Uh, yeah, this site's credible. But I will say: I hope it's true that we plan to use nukes against Iran. I can think of no simpler way to resolve the tension in the Middle East than to show the radical Islamists that we really, really, really mean business, and that even if they get one or two nuclear weapons--well, golly, we have thousands.

They could possibly hurt us, maybe even badly, but we could make it as if they never even existed. Except for the glow, of course.

I have a unique idea: if you tell your boss you're going to work from home, how about actually, well, working?

I highly doubt that this is the only area where Noam Chomsky is dead wrong.

Our government has become so large, so bloated, so powerful, and so corrupt that the layman cannot possibly make heads nor tales of this sort of thing. I fear that our media can't, either, and so they draw their conclusions based on whatever their political leanings might happen to be. Since they tend to be Leftist (and I'd require a significant treatise to convince me otherwise), this sort of this will be ascribed to Bushitler and Cheney far more quickly than it ever was to Clinton. And in my mind, Clinton was by far the more treacherous.

Ultimately, who can really blame the average American, with families to take care of, bills to pay, and, yes, in general, lives to live, for not spending the hours, days, weeks, or months it would require to unravel even a single issue like this one. In writing this blog, I spend far more time than most people on such issues, and I often (almost always, really) feel like I'm just getting sucked farther down the rabbit hole.

I have no idea of the veracity of this, and it's a helluva long read for someone who might want to quickly compare it to other Jefferson writings, but if you want to see what Jefferson (might have) thought about Jesus and the New Testament, take a quick read here. Or not so quick, maybe.

Get some Creationist propaganda with your kid's grilled cheese sandwich.

It's good to know that the up-and-coming generation has at least some ingenuity. Call me a curmudgeon, but I'm not terribly optimistic.

And here might be the only case where I can imagine intellectual property piracy being a good thing. The less money that goes to Michael Moore, the better.

Digg Report: Today's #1 Digg, at 6432 Diggs, is a complaint about the new Digg comment system. Of which, of course, I was completely unaware, and uncaring, unlike many of the commenters who obviously take things like this personally.

Yawn.

Another light blogging day. Much in the way of personal things to get done. More tomorrow.

Cox and Forkum on Sir Salman Rushdie. Hee hee, in a sick sort of today's reality way.

And in the meantime, Iran's Imajihadist, or whatever the Hell his name is, gets away free as a bird.

Incidentally, I can think of a few uses for the butter knife.

The ten most hated words on the Internet. They seem rather innocuous to me, but whatever.

Another good article from Capitalism Magazine, this one on the shift from "global warming" to "climate change" as today's environmentalist mantra. I'd noticed this myself, but only peripherally. This story makes the point explicit.

I couldn't agree more with this Capitalism Magazine story. By whatever means, the Iranian regime needs to be removed and, as in Germany and Japan, a constitutional republic imposed whether the Islamists like it or not. And, we should do so at their expense, and not for their benefit but for ours. We can't have vacuums in the Middle East for terrorists and radical Islamists to step in and control, but our goal isn't to make their lives better.

It's to make our lives more secure. If the Iranians want to avoid such actions, then they need to stand up and remove the current regime from power themselves, and demonstrate that they hold no ill-will toward America. In that case, I'm sure we'd be happy to help out.

Thus demonstrating one of the reasons why America is not a democracy. The Founders feared oppression of a minority by the majority just as much as of the majority by a minority. I can only imagine what they would have thought of oppression by the stupid.

This is awesome, and I want one. Hell, I want two. I'm just not sure what I'd do with them. I don't have any proteins that need folding at the moment.

People have often predicted that we'll have supercomputers on our desks (probably, in our hip pockets, or in our hips). By some measures, we're already there. The Singularity looms large, and I for one am looking forward to it.

Google. Do no evil. Compete on the strength of their own products.

Right.

And the CCA would do this, because every DVD sold clearly states that unauthorized copying is not allowed. If people really wanted to change things, they'd simply boycott CDs and DVDs until the distributors came up with better ways of dealing with things.

Oh, silly me. A boycott wouldn't work, because the people who really care about this issue don't buy CDs and DVDs in the first place--they just pirate them off of Bittorrent.

RealTechNews kind of misses the point here. It's not population per se that dictates CO2 emissions, it's industrial output, automobile use, etc. At least, so the theory goes as I understand it.

What this really shows is that the more advanced the industrial society, the more technology it can bring to bear on the issue. China is much more heavily reliant on burning dirty coal, hence their #1 ranking. One should also remember that the Chinese economy is still only about a fifth (or maybe a bit less) the size of the American economy, and so their CO2 emissions are even more egregious. Where the US to be as backwards in energy use as the Chinese, our own CO2 emissions would be stratospheric (no pun intended).

That is, to the extent that one believes any of it's meaningful in any sense.