News Brief, America, Frack Yeah Edition

Defense

• It saddens me to see that a general neglect of our soldiers has a long and storied tradition in this country. I honestly think us to be better than that.
• Uh-oh, is our new strategy in Iraq geared for cutting and running? Those defeat mongers at the Pentagon must want Al-Qaeda In