I open up the news quickly, just to see if something interesting is up in the world, and what do I see?

Chimpanzees living in the West African savannah have been observed fashioning deadly spears from sticks and using the hand-crafted tools to hunt small mammals -- the first routine production of deadly weapons ever observed in animals other than humans.

Hi everyone, lots of significant news stories today. Top of the line: the new Int'l Panel on Climate Change report is out. Or at least, the Summary for Policymakers; their web site is such an utter mess that I can't find the actual report anywhere. Haven't read it yet, will post once I do. (Maybe to climatepapers) Here's pretty good news coverage from NYT. However, this report needs to be taken with a very serious grain of salt: Apparently they caved to political pressure and seriously damped the prediction about sea level rise, to basically assume that nothing bad ever happens to an ice sheet ever again. This is unfortunately total nonsense since ice sheets have been collapsing all over the place, and so it means that a lot of the predictions in this document are probably very off -- in the conservative direction.

Next story, more fighting between Hamas and Fatah. Palestinians fall deeper into civil unrest. Subtext of this: After Arafat died, there was no central strongman. Hamas has been thoroughly infiltrated by Iranian agents and is working on its own little agenda, which is part of why it started shelling Israel a while ago and kidnapping soldiers (they did it before Hezbollah, when the latest Lebanese war started! These groups work in sync now) without bothering to ask the Palestinians if that was a good idea. And Fatah, Yassir Arafat's old party, specializes mostly in corruption, despite what appear to be good intentions by its current leader Mahmoud Abbas. Fatah has the presidency and Hamas the parliament, and both have their own armed forces. So the two factions of Palestinian government are busily killing each other. If it weren't for the fact that this is wholly destructive of any remaining bits of functioning civil society and infrastructure in the Palestinian territories, and thus one of the few ways left to make life systematically worse for the average Palestinian, I would say that these batch of idiots shooting one another is the best thing they could do with their time.

And yet another report on Iraq indicating that the place is a mess and deteriorating rapidly. (Shocking!) On the same day, a suicide attack in southern Iraq killed 60 and wounded 150.

OK, for anyone who hasn't figured this out yet, something important to understand. Majority rule is not the defining feature of democracy; there have been plenty of dictatorships that had the support of the majority. The key feature is protection of the rights of the minority. This is the center of the "deal" in democracy: when group X loses an election, they relinquish power, because they trust that the group taking power will not use that power to, say, brutally kill group X, or take everything X owns, or change the laws so that X is never again allowed to be in power. Without that level of trust, any election is simply a sham. In Iraq, there has never been this basic level of trust, because the basic level of political alliance is to tribe (and sect, and so on). A Sunni would have to be out of his mind to vote for a Shi'ite candidate, or even to let a Shi'ite candidate take power, because they know that the Shi'ites would have no compunction at all about killing them if they had the instruments of power, and vice-versa. In a situation like this, hopping for democracy is utterly ridiculous; civil war is the only possibility, ended either by one group seizing power forcibly over the others or by stable partition.

Please, please, please, don't forget that. Having elections does not make you a democracy any more than going to a garage makes you a car.

OK, back to work for me.

(PS: Sorry, I'm just linking to the NYT stories today; these are being covered everywhere, check your favorite news outlet for details. Except for the climate report, which I couldn't find anywhere at all on Fox News' web site; what a shock)

I find that I very often want to see something like an outline of "1,500km from the Saudi border" or something similar to that, superimposed on an ordinary political map of the world. I'm sure this is really easy to do. Does anyone know of something on the web, or some simple software solution, to quickly bring these up?

There's an article in the NYT about the president authorizing US troops in Iraq to use force against Iranian agents they encounter there. And for the first time in a long while, I think the president said something that wasn't simply asinine. But what I hope this means is something significantly more aggressive. Iran is currently engaging in a very sophisticated proxy war across the Middle East, with their agents infiltrating and taking over groups and using them for violent confrontations and takeovers. (Hamas against both Israel and Fatah, Hezbollah against all of Lebanese civil society, various agents including al-Sadr in Iraq, Iranian "military representatives" in Syria, and sleeper cells in every country with a Shi'ite population) These guys are using Iraq as a perfect opportunity to set up people who can do all of the things that they don't want to do openly; a really significant fraction of the violence in Iraq is being driven by these agents, for Iranian purposes. (Mostly, to screw with the US, and to even have a chance to attack US forces, train against them, and evaluate their capabilities in the field)

If Iran is going to fight a "secret war" with the US, the US should feel no compunction about fighting a secret war back. Let me armchair-general for a moment: I would have already issued orders to capture or kill any Iranian agents found in Iraq, and if they have any local cell organizations that aren't valuable for some other purpose, to simply wipe them out. Iran can't complain about nasty things happening to its people when it denies that they're in there; OK, let's take them up on that. The fewer remaining members of their "intelligence services," the better.

