Say Anything Blog

Can’t possibly do this justice other than to say a must read from Michael Toten on the Anbar Awakening.

It really drives through the point that only the Iraqis can actually win in Iraq, we can’t do it for them.  Though we certainly can do a lot of the heavy lifting as this photo of an Iraqi child’s artwork, lifted from Toten’s article, suggests



As Michael observes, the sword is Iraqi and the muscle American.

BBC reports on a new technique for returning people from a state of minimum consciousness:

Treatment of a 38-year-old man with a severe brain injury enabled him to use words and gestures, chew and swallow and drink from a cup, say US doctors.

Before the stimulation, done through electrodes implanted in his brain, he could only make slight eye or finger movements, the team report in Nature.

[snip]

Within 48 hours of the first stimulation, the patient was able to keep his eyes open, turn his head, and utter words.

After several treatments he is now able to perform complex tasks such as brushing his hair, although with difficulty due to severe immobility caused by his condition.

And can chew and swallows his food where before he needed a feeding tube.

Further tests on 12 patients have gained FDA approval. The researchers say if these results are replicated, it could change the standard of care for such patients, most of whom have to be cared for in long-term nursing facilities.

RTWT™

This raises the question of what would have happened if Terri Shiavo had been granted this opportunity for recovery.

That question in my mind exposes the Achilles’ Heel of the practice of euthanasia (especially when it is practiced with a good measure of political theatre): Unless you can definitively state that a person can never be returned to a near normal state of consciousness, it is better to take the more cautious approach and assume that in the future an as yet undiscovered technology might return that person to a (near) normal life.

In the end, our understanding of consciousness and what is required physiologically for that state to occur is very very limited.  The human brain is known to be highly redundant, and has a greater plasticity (ability to “rewire itself") than previously given credit for.  (See this post by Rob for a clinical example.)

Michael Yon has provided us with the third of his not to be missed reports on Operation Phantom Thunder. This report contains graphic and chilling photoevidence of the evil nature of the forces we are engaged with.

On 29 June, American and Iraqi soldiers were again fighting side-by-side as soldiers from Charley Company 1-12 CAV—led by Captain Clayton Combs—and Iraqi soldiers from the 5th IA, closed in on a village on the outskirts of Baqubah. The village had the apparent misfortune of being located near a main road—about 3.5 miles from FOB Warhorse—that al Qaeda liked to bomb. Al Qaeda had taken over the village. As Iraqi and American soldiers moved in, they came under light contact; but the bombs planted in the roads (and maybe in the houses) were the real threat.

The firefight progressed. American missiles were fired. The enemy might have been trying to bait Iraqi and American soldiers into ambush, but it did not work. The village was riddled with bombs, some of them large enough to destroy a tank. One by one, experts destroyed the bombs, leaving small and large craters in the unpaved roads.

The village was abandoned. All the people were gone. But where?

Many, it turned out, were murdered by the al Qaeda who occupied this village. 

Read the full thing, and make sure to leave a donation, if you already haven’t.  Be warned though that it contains very graphic images (including the severed skulls of children murdered by al Qaeda).

US forces are at strength as of June 16, and we have now fully engaged the enemy.  This is “crunch time” for us.  It is our last, best chance to stop this evil from taking over Iraq.  Anybody who thinks that life will become easier for Iraqis if we left, instead of descending into the same state of madness seen in much of Iraq, after they were controlled by al Qaeda, needs to have photos like this shoved in his/her face.

It is time now for us to speak to our congressmen, many of whom are showing their lack of leadership and moral character by caving into the clammers of the antiwar groups.  Make sure to mention the work of Michael Yon and other journalists who have shined a light where others have chosen not to.

Update: Also see this analysis by Frederick and Kimberly Kagan,. The New Strategy in Iraq.

The clearest evidence yet that warming sea temperatures are not responsible for increased storm activity has just been published in Nature. They find:

NEW YORK (Reuters)—Hurricanes over the past 5,000 years appear to have been controlled more by El Nino and an African monsoon than warm sea surface temperatures, such as those caused by global warming, researchers said Wednesday.

The main reason that ocean temperature isn’t expected to generate stronger hurricanes is because it isn’t temperature that drives storm activity. 

It’s the difference in temperature between the poles and the equator that matters.  And because the global warming models predict that warming temperatures affect the poles more than it does the equator, global warming is expected to reduce the temperature difference, and likely the number and strength of Atlantic hurricanes.

One of the standard talking points of the left is how President Bush abuses them by issuing so many, or that the executive branch is side-stepping the legislative branch via executive orders.  For example consider this paragraph:

Lest anyone think that Congress is supposed to be the supreme lawmaking body of the central government of the United States, those days have long passed. A trend that began during the War Between the States and that accelerated during the Progressive Era and the Great Depression continues unabated. Laws and lawmakers are not what they used to be and certainly not what existed when the republic known as the United States of America was formed.

