Iran the new Hitler

Podhoretz v. Zakaria



This dude is whacked. That is his argument? This should be easy to rebut. Anyone for the war against Iran is the new Bush/Cheney and anyone against it is everyone who was right about the Iraq war.

Too soon?

Or you can just go with the ... the US spends 57 x's more than the nations of Cuba, Iran, Libya, North Korea, Sudan, and Syria combines. Threat? Puuhleease.

Climbing Kilimanjaro

Tom Bissell’s account of his painful and exhausting climb to the summit of Mount Kilimanjaro

Select a candidate 2008

select a candidate

Last call

UN issues 'final wake-up call' on population and environment

Time to ditch Kyoto

Climate policy after 2012, when the Kyoto treaty expires, needs a radical rethink. More of the same won't do, argue Gwyn Prins and Steve Rayner.

The Kyoto Protocol is a symbolically important expression of governments' concern about climate change. But as an instrument for achieving emissions reductions, it has failed¹. It has produced no demonstrable reductions in emissions or even in anticipated emissions growth. And it pays no more than token attention to the needs of societies to adapt to existing climate change. The impending United Nations Climate Change Conference being held in Bali in December — to decide international policy after 2012 — needs to radically rethink climate policy.

Kyoto's supporters often blame non-signatory governments, especially the United States and Australia, for its woes. But the Kyoto Protocol was always the wrong tool for the nature of the job. Kyoto was constructed by quickly borrowing from past treaty regimes dealing with stratospheric ozone depletion, acid rain from sulphur emissions and nuclear weapons. Drawing on these plausible but partial analogies, Kyoto's architects assumed that climate change would be best attacked directly through global emissions controls, treating tonnes of carbon dioxide like stockpiles of nuclear weapons to be reduced via mutually verifiable targets and timetables. Unfortunately, this borrowing simply failed to accommodate the complexity of the climate-change issue.

Kyoto has failed in several ways, not just in its lack of success in slowing global warming, but also because it has stifled discussion of alternative policy approaches that could both combat climate change and adapt to its unavoidable consequences. As Kyoto became a litmus test of political correctness, those who were concerned about climate change, but sceptical of the top-down approach adopted by the protocol were sternly admonished that "Kyoto is the only game in town". We are anxious that the same mistake is not repeated in the current round of negotiations.

...

Climate change is not amenable to an elegant solution because it is not a discrete problem. It is better understood as a symptom of a particular development path and its globally interlaced supply-system of fossil energy. Together they form a complex nexus of mutually reinforcing, intertwined patterns of human behaviour, physical materials and the resulting technology. It is impossible to change such complex systems in desired ways by focusing on just one thing.

Social scientists understand how path-dependent systems arise; but no one has yet determined how to deliberately unlock them. When change does occur it is usually initiated by quite unexpected factors. When single-shot solutions such as Kyoto are attempted, they often produce quite unintended, often negative consequences. The many loopholes that have enabled profiteers to make money from the Clean Development Mechanism, without materially affecting emissions, are examples. Therefore, there can be no silver bullet — in this case the top-down creation of a global carbon market — to bring about the desired end.

They then go on to propose 5 central elements of any future climate change policy.

FRONTLINE

Showdown with iran

Colbert for prez

Comedian Colbert Reaches Double Digits As Third-Party Candidate

Hillary Clinton (D) vs. Rudy Giuliani (R) vs. Stephen Colbert (I)
Hillary Clinton (D)	45%
Rudy Giuliani (R)	35%
Stephen Colbert (I)	13%

Hillary Clinton (D) vs. Fred Thompson (R) vs. Stephen Colbert (I)
Hillary Clinton (D)	46%
Fred Thompson (R)	34%
Stephen Colbert (I)	12%

Just for the heck of it

Burma

More on the Netherlands new drug policies

Holland Clamps Down on Drugs

Fear and facts

Zakaria debunks the current conservative madness... Stalin, Mao And … Ahmadinejad?

At a meeting with reporters last week, President Bush said that "if you're interested in avoiding World War III, it seems like you ought to be interested in preventing [Iran] from having the knowledge necessary to make a nuclear weapon." These were not the barbs of some neoconservative crank or sidelined politician looking for publicity. This was the president of the United States, invoking the specter of World War III if Iran gained even the knowledge needed to make a nuclear weapon.

The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran's President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is "like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism." For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland's and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

Random stuff

Five Easy Ways to Go Organic - Especially important if you are raising a child.

Medical myths: Strange, but true...

and it looks like we might be entering into the global warming positive feedback loops before we thought... 'Carbon sinks' lose ability to soak up emissions. That is bad news.

and finally, 4 out of 5 certified military people think Cheney is whacked. And not in a good way.

Justice

SR.com: Gonzales could be prosecuted, McKay says

The U.S. Inspector General may recommend criminal prosecution of departed Attorney General Alberto Gonzales at the conclusion of an investigation, possibly as early as next month, the fired former U.S. attorney for Western Washington told a Spokane audience Friday.