So for once, I actually think that our president's call for increased military action in some regard is a good idea. Mark it well, it won't happen that often.

...I've got a prison colony I'd like to interest you in.

A lovely little exchange between our Attorney General and Sen. Specter at the Jan. 18th Senate Judiciary Committee hearings, which were mostly about legislative and judicial oversight of Gonzales' mass wiretapping program. The main story of that day was that Gonzales basically indicated that the executive would do everything in its power to evade the substance of the order, but the fun part was the conversation that began when Gonzales said, "There is no expressed grant of habeas in the Constitution; there’s a prohibition against taking it away."

From the fact that the Constitution's only mention of habeas is that "The privilege of the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended, unless when in cases of rebellion or invasion the public safety may require it," he therefore concludes that the Constitution does not grant you this right at all.

I love the sort of fellow we have in the AG's office. I really wasn't certain if our administration could find a more odious person than Ashcroft, but apparently if you start with people whose past experience is in writing legal justifications for torture, you can.

Side note: This story appeared on slashdot with a note that it wasn't being covered by the mainstream press, but only by the indies. However, today's Washingon Post corroborates the story.

(For those who don't follow the law, habeas corpus is the right that, if you are imprisoned, you can go to a court and demand that whoever is imprisoning you show that they have the legal authority to do so, e.g. that they're doing so in order to charge you with a crime. Without it, you can be hauled off to prison "just because" and left there)

Edit: You know, it takes a certain marvelous skill for an Attorney-General to get Bay Area Indymedia and the John Birch Society to simultaneously consider him a dangerous scumbag, and for the same reason.

Edit 2: Here, watch the conversation. It's a gas.

Geopolitics steps up again -- China successfully tested an anti-satellite weapon by shooting down one of their own old weather satellites. If you go back to the latest National Space Policy, [old post] you'll see whence all the emphasis on protecting US "freedom of action in space:" the US and China both see this as a major new battleground for geopolitical-scale military superiority.

There's a much broader game going on, of course. China has worked out a systematic policy of recruiting any states that don't get along with the US, e.g. African dictatorships that the US won't deal with because of extensive corruption, and turning them into client states, with extensive Chinese investment (under very strict Chinese control; they don't care if they have to bribe some locals, but then they get to run the show themselves) turning into a steady supply of raw materials for China. It also means that embargoes are trivially broken; if the Western coalition embargoes someone, they just start working with China instead. Iran being a key example: they're building oil pipelines out to Beijing now, with China giving Iran full cover for its nuke program. (Also nice for China since Pakistan is an increasingly weak and flaky ally, and at perpetual risk for coup)

Note, BTW, that North Korea's continued existence is determined by China. The DPRK gets to keep running in their own peculiar madhouse way, and sell advanced missile and nuclear technology to anyone within the Chinese "family." It's a way they can provide somewhat sleazy benefits to their closer partners while providing plausible deniability.

Update: More details from the Washington Post.

From the Washington Post: "Secret Panel to Govern Domestic Wiretapping."

You know, in any normal sort of world, that headline would be rather alarming. But it actually represents a significant improvement from the situation a day ago, where domestic wiretapping was governed by the personal fiat of various individuals in the Departments of Justice, Defense, and Homeland Security.

Not to say that I believe that those three organizations will miraculously stop all wiretaps (and other forms of surveillance, both focused and broad-spectrum) that are not governed by the FISC.

The story is going around the blogs that Robert Anton Wilson passed away. For those who haven't heard of him, he was a writer who wrote some truly bizarre shit, as well as some philosophy and so on which turned out to be surprisingly deep. Hell of a sense of humor. Real impact on me when I was younger. Probably still to this day.

