Various people continue to kick the Stern report and scientifically ignorant politicians around. To them I say, good.

I am quite pleased with the results of the two questionnaires that I answered recently. Does this mean that Obi-Wan is a Republican?

My results:
You are Obi-Wan Kenobi

Obi-Wan Kenobi 74% Qui-Gon Jinn 72% R2-D2 70% Chewbacca 68% Lando Calrissian 66% Mace Windu 66% Han Solo 66% Luke Skywalker 65% Yoda 63% Boba Fett 62%

You are civilized, calm, and have a good sense of humor, even when those around you don't. You can hold your own in a fight, but prefer it when things don't get too exciting.

(This list displays the top 10 results out of a possible 21 characters)


Click here to take the Star Wars Personality Quiz

Was this ever in question?

You scored as Republican. <'Imunimaginative's Deviantart Page'> Republican 92% Anarchism 83% Democrat 33% Socialist 33% Green 17% Communism 17% Nazi 0% Fascism 0% What Political Party Do Your Beliefs Put You In? created with QuizFarm.com

Earlier today, we again marked "The Eleventh Hour of the Eleventh Day of the Eleventh Month." Originally established to honor the veterans of World War I and remind us of a commitment to end war that proved impossible to keep.

Today the day is for the veterans who served in all wars, especially those who gave their lives in the defense of freedom for us all. My thoughts go to my own Father, gone now for a little over 14 years. He was one of the many thousands of infantrymen to land on the beaches of Normandy on June 6, 1944. He fought through the Battle of the Bulge. He lost some hearing, and was injured when a building he was clearing collapsed after being hit by shellfire. He returned home to Georgia, somehow found his way to Mobile, Alabama, and met my Mother in 1953. I came along in October of 1954 after they had returned to Georgia and started their lives together in Macon.

There are still thousands of such men alive today. They endured incredible danger and hardship to fight an implacable enemy who had swept all before him from the late thirties until mid-1942. They battled an enemy dug in on tiny nameless islands across the Pacific. Those that survived returned home and started us on a great adventure that exhibited the might of America. While scrimping to buy their own homes, to start families, to attend night school, to work one or more jobs, their taxes paid for the restoration of Europe, the occupation and restoration of Germany and Japan, and to hold back the tide of Communism. They were heroes on the battlefield, and loyal Americans on the home front. The enemies of America underestimated them time and again.

Today we honor these men, and veterans of other wars who have made sacrifices in other places and other times just as great. I honor them, but most of all, I honor my Father. I thank him for more things than I can possibly say; mostly for his love, his faith and encouragement, his example. I love you and miss you, Dad, and I hope to be able to say that and more to you one day when we're all together again.

The Democrat party wins, and "Voters gain faith in American elections." Nice to see that in print.

The whole notion of attempting to accuse the other (winning) party of nationwide election fraud is ridiculous, and is dangerous to the republic. We still need to find out what ACORN has done, but this election appears to have been generally fair overall.

I hope that any efforts to circumvent the Electoral College have been put aside forever. Otherwise, we would have large groups of disenfranchised states and wholesale opportunities for voter fraud nationwide.

The post-election and Rumsfeld resignation aftershocks continue.

I am more concerned about the impact of Secretary Rumsfeld's departure on force morale and enlistment/reenlistment rates than on the possible political benefits during the just completed election cycle. Still, it appears that his departure was handled so badly that there is a distinct possibility of negative impact on both aspects of the issue.

I became a huge fan of the Oakland A's when I moved to the Bay Area in 1980. The Giants were just "OK"; the A's had it all.

Now on ESPN: "Athletics have deal with Cisco for Fremont site." What would Billy Martin say?

This will put Fremont on the map, and contribute to the continuing demise of the city of Oakland.

Ann Althouse has one of the best post-election takes I've read yet.

