1. Buried in the news was the acknowledgment that this new Iranian facility is not operational. It is merely being built. Most of the froth about it is bullshit.

2. Where the hell did Israel get hundreds of nukes? Israel has never tested a nuke and it's really hard to have operational nuclear warheads unless you've tested a few to make sure they work. I'll give you one guess where they came from.

Being the world's reserve currency isn't really about who holds your currency as their reserves so much as it is who will unconditionally (or nearly unconditionally) accept your money. Back in the '80s McDonnell Douglas sold DC-9s to Yugoslavia. We got paid in hams. And the cafeteria was selling really good Yugoslavian hams for a good price. That's the sort of thing that happens when people don't want your money.

What Miz Bachmann is probably really worried about is that if enough people/nations/businesses start to decline to accept the US dollar, people like her will have a hell of a time starting random wars and paying for them by running the printing presses overtime. There are many privileges that come with being the reserve currency (and many responsibilities). And, since there is no wizard who anoints the reserve currency, if we get voted off the island, losing the privileges will hurt. A lot.

read The Nightmare Years by William L. Shirer, or, at least the front end of it. It is a part of Mr. Shirer's memoirs covering the years 1930-1940 and his time in India and Europe as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune. In the early '30s he was in India covering Ghandi and traveled to Afghanistan with the young prince who would become the King of Afghanistan that would be deposed in the 1970's in advance of the Russian invasion. He had to sneak in past the British blockade of the country (The British being the world's bullies at the time; a role we have since assumed.).

I read this book, published in the mid-80's, after our invasion of Afghanistan and I actually pulled out the book and the newspapers and set them side by side because it looked as if the NYT had plagiarized Mr. Shirer's work in their descriptions of the country. The NYT was innocent but, nonetheless, the descriptions made in the early 2000's were eerily similar to the ones made by Mr. Shirer of an age 70 years earlier.

Instead of religious righteousness, we would be better served if we dealt with our empire with more Roman pragmatism.

let me point this out:

Russia ready for restoration of ties with NATO

Sep 30th, 2009 | MOSCOW -- The Kremlin says it's ready to fully restore cooperation with NATO, which was suspended in the aftermath of Russia's war with Georgia.

President Dmitry Medvedev's spokeswoman Nataliya Timakova said Wednesday that a planned visit to Moscow by the NATO chief demonstrates that the alliance is ready for better ties.

Relations between NATO and Russia were frozen after the August 2008 war. NATO accused Russia of using excessive force and occupying Georgian territory.

Timakova says that an EU-commissioned report released Wednesday showed that NATO had made some decision too quickly.

The report says that Georgia's attack on its breakaway province of South Ossetia marked the start of the war, but it also concluded that Russia retaliated with excessive force.

This, of course, is AP but look at the headline. It makes it sound as if Russia is ready to resume ties with NATO - the implication being that they broke them off. But, no, they didn't and they weren't the ones unready to have ties. It was NATO that broke the ties and weren't ready to have them. The first sentence claims that Russia said they were ready to improve ties. The next line, quoting the Russian spokeswoman, makes it clear that the Russians said that NATO was ready for closer ties not the other way around. It would be nice if the news just gave you news without distortion. And we used to call Pravda the world's most mendacious newspaper.

I'd like everybody to remember that the observation that the average temperature has been rising over the last 50 years does not, ipso facto, mean that the observed rise is a result of CO2. Even being able to claim that the observed rise is a result of human activity does not, ipso facto, pin the tail on CO2.

While the science behind the greenhouse effect is well understood (it is a consequence of the mechanism by which electromagnetic radiation propagates in a medium); the expansion of the observation that greenhouses warm up very quickly in the morning to the effects on the atmosphere in whole is deeply flawed for at least three reasons.