Anyway, this just makes me think of the time about ten years ago when a rumor started going around that he was dead; he even had obits showing up in newspapers. It took years to get it fully straightened out that no, in fact, he was still alive. So there's part of me that secretly wonders if he's going to come back from the dead this time, too. Another part of me realizes that this is pretty Messianic thinking... but if this world is going to get hit with a messiah, I suppose it could do a hell of a lot worse.

(The part of me that's a good Jew is wondering about why other parts of me describe the coming of the messiah as something that the world could get hit by, rather than something that "I look forward to... with perfect faith, though he may tarry." The part of me that knows history thinks that "inflict" is a pretty good verb to use with "messiah." The part of me that's watching this many parts of me yell at each other thinks that RAW would find that pretty appropriate.)

From a decision of the Supreme Court today, in MedImmune v. Genentech:

The rule that a plaintiff must destroy a large building, bet the farm, or (as here) risk treble damages and the loss of 80 percent of its business, before seeking a declaration of its actively contested legal rights finds no support in Article III.

From the Washington Post:

Bush Urges Troop 'Surge' in Iraq: President says al-Maliki's willingness to commit forces against Shiite militias ensures success.

I've spent a lot of time in the past few years reading resumés and interviewing people. A really surprising fraction of those resumés have been really lousy; either uninformative, or full of meaningless junk, or just plain illegible. I tend to throw those out. On the other hand, good interviews with competent people leave me in a better mood all day... so in the interest of getting more of those in the future, I'm going to post a couple of notes on good versus bad resumés. (OK, to be honest: In the interest of not having to slog through any more piles of really bad resumés. It makes me feel like my brains are going to leak out of my ears.)

( Read more...Collapse )
Disclaimer: This is not the official position of my employer, or anyone else except me. I offer no guarantee whatsoever that if you follow this, you will get interviewed, hired, even noticed by a potential or current employer, or even not be shot at by them. Nor is any warranty, express or inferred, offered in conjunction with the reliability or usefulness of this advice.

Trent Lott (R-MS) just got chosen to be minority whip. He's the former majority leader who stepped down in 2003 after a bit of a fuss over his remarks at Strom Thurmond's 100th birthday party. Just so nobody forgets, his exact words were:

"I want to say this about my state -- when Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We're proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn't have had all these problems over the years, either."

"I wanna tell you, ladies and gentlemen, that there's not enough troops in the army to force the Southern people to break down segregation and admit the nigra race into our theaters, into our swimming pools, into our homes, and into our churches."

Newsweek and the Washington Post are hosting a dialogue on the subject of faith and the possibility of coexistence between religions. Contributors so far include the Dalai Lama and Mohammad Khatami. Interesting to hear them speak, and to see people's responses.

There has been significant progress towards sequencing Neanderthal DNA, and there are hopes of having an almost complete sequence in a year or so. This opens all kinds of doors to looking at what, genetically, makes us human.

On a related note, Slate is running an article about cross-species mating, and in particular why humans could or could not breed with other species. (This was prompted by a recent paper suggesting that humans and Neanderthals may have mated, and that's the origin of some of our modern cranial capacity genes)

Back in the land of geopolitics, a Chinese sub managed to sneak up on a US carrier group. Apart from sdragon's comment that someone O4+ is going to be in seriously deep shit over this, this suggests that they've been doing quite well on the technology needed to make highly silent motors and so on. (Whether they did so on their own or "acquired" this technology from elsewhere is an interesting question. China's military has certainly never suffered from not-invented-here syndrome.)

There's really a lot having to do with China going on right now. China and Iran are cementing an alliance, with Iranian oil getting ready to flow east. (Question: Anyone have some info as to what the routes are going to be? It looks like every possible path is going to involve some combination of Pakistan, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Uzbekistan, and Kazakhstan, which could make for some very exciting places to put oil pipelines. Don't forget what happened to Russia's Caspian -> Turkey pipeline, that once upon a time went through Chechnya...) Iran may well have had observers at N Korea's nuclear test. (Unconfirmed rumors, but wouldn't be all that surprising if true; those countries have been working hand-in-hand on this for a while.) China is similarly making alliances with a lot of other dubious places that have useful resources, like the Sudan and Zimbabwe, but that the West by and large wants nothing to do with. This certainly makes the notion of sanctions as a weapon pretty much infeasible, since that depends on some sort of unity, and could bring us back towards a bipolar world -- if, that is, China's "burn through the environment as fast as needed to get economic progress" algorithm doesn't hit a really nasty obstacle in the near future. Which is not something that I would bet against. (Side note: They're burning through this a lot faster than the US or Europe ever did, because they have a much higher population, and they have old systems in place which turn into a huge social unrest risk if they don't keep the economy flowing. Add to this an almost total willingness to sacrifice the countryside to protect the cities, again because of unrest risk, and there's a real problem brewing in China. Not that this would be useful to the furthering of US interests or anything.)