Drawing the line on FISA

Meeting Resistance

A movie about the Iraqi resistance - Trailer here

Moving towards a more participatory democracy

10 Questions

I need to write a paper that coins a new term, "collaborative democracy" or "wiki-ocracy" or something.

Stephen Colbert to Run for President

Only in South Carolina and will run as a Republican and a Democrat

Rudy rudy rudy!

Just doing their part to maintain the status quo

Revealed: the man behind court attack on Gore film is a fuel and mining magnate

Bangkok

Frontline

Cheney's law on Tuesday, October 16, 2007 on PBS

The ‘Good Germans’ Among Us

Frank Rich catches on

The Right Brain vs Left Brain test

Go here
I originally saw the dancer spinning clockwise, but I figured out a way to get it to switch directions. Its a bit freaky, because seeing it spin one way it is impossible to imagine it can be seen as spinning the other way... and yet...

Netherlands declares...

Netherlands declares it will outlaw the sale of psychedelic mushrooms

Sanchez

Getting dirty

WASHINGTON, Oct. 12 — In a sweeping indictment of the four-year effort in Iraq, the former top commander of American forces there called the Bush administration’s handling of the war “incompetent” and said the result was “a nightmare with no end in sight.”

Lt. Gen. Ricardo S. Sanchez, who retired in 2006 after being replaced in Iraq after the Abu Ghraib prisoner abuse scandal, blamed the Bush administration for a “catastrophically flawed, unrealistically optimistic war plan” and denounced the current addition of American forces as a “desperate” move that would not achieve long-term stability.

“After more than four years of fighting, America continues its desperate struggle in Iraq without any concerted effort to devise a strategy that will achieve victory in that war-torn country or in the greater conflict against extremism,” General Sanchez said at a gathering of military reporters and editors in Arlington, Va.
...
General Sanchez, who is said to be considering writing a book, promised further public statements criticizing officials by name.

Today's entertainment

Krugman

No longer behind the select wall: Sliming Graeme Frost

Gore wins Nobel peace prize

Jointly with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

Lynne Cheney went on the Daily Show

and they had a revealing discussion.

I was glad Jon mentioned the anthrax attacks - that has disappeared down the memory hole.

Gonzales Lawyers Up

I love it when lawyers hire lawyers

My favorite take on this is that the Dept. of Justice should just apply 'enhanced interrogation' techniques on him and get right to the bottom of this.

Apparently we are against feeding people

Who knew? There are city ordinances limiting peoples' ability to feed the homeless.

Fortunately, someone indicted on that charge in Orlando was found not guilty

So cute...

Settlers of catan board game online

Settlers of catan board game in flash

JSettlers

Sea3D - this one looks like the best...

On Democracy

Why?

How Bush Thinks (Yes, Thinks)

Well, ok... I meant to write Baboons

Burma

Smuggled out video

the Ascent to a Ph.D.

at least one person i know has finished the climb

That Chris Matthews interview

Here it is...Funny how Chris Matthews calls it the worst interview ever - Jon isn't kissing his *ss so therefore it isn't a good one. But really, Jon is telling it like it is, and playing hardball can hurt.

The party of fiscal responsibility

GOP Is Losing Grip On Core Business Vote

This trend has been going on for a while. It seems an especially advantageous time for the democrats to beat the we are fiscally responsible drum for a while - kick the GOP when they are down.

Self-silencing and other detrimental argumentation techniques

Marital Spats, Taken to Heart

In men, keeping quiet during a fight didn’t have any measurable effect on health. But women who didn’t speak their minds in those fights were four times as likely to die during the 10-year study period as women who always told their husbands how they felt, according to the July report in Psychosomatic Medicine. Whether the woman reported being in a happy marriage or an unhappy marriage didn’t change her risk. The tendency to bottle up feelings during a fight is known as self-silencing. For men, it may simply be a calculated but harmless decision to keep the peace. But when women stay quiet, it takes a surprising physical toll.
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For women, whether a husband’s arguing style was warm or hostile had the biggest effect on her heart health. Dr. Smith notes that in a fight about money, for instance, one man said, “Did you pass elementary school math?” But another said, “Bless you, you are not so good with the checkbook, but you’re good at other things.” In both exchanges, the husband was criticizing his wife’s money management skills, but the second comment was infused with a level of warmth. In the study, a warm style of arguing by either spouse lowered the wife’s risk of heart disease.

But arguing style affected men and women differently. The level of warmth or hostility had no effect on a man’s heart health. For a man, heart risk increased if disagreements with his wife involved a battle for control. And it didn’t matter whether he or his wife was the one making the controlling comments. An example of a controlling argument style showed up in one video of a man arguing with his wife about money. “You really should just listen to me on this,” he told her.

Chris Matthews on the daily show

Go and watch the interview. Hilarious.