excellent job of framing the problems that printed newspapers face and proposing an interesting direction that could save and even expand their presence in the digital age.

Even more reasons for the bad guys to fear the Warthog: now with extra prickle.

On the one hand, it's encouraging to read that the US intelligence community is considering using Wiki and blog technology and techniques to improve the quality and speed of its analysis. On the other hand, it's discouraging that it hasn't already been a well established practice.

The full research paper is available here.

Betsy Newmark takes a pitch in her wheelhouse and belts it out of the park. The fact that she nails the Seattle school system by calling it "despicable" adds extra distance to the homer.

American Thinker asks, "What Islamic Science and Philosophy?"

The Tao of Defiance explains "Why the Muslims world was left behind."

This excerpt should encourage you to read the whole thing:

[..] Secular order in India thus is possible only when Muslims are not in power. Thondi, Rasathipuram and other places prove that the Muslim mind suffers from a dangerous duality—of seeking secularism when out of power and imposing a brutal demeaning theocracy for non-Muslims when in power."

India is in effect another canary in the coal mine, illuminating the true character of Islamofascism for all who will see to understand the threat to civilization that unchecked Islamofascism poses to the world.

Update: don't miss this post, entitled "The Hajj story you won’t hear; Islam as a religion that lost sight of its inner meaning."

Despite being born in Mobile, AL and growing up in Macon, GA--and purposefully mimicking Gary Owens of Rowan & Martin's Laugh-In fame--my quiz results indicate that I am from Philadelphia.

What American accent do you have? Your Result: Philadelphia Your accent is as Philadelphian as a cheesesteak! If you're not from Philadelphia, then you're from someplace near there like south Jersey, Baltimore, or Wilmington. if you've ever journeyed to some far off place where people don't know that Philly has an accent, someone may have thought you talked a little weird even though they didn't have a clue what accent it was they heard.
The Midland
The Northeast
The South
The Inland North
Boston
The West
North Central
What American accent do you have? Take More Quizzes

I wonder if Space Ghost is from Philly? Gary Owens is from South Dakota.

That source of unimpeachable truth, the Weekly World News, reveals a truth that puts paid to the ambitions of all too many of us.

Jason Miks is lucky enough to have had A Conversation with Bjorn Lomborg. He's still correct; I hope he's right that more climate scientists are becoming global warming catastrophe skeptics, at least for the next half century. I also applaud his efforts to attempt to get mankind focused on real problems like indoor air pollution caused by burning the wrong fuels to heat homes, lack of drinking water and encouraging responsible use of pesticides in developing countries to control disease.

Glenn links to Ronald Bailey's article in Reason Magazine in which he asks the question, "Brother, Can You Spare 22 Terawatts?: Big ideas for the future of energy."

The first sentence should hook you into reading the whole thing: "The flip side of the climate change conundrum is energy."

Where is the energy going to come from to feed the growth of not only the west, but the developing world? Can we trust government to make the right choices, or should government take a less activist role in terms of the technologies selected to produce the energy to meet our needs?

Move along, nothing to see here: "Hurricane predictions off track as tranquil season wafts away."

Betsy Newmark links to and expertly fisks a column in the Washington Post by Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska who seems to have lost his will. I commented beneath the article; I repeat my comments below for those who don't care to visit the WaPo.

Mr. Hagel, Mr. Hagel. I can't understand how members of Congress who supposedly understand American interests and geopolitics can spout this drivel over and over again.

1) "They will decide their fate and form of government." Mr. Hagel, the Iraqis have voted in election after election, with overwhelming support and in numbers greater per capita than our republic.

2) "Iraq is not a prize to be won or lost. It is part of the ongoing global struggle against instability, brutality, intolerance, extremism and terrorism." This is the only true statement in the article.

3) Apparently Mr. Hagel depends on the NYT headline writer for in-depth analysis of the news. Here are Dr. Kissinger's most recent and celebrated comments on Iraq in full,

"If you mean by 'military victory' an Iraqi government that can be established and whose writ runs across the whole country, that gets the civil war under control and sectarian violence under control in a time period that the political processes of the democracies will support, I don't believe that is possible....A dramatic collapse of Iraq - whatever we think about how the situation was created - would have disastrous consequences for which we would pay for many years and which would bring us back, one way or another, into the region." It appears that Mr. Hagel and his allies would have argued against the occupation of Japan and Germany and against the many efforts in the Cold War that cost lives--including the Korean War--to restrain the Soviet Union. There were many setbacks during that period, and peaceniks and "know nothings" argued for rapprochement since the West could not defeat the Soviets and the ChiComs. Truman understood US national interests, as did Kennedy. Why can't today's Democrats?

3) "We are destroying our force structure, which took 30 years to build." This is high comedy. During the 90's, the "Clinton peace dividend" was used to shrink the number of troops, ships, air squadrons, etc. I think that counts as more deliberate destruction of force structure in my book.

4) While the cost of the war is high, and the loss of any member of the armed forces is one too many, the cost and losses compared to WWII is insignificant on a per capita basis. The bulk of our population carries on virtually untouched by the war. There are no war bond drives, no rubber drives, no gas rationing, no draft. The strongest argument against our policy in Iraq is that we are not fighting hard enough. We are lawyered up and in a politically correct straitjacket. During WWII, Patton's third army would bypass tough opposition and use artillery and air power to neutralize it. "Rubble causes no trouble."

If Mr. Hagel believes that validating OBL's assertion that America lacks the will to defend its interests over the long term, as Europe has shown, then he must be willing to spend fantastic sums at home to attempt to defend every possible avenue for attack and strengthen every possible vulnerability. If Mr. Hagel spent time listening to the speeches given by Islamofascist leaders and reading and watching their media, he would understand how badly that they want to follow us home. Utter defeat is the only lesson these people understand. We owe future generations of free peoples everywhere to defend liberty at all costs. We cannot defend it by running from the hot point of the conflict of ideas and ideals.