Really, China is in an interesting fix. They got where they are today by being the cheapest producer of all sorts of things. Now other Asian countries, especially in SE Asia, are thinking about competing with them; so what will China do? Keep trying to undercut them, or move into higher-end markets? The latter is more sustainable in general, but it doesn't necessarily scale to a huge population quite as smoothly, and China has been moving so fast that it hasn't really had time to transfer the benefits from its previous wave of growth to the population as a whole, so the moderating factor that that would create isn't available. And trouble from the countryside, local riots, complete collapses of regions due to ecosystem failure, and so on, keep happening more and more often, while people keep streaming into already-overloaded cities. It reminds me a bit of the USSR: it looks awfully menacing on the outside, but if you look at their underlying logistics and infrastructure, there's a very different thing going on.

Dammit, I'm not nearly enough of a China expert. Perhaps I'm going to need to start on that.

Read this.

The Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department have told a federal court that permitting lawyers access to high-level Qaeda suspects without tighter secrecy procedures could damage national security by revealing harsh “alternative interrogation methods” used in secret C.I.A. prisons overseas. ... “Nobody is trying to keep Khan from speaking with his attorney,” [Justice Department spokesman] Blomquist said. “Rather, the government is asking that the protective order governing the information the detainee shares with his counsel be appropriately tailored to accommodate a higher security level.”

For those of you who haven't seen this, the Rev. Ted Haggard, a prominent conservative leader, (and who was prominently featured in the recent documentary Jesus Camp, btw) recently resigned after admitting to the at least partial truth of allegations that he's been popping meth and screwing male prostitutes. But he qualified his admission:

One of the nation's most influential conservative Christian leaders, the Rev. Ted Haggard, said today he bought methamphetamine and received a massage from a self-described male escort. But Haggard denied allegations by the man that he ever used the drug or had sex with him.

From Anders Sandberg's blog, warning signs for tomorrow. I can think of a couple of places I'd like to post the "Group Intellect" warning; "Existential Threat" may have to turn into an icon. I may have to sit down and come up with some other useful warning signs. ("Beware of Golem!")

From Slashdot, an article suggesting that call centers may be using emotion detection software to tell when customers are annoyed. I'm not really sure what they're doing with this; if they already have a human on-line, humans are much better at detecting annoyance than machines are. If they're using it to identify "this person is getting pissed, move them up in the voicemail queue," that seems like one of the worst perverse incentives I've seen in a while. It makes me think of Crowley's antics from Good Omens.

Apparently, as "his frustration rises and his influence ebbs," our president has been using the word "unacceptable" much more often. The article says:

In speeches, statements and news conferences this year, the president has repeatedly declared a range of problems "unacceptable," including rising health costs, immigrants who live outside the law, North Korea's claimed nuclear test, genocide in Sudan and Iran's nuclear ambitions... Having a president call something "unacceptable" is not the same as having him order U.S. troops into action. But foreign policy experts say the word is one of the strongest any leader can deploy, since it both broadcasts a national position and conveys an implicit threat to take action if his warnings are disregarded.

You use that word a great deal. I do not think it means what you think it means.

From Reuters: Troops battle 10-foot marijuana plants.

One soldier told him later: "Sir, three years ago before I joined the Army, I never thought I'd say 'That damn marijuana.'"

An article recently published in the Lancet estimates the number of "excess deaths" in Iraq since the invasion at 655,000, of which 601,000 were due to violence and the balance due to disease, etc. Here's a Washington Post story; here's one from the BBC. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the original journal article; if someone does and could forward me a copy, I'd be very interested to read it.

[In fact: The BBC and WP stories seem to disagree on numbers a good deal, so I'd really like to see the original paper and figure out what's going on. The WP numbers more closely match what I've heard from other media channels, so I'll use those below]

There's "controversy," of course, because the US administration immediately decried the results as false and the methodology as incorrect -- which I would personally find a bit surprising, given that poor methodology doesn't generally get published in top-tier medical journals. The official death toll is less than 1/10th of that.