Read the whole thing. I especially like this part:

"What I'm concerned about is national security and, consequently, the way the election was fought and is being interpreted. I'm upset because I think we have sent a terrible message to our enemies: Just hang on long enough and continue to inflict some damage, and the Americans will lose heart and give up. You barely need anything at all. You might not be able to hijack a plane with a box cutter anymore, but you can take back a country -- a country we conquered with overwhelming military power -- merely by mercilessly and endlessly setting off small bombs in your own town day after day.

How much harder it becomes ever to fight and win a war again. Only pacifists and isolationists should feel good about the way this election was won."

In The Register: "The myth of the home-bake terror nuke 'cookbooks': Who needs Iraqi A-bomb plans anyway?"

Now they tell us!

Here's an excerpt:

"Astute readers know that news organizations like the Times never have trouble finding experts who will attach the worst possible interpretation to security issues. This is part of the inescapable nature of the war on terror. Sometimes there is unvarnished truth from them. But quite often they are just an appropriate-sounding bleat of concerned noise out of the religious belief and slogan, '9/11 changed everything.'

Now, to further soil your underwear with demonical atomic menaces to America, let's take a trip to a news item in the Los Angeles Times a couple weeks earlier. The security problem: The US government's nuclear materials storage facility at Oak Ridge, TN, wasn't superheroically protected enough against potential terrorist assaults, terrorists who could assemble and detonate an improvised nuclear device in minutes. That's right, minutes. 'It is believed such a device could have a yield equal to that of the Hiroshima atomic bomb,' wrote the newspaper.

The reader should be left wondering why anyone needs plans to put together an atom bomb if terrorists under fire can lash one together in a relative moment.

But this, too, originates specifically from - guess where - the New York Times. Chasing the suicidal nuke bomber threat, Matthew Wald of the paper dug up the expert in 2002. In this instance it was Frank von Hippel of Princeton University, saying, as paraphrased by the paper, 'that a 100-pound mass of uranium dropped on a second 100-pound mass, from a height of about 6 feet, could produce a blast of 5 to 10 kilotons.' Which, you'll note, is less than the Hiroshima bomb although still a pretty big bang.

Von Hippel also seemed to indicate to the Times that any such improvised blast might yield as little as a kiloton and that actually finding the right kind of uranium would be 'a challenge.' Nevertheless, the story has been flogged by news organizations and a public interest group interested in security whoopie cushions and gotchas since then, conjuring the images of an al Qaeda team with atom scientists more expert than US atom men, jerry-rigging chunks of weapons grade uranium onto a hoist while machine gun fire envelops them.

Historically, Manhattan Project scientist Luis Alvarez's 1988 autobiography used to be the primary source for this idea. Alvarez wrote 'With modern weapons grade uranium the background neutron rate is so low that terrorists, if they had such material, would have a good chance of setting off a high yield explosion by dropping one half of the material on to the other half.' When citing Alvarez, other physicists used to tend to mention there was no guarantee this would work at all.

Mark, for example, claimed, 'What [Alvarez] meant by 'high yield' or 'good chance" are not explained...' You tend not to find such statements, however, in newspapers because they spoil the narrative.

And it would seem if North Korea had known how simple it all is, it could have saved itself the embarrassment over a botched first test shot.'

Democrat party takes the Senate, Senator Joe Lieberman welcomed back like the black sheep of the family during the holidays. The far-left nutroots will call for an immediate withdrawal from Iraq and endless investigations of the Administration. Are they prepared for the consequences of the former? Another episode like the Vietnamese boat people and the killing fields in Cambodia? Time will tell.

There are many postmortems on the election out now, and there will be many more to come. I like the take of the Best of the Web Today so far.

We now return to the era of divided government. An era where there will be much heat, but less light. Perhaps that is best; as Thomas Paine said, "That government is best which governs least." We will certainly see fewer earthshaking changes at the Federal level.

Over the next two years, it will be interesting to watch the 50 states to see which of them produce the best results. Like 50 distinct laboratories, one of them may produce a leader--or may have already done so--who is worthy to lead the nation.