Truthfully this is one of the more reasoned comments I’ve seen on this.  Most are over the top, how Bush is abusing his executive privilege by issuing an unprecedented number of executive orders.  I’m not linking to any of those garbled screeds because frankly I don’t feel like adding to their link count.

Anyway, here’s the actual trend, shown in average number of executive orders per year for each president. President Bush is president #43.  President #31 is Hoover and #32 is Roosevelt.

The average for the first 30 presidents is 36 executive orders per year.  My source unfortunately doesn’t break down the numbers for the first 30 presidents.

So what is the conclusion? 

Quite clearly, the claim of a disturbing trend is just a complete fantasy. 

There isn’t any significant trend in recent presidencies towards more executive orders.  If anything, the trend has been towards fewer executive orders. 

Which really is a not-so-disturbing trend.

And the scuttlebutt is that as many as 30 prisoners who were released have returned to fight against us. And most of them aren’t innocent lambs:

Records on 517 current and former detainees show that 95 percent have been members of or associated with al Qaeda or the Taliban and that 73 percent participated in hostilities against U.S. or coalition forces, defense officials said.

But let’s release them, ‘cause like we’ve violated their habeas corpus rights by holding them as prisoners of war during an ongoing war in Afghanistan, after capturing most of them on the battlefront to begin with.

Because, according to our so-called liberal friends, it’s doing really dumb crap like prematurely releasing POWs that makes us civilized.

Via Instapundit,

This week’s announcement by the Canadian government—that it may join a U.S.-led coalition focused on voluntary emissions cuts—could be part of a global shift away from Kyoto’s binding targets.

A vote against Kyoto is a vote for sanity.

While there is a lot of debate about the validity of the climate model predictions, interpretation of the effects of anthropogenic CO2 emissions on global climate, there should be little debate on this:

Kyoto is an extremely bad economic policy, and should never have been adopted to start with.  The Copenhagen Consensus rated it in their lowest category “poor” and ranked it 16th out of 17 global policies they considered.  Actually I though they were being generous.  They should have created a new category “abysmally stupid”.

It is the fact that the global warming advocates embrace such an embarrassingly flawed treaty that undercuts any faith that I would have in their ability to objectively evaluate the science of global warming.

Tonight on BBC: Payouts reveal Iraq civilian toll, being a story about US pay outs to Iraqis whose civilian relatives were accidently killed by US forces.

Funny, though. I thought the death toll from nearly daily car bombs, and the accompanying eulogies paid to the car bombers by the US media, did a much better job of “revealing the Iraqi civilian toll.”

There is an interesting article on Fox News Scientists Debate Sun’s Role in Global Warming.

Earth is heating up lately, but so are Mars, Pluto and other worlds in our solar system, leading some scientists to speculate that a change in the sun’s activity is the common thread linking all these baking events.

Of course, the global warming jihadists are confused over what the link could be.  Says Benny Peiser, a social anthropologist (and therefore an expert on planetary climatology):

Global warming on Neptune’s moon Triton as well as Jupiter and Pluto, and now Mars has some [scientists] scratching their heads over what could possibly be in common with the warming of all these planets ... Could there be something in common with all the planets in our solar system that might cause them all to warm at the same time? [...] I think it is an intriguing coincidence that warming trends have been observed on a number of very diverse planetary bodies in our solar system,” Peiser said in an e-mail interview. “Perhaps this is just a fluke.

Perhaps the Sun could be responsible for it?  Of course, I’m no social anthropologist, so I’m in no position to judge Peiser. 

There is accumulating evidence that Mars, like the Earth, is currently experiencing global warming.  Via Instapundit, see for example this AP story.

There are a couple of things that make the Mars global warming interesting.  First is the fact that terrestrial human generated emissions play no part in the Mars climate.  Secondly, because Mars’ atmosphere is much thinner than the Earth’s, the greenhouse effect on Mars is currently much weaker than on Earth.  Thus most of the current heating can only be explained in terms of extra-planetary effects, such as an increase in solar radiance or a natural tilt effect similar to the Milankovitch cycles on the Earth.

That latter explanation is somewhat troublesome, as is argued by researcher Habibullo Abdussamatov, because of new evidence linking the changes in Martian temperature to the solar cycle.  Doctor Abdussamatov concludes that

The long-term increase in solar irradiance is heating both Earth and Mars. [...] Man-made greenhouse warming has made a small contribution to the warming seen on Earth in recent years, but it cannot compete with the increase in solar irradiance

Also interesting is the fact that Mars may be in the process of undergoing a major climate warming event:  Most of the “ice” on the Martian poles is frozen CO2.  If this CO2 were to melt, enough would be released to raise the atmospheric density to roughly 1/10 of that of Earth, and raise Martian surface temperatures so,

That takes us from a situation of working in a near vacuum with a space suit to being able to run around on the surface with an oxygen mask and a heavy coat. It’s what the terraforming people were always talking about.