But there may be a good reason why those two numbers disagree: the official death toll is probably counting very selective types of deaths, e.g. deaths in which US personnel were directly involved, either as combatants or in cleaning up the mess. It's an attempt to count deaths which came to the attention of US forces. The Lancet study is measuring something else: they did a random survey of 1,849 households across Iraq and asked people about deaths in their family, asking for (and routinely receiving) death certificates to verify the numbers. Based on this, they computed the overall mortality rate in Iraq in deaths per 1,000 people per year, compared this to the known mortality rate prior to the war, and thus computed the number of people who died above the number you would expect to have died had nothing happened. As a sanity check, they noted that their measurement for excess deaths in the time period immediately following the invasion does match the official number for that period fairly closely. Since US forces were more directly involved in everything that was going on then, those numbers ought to match up.

A number measured by these means is both helpful and not: on the one hand, it tells you that there is some total effect going on (which is why this sort of method is very common in epidemiology) but it doesn't tell you what caused it. However, the second number is pretty surprising: Of the 655k excess deaths, 601k were from violence, primarily from gunshot wounds. Normally in a post-war region, I would expect excess deaths to come mostly from disease, starvation, and the like; the fact that most of these deaths were violent is pretty unusual. Perhaps it means that medicine is improving.

I noticed that a DoD spokesman said "it would be difficult for the U.S. to precisely determine the number of civilian deaths in Iraq as a result of insurgent activity." This is an attempt to emphasize that people aren't dying because US forces are killing them, but as a result of the insurgents, which we consider our enemies. This is true but misses the point; on the one hand, nobody was accusing the US forces of killing 655kpeople, and on the other hand, the simple presence of these insurgent forces is a direct consequence of the US invasion. In fact, the relatively low number of non-combat deaths may speak well of US activity on the ground; the absence of the other two of the Four Horsemen bespeaks some good work on keeping food and medicine flowing in a war-torn country. But the high number of overall deaths is directly
attributable to the fact that the US invaded Iraq, and the upper political command has no cover from that.

Edit: I got a copy. It looks like the WP numbers are correct; the 100k number that the BBC cites is the number from previous studies, which this paper means to update. Similarly the number of households surveyed is in fact 1849, not "under 1000." I'll read the paper in more detail tonight and update if there's something interesting in it.

For once, have some good news. It looks like Katrina was a wake-up call for one group that realized it had a lot to lose from climate change: the insurance industry. And because insurance companies are very big, they have direct influence over the polluters at the same time that they're exposed to risk from the polluters screwing up. (If they were smaller and more specialized, that wouldn't be the case -- an insurer just of power plants wouldn't be nearly as worried about flood risks as a general insurer) So apparently, they're starting to do things about it.

I see this as really promising: It's a case where being very big gives a company a much broader perspective on consequences. (It reminds me of some recent articles comparing HMO's to the VA. Since the VA is stuck with people for their whole lives, in essence, it makes them think a lot more about preventive care, general quality-of-life, and so on, rather than on short-term solutions whose long-term costs they can remove by dumping patients. Sometimes, a company being big can be a very good thing for the world.)

The president just released a new national space policy. This was all done pianissimo; apparently it hasn't been posted on the White House's website, or even on NASA's, but only on the Office of Science & Technology Policy. The policy itself is highlighting things like the right of safe passage of US spacecraft, that nothing should be allowed to interfere with such, and that "freedom of action in space is as important to the United States as air power and sea power."

Incidentally, there have been vague rumors recently that China has been field-testing some new anti-satellite weaponry by pointing it at US satellites. I will just guess that this is no coincidence, and that you're seeing some geopolitics in action here.