The House has swung to the Democrat party. The Senate is in the balance. There are three Senate races that are too close to call. There will be a recount in the VA race. MO looks like a Democrat pickup. Not enough returns are in as of 11:05 Pacific time to call, although the Democrat challenger is in the lead.

Click here to see the results for the WA races.

My old associate going back to the late 80s (when I was Apple's Networking and Communications Evangelist), Toby Nixon, appears to be going down to defeat in his race to return to the state senate. Toby is a terrific person, with a wonderful family. He is a legendary figure in the evolution of PC communications--he worked at Hayes Communications back when "Hayes modem" was the standard. I believe that he still works at Microsoft, and does important work there. I'm sure that he'll continue in public service in some capacity. He was a very good senator, and his defeat is a loss for the people of the state of Washington.

Eureka! Stem cell breakthrough to aid heart attack victims! Oh, it is based on the original adult stem cell breakthrough, bone marrow injections into the heart.

Nevermind, Michael Fox, nothing to see here...

I'm taking a different approach to "watching" the election results this year--at least at this point. I have two machines up. My laptop running Windows Vista RC2 is streaming Hugh Hewitt's program over on KKOL AM. By the way, Firefox 2 plus the common add-ins runs fine on Vista.

My main machine has Firefox up with 8 tabs. I am in love with Google Reader; I have all of the best bloggers in a category called "opinion" open in a tab that I refresh frequently. I have tabs dedicated to The Truth Laid Bear's wonderful election tracker, Fox News election page, and to CNN's Blog Party--at least for now.

Many pundits predicted a loss of both houses to the Democrat party. A smaller number predicted that the Republicans would retain both houses. I agree with Captain Ed that the Democrat party is likely to take the House--the only question is by how much--but the Republicans are going to hold the Senate--narrowly.

Hugh Hewitt's post reminds me that there is a corollary to the old saw, "beauty is in the eye of the beholder". This year, "insults are in the ear of the listener".

Here's an excerpt that includes Hugh's response to Jonathan Chait of the LA Times:
"Everybody in professional politics, conservative or liberal," Chait wrote, understands that Kerry was trying to make a joke about Bush. And yet the GOP has succeeded in convincing the country that he was denigrating American soldiers." Which means that those who disagree with Chait must be stupid or lying. That group includes a vast number of men and women in the military, as has been pointed out repeatedly across the web. MSMers like Chait refuse to acknowledge their opinions and judgments. They don't want those opinions and judgments to be counted, just like the military's votes in Florida in 2000.

Meanwhile, in geek news, George Ou paints Robert Cringely as a fool or worse for his lack of knowledge of the issues addressed by IPv6 in "Robert Cringely shows blatant ignorance of networking". The link contains the article that sparked George to smack down Robert. Here's a sample:

"As for your comments on NAC, you're sounding like a crackpot conspiracy theorist lunatic. NAC has absolutely nothing to do with charging for every PC in your house, it is an optional technology for corporate LANs. There is no secret plan to put an 802.1x NAC capable switch on to your home network. If anything, moving away from NAT and on to IPv6 would allow ISPs to see how many devices you have in the home and potentially charge you for every device on your home. As it stands now, the ISP can only see the single IPv4 address on your personal router."

While George is scathingly correct in his fisking of Robert, after reading Robert's original article and George's response, I'm reminded of this.

So do I, young war heroes, so do I.













H/T: Michelle Malkin.

James Q. Wilson pens a must-read indictment of "The Press at War". It is well worth your time to read, especially less than 48 hours prior to the closing of the polls in America.

Hang him high.

Austin Bay applies a coup de grace to John Kerry's pathetic and revolting vitriol and non-apology apologies.

H/T: Instapundit.

Fox News' Steve "Danger" Harrigan experiences waterboarding firsthand.

Interesting to hear his reactions during all three phases. It has a much happier ending than other videos that have been published from Iraq.