News Briefs, Ghost in You Edition

Cross-posted at The Conjecturer. I am not posting the rest of the week, as I will be traveling.

Defense

• I really like thinking the best of our guys in uniform. But the demon spawn of our rightwing radio hosts seem determined to make that incredibly difficult. Best line: “Dr. Laura has been curiously silent about her son’s bravery.” Indeed.
• Doug Bandow takes a look at what Ron Paul said, what Paul Wolfowitz said, and offers this: “Doing so does not mean that Americans are “to blame” for terrorism. Or that the victims of 9/11 “deserved” what they got. Talking about the issue doesn’t necessarily even mean that the United States should change what it is doing. But the first step to design good policy is to recognize the consequences — all of them, including the ugly, unexpected, and painful ones — of alternative strategies.” He notes that 9/11 short-circuited the debate, and he’s right. Sometimes, it’s difficult for me to discuss, too, if only for the very personal losses that resulted.

Around the World

• Andrei Lugovoi has been charged with the murder of Alexander Litvinenko. The trick? Russia’s constitution forbids extradiction, in addition to the Kremlin’s desire to shelter Putin’s contract murderers. Lugovoi was discovered to have had extensive contact with Polonium-210 before his meeting with Litvinenko, with samples found on an airplane he rode and the hotel at which he stayed. He protests his innocence.
• And no, Russian still haven’t figured out a tasteful way to spend their oil money.
• Anne Applebaum takes an excellent look at whether and how NATO should respond to Russia’s cyberwar against Estonia. Such cyberwarfare doesn’t work against Russia’s other side thorn, Georgia: there, they’ve relied on their continuing row with the EU to slowly bleed off Saakashvili’s supporters, I assume for the ultimate cause of annexing liberating South Ossetia and Abkhazia.
• The Mark Seidenfeld case grows dark—and the prospects for a fair trial or equitable outcome look bleak.
• China’s protest season (I have no idea if there is an actual season, like in Boulder) kicks off with a bang, as the enforcement campaign for the One Child policy prompts massive riots in Gunagxi. China routinely faces between fifty and ninety thousand protest marches each year in reaction to various inefficiencies and poor planning.
• David Axe got to sit down with Afghan Ambassador Said Jawad. The snippets are encouraging: he shares many of my frustrations with how things are proceeding, along with a guarded hope that it just might work out. In stark contrast to some other, unnamed American projects, Afghanistan still has a very real chance of success.
• Meanwhile, Germany is back to wringing its hands and gazing at its navel over a soldier’s death in Afghanistan. But it is at least a debate, with a majority still seeing the value of cleaning up the mess.
• While I can see the geopolitik reasoning behind the assumption that Iran is responsible for the new missiles being found in Afghanistan, does anyone in their right mind think Tehran would suddenly reverse more than a decade of opposition to the Taliban, just to score a few western bodies? It was opposition to the Taliban that garnered a surprising collaboration between Tehran and Washington in 2001 and 2002, and the Shi’a in charge of Afghanistan’s western neighbor do not want to deal with a newly emboldened Mullah Omar setting up shop in Kandahar again, or even with a NATO withdrawal spurred by excessive chaos.
• Daniel Ortega, apparently not of the salsa fame, totes luvs the Kim Jong-il.
• Is our healthcare and welfare making us short? Color me skeptical—while the correlation between childhood nutrition (and by extension, overall societal wealth) and adult height is strong, I can’t imagine how researchers could control for all the variables associated with childhood development to establish a causative relationship. From what I know, a more logical cause of the height difference would be an interplay of two things: different rates of immigration (immigrants introduce difficult externalities into population studies), and food quality. I would imagine the amount of steroids and hormones we inject into our food products, as well as the pervasiveness of a corn monoculture, play a bigger role in adult height variance than whether or not we provide adequate social security to our elderly.

Back at Home

• Annoying as it is, the DC area isn’t that bad a place—so long as you avoid Leesburg, Ashburn, South Riding… Hell, any of the children-of-the-corn “planned” communities governed by HOAs so fascist and obsessed with uniformity they’d make the Presidium of the Supreme People’s Assembly proud. Anycrap, so there are other annoying bits as well, like Clarendon’s new reputation as a dumping ground for the recently bereaved, or development turf wars that feature lines like, “On the other side, Reed Fawell, a project supporter, compared the block where the proposed project would be to a “Third World country,” albeit one within walking distance of a Williams-Sonoma.” Yes, people say things like that with a straight face. Luckily, I’m in Reston, which does me the courtesy of being too expensive to live while also having nothing to do. Thanks, Virginia! At least we’re not third-world DC with starving fly babies!
• Democrats announce economic illiteracy, power of instincts.
• The Instapundit hates the Economist for being unfair. No, he thinks it is unfair to America. Yes, I realize how silly that sounds.
• Meanwhile, the Supreme Court hates your freedom to sleep at night without fear of… well, let’s let Radley Balko explain: “the police can break into your home, rouse you from sleep, hold you naked at gunpoint, and—even if you’re completely innocent—[and] you have no recourse, so long as the warrant was valid.” In other words, we live in a police state.