Also: The directive for civil space exploration says that NASA's mandate is to "advance fundamental scientific knowledge of our Earth system, solar system, and universe." The part about Earth was removed in an earlier version, and apparently got reinstated. (This has to do with whether NASA should research climate -- n.b. the GISS-E group that does the current gold standard climate modelling is partially based out of NASA)

For those of you who somehow haven't heard, Rep. Mark Foley, R-FL, recently resigned his seat after he was caught trying to seduce teenaged boys. There's a scandal brewing because apparently the Speaker of the House, Dennis Hastert, knew about this and tried to cover it up. (And much of the Republican leadership as well)

Watching people try to spin this is just fascinating. First Foley checked himself into alcoholism treatment at an undisclosed location. He then revealed (via his attornies) that he had been abused as a child by a priest. (The relevance of this is dubious, but I suppose it's meant to explain why he's doing this and how he's really a victim?) Then he revealed that he's gay, which was apparently no secret within DC. (So we now have the spin of "blame the priests, blame the alcoholism -- which is a disease, he's getting treated for it, don't worry -- blame the fact that he's gay and not really one of us")

But apparently, that wasn't odd enough. So over the past few days of news coverage, Fox News decided to take a slightly different tack:

They repeatedly started referring to him as a Democrat. Typo? Nope, they have it written out in full, too, and apparently are running analysis of it:



(More links from sdragon, including vid clips)

I know that some news outlets have been fairly liberal with stating that "the President's policy has always been X," even in the presence of old tape archives showing them saying the opposite. (Ari Fleischer got into some particular trouble for this towards the end of his tenure, but never anything serious) But this is really going a little far, no?

(Hi, Trotsky. Hi, Yezhov. You've got company.)

In case you haven't read, the Military Commissions Act of 2006 passed the Senate on a roll-call vote by 65 to 34, with one abstention. Put briefly, this bill suspends most of the Constitution, stating that anyone not a citizen may be arrested and tried under military law, absent the rights to challenge evidence, have counsel of their choosing, call witnesses, or challenge the basic cause for their detention under habeas corpus. Conviction is by a majority vote of the military commission under secret ballot; they may be appealed to a military appeals court, and thence to a civilian court. (Note that this is a bit milder than some of the previous situation, in that it only affects non-Citizens; but note also that the key provision of the 14th amendment is that the rights stated under the Constitution apply to all persons, not only to citizens. This was instated soon after the Civil War, when freed blacks were persons but not citizens. You may notice that the executive branch also has the ability to strip citizenship)

Sections 7 and 8 effectively give blanket immunity to US personnel for charges of war crimes, specifically w.r.t. the Geneva Conventions. Basically, it redefines the War Crimes Act to allow whatever the President says. (Sec. 8.a.3 of this bill)

Some good news: This isn't the first time our country has suspended the Constitution in some wholly unconstitutional manner; each time it was realized and reverted a few years later. I suspect that the same will happen here, after our current President -- may his name and his memory be erased -- is gone and the Congress cleaned up as well. It's very important to do that, soon, before (more) lasting damage is done: remember to vote in this coming election, no matter where you are, and if you can contribute to electoral races, do so. And next election. And the one after that.

(On the subject of lasting damage: No real developments in the Arar case since the Canadian government's report. Apparently they admit that they mistakenly tagged him as a terror suspect and gave this information to the US; the US promptly shipped him off to Syria to be tortured. The Canadian government apologized. But that doesn't answer the basic question of where the safety checks went that would keep a single mistaken identification from sending someone off to a torture chamber for a year -- isn't this precisely why we have a rule of law?)

Politics: Riots in Hungary, a military coup in Thailand. (Random note about the latter: when we were in Thailand a few months ago, I told autumnflames that it was good that we went then, since there had been unrest a few months before and there was going to be a coup by October. I don't actually know much of anything about Thai politics; it was clear enough that picking up the paper a few times and staring out the window was information enough to tell. It's too bad there isn't an obvious way to do something useful with "there will be a coup here on such a date" information, apart from the usual "get you and everyone you care about out of the way.")

Israel says it will pull the last of its troops from Lebanon by this weekend. At some point I'll write a big post about all of the politics around this, really.

Potentially (much) more important news: Major openings forming in the Arctic ice sheet. They quote Mark Drinkwater of the European Space Administration as saying that the North Polar Sea should be seasonally navigable in 10-20 years. Key conclusion: If you can get your hands on land way up North, especially useful sea ports, now would be a good time. There will be shipping traffic there, there will be oil exploration, and if James Lovelock's really gloomy predictions come to pass, it may be some of the most pleasant real estate left on the planet 100 years from now...

And your oddball news: A recent study of almost 25k women with breast implants showed that they did not have a significantly higher mortality rate than women without them. They did, however, have a 73% higher suicide rate than the population as a whole.

An article from the Cato Institute titled Doublespeak and the War on Terrorism. A nice little summary of what our government has been turning into.