Predictably the AP writer shills for the global warming advocates in his criticism of the Abdussamatov storywith this amazingly 4th-grade level insight on the new study:

Perhaps the biggest stumbling block in Abdussamatov’s theory is his dismissal of the greenhouse effect, in which atmospheric gases such as carbon dioxide help keep heat trapped near the planet’s surface. [...] He claims that carbon dioxide has only a small influence on Earth’s climate and virtually no influence on Mars.

Actually, dumba$$, what he claimed was human generated greenhouse gases have only a small influence on our climate.  Learn to read your own copy.  And there is other evidence for that, like water vapor being the dominant greenhouse gas on Earth, not CO2.

Rob has recently posted a few stories on the comments of Steve Jobs and the reaction of one of a technical writer to Job’s remarks on the negative effects of unionization on American teacher jobs.

Coincidently, the Economist has just posted a thought provoking piece Do unions increase productivity? that includes the graf:

This may explain why some unions are equally well known for their lack of productivity; the American teachers’ unions are generally believed (by everyone outside of the teachers’ unions) to be the primary obstacle to improving America’s appalling public schools.

I’m afraid I had to chuckle when I read that part, especially given the shock of the technical writer that anybody could suggest such a thing.

The Economist’s article in turn is a look at an article by Steven Bainbridge Unions’ Effect on Productivity, which is also an interesting read.

As the son of two school teachers (with my Dad a union representative), I would say that school performance problems is a bit more complicated than can be explained just by the presence of unions.  Certainly the difficulties in firing poor performing teachers is an issue, although in my Dad’s school system, it was possible:  You had to follow a documented set of steps demonstrating the incompetence of the teacher.  These days with the testing of teachers, I would think it gets even easier to remove dead weight.

I’d suggest that the real problem is the removal of competition from funding system.  This has been rectified to some extent, but there is little denying that measured in terms of performance/money spent, the American public school is one of the worst educational systems in the world.

Presumably everybody on this web has heard of the supposed story of an Exxon-supported lobby group soliciting anti-global warming:

Scientists and economists have been offered $10,000 each by a lobby group funded by one of the world’s largest oil companies to undermine a major climate change report due to be published today.
Letters sent by the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), an ExxonMobil-funded thinktank with close links to the Bush administration, offered the payments for articles that emphasise the shortcomings of a report from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

Interested story.  Only problem with it, is it is a total lie.  Like the story title says, if the truth is inconvenient, why just make up a lie?  Especially if you are a socialist rag like the Guardian, and lying is what you specialize in to start with.

Here are the facts:

• The organization (American Enterprise Institute) receives less than one percent of their funding from Exxon, hence “a lobby group funded by” Exxon is more than a bit of a reach. “Funded by” implies, well they receive their funds, not just a tiny fraction of them.
• Secondly, they aren’t offering $10,000 for scientists to debunk the story.  They are paying somebody to review the global warming literature including the IPCC. The purpose of the research report (as it is described on the AEI website) was to present multiple viewpoints on the issue of the anthropogenic global warming.  That is hardly the same thing as fishing for somebody to debunk it.
• Third they aren’t even a lobby group at all.  They are an independent think tank, and serve no particular partisan issues on any topic, to the extent that yes indeed they even criticize Bush’s policies occasionally.
• Third, the group has no particular ties with the Bush administration, and as I mentioned is a frequent of him.  Hardly the same as being cronies of Bush, as the Guardian so slimily insinuated.

And these crack heads on the left want us to take them seriously exactly why?

Note: The AEI response to the criticisms can be found here.

...when the US Army knocks on your door.

With the arrest of Deputy Health Minister al-Zamili, a suspected collaborator with the Mehdi Army, it looks like the US forces have begun an important purge of the Iraqi government. 

One thing that the increased US troop presence allows is the ability to act with impunity against the Mehdi Army.  What people were interpreting as a former lack of will on Maliki’s part may, in fact, have been simply a political calculation that he lacked the means to rein these thugs in.

… so why not now?

They are finally able to clone pork meat (and no doubt soon other meats) on a large scale, without the pesky issue of growing an animal first.

I’m sure that Rob will give a sigh of relief now that a solution other than forced vegetarianism to the crisis of our times, cow-fartogenic global warming, is just around the corner.

Surely we live in bright times.

Actually, that’s the take home message in this article that slams the latest IPCC report for failing to take into account, among other things, the effect of the melting ice in in the western Antarctic ice field on the sea level.

Since the ice field in question is floating in the ocean (instead of e.g. sinking), melting this ice will have a negligible effect on the sea level.

A physics explanation follows:

• Since the ice sheets are floating on the ocean, the buoyant force exerted upon them by the ocean is equal to their weight.
• Archimedes Principle states that the buoyant force on an object is equal to the weight of the water displaced.
• This means that the ice sheet floating on the surface has the same weight as the water it’s displacing.
• Since it has the same weight, once it melts, it has the same volume as the water it was displacing before it melted.
• Ergo, the height of the water is the same with ice floating in it, as it would be immediately after the ice melts [assuming the same water temperature before and after, no evaporation and all of the other usual physics caveats].

I guess this shows that understanding basic physics isn’t a prerequisite for making you the world’s expert on global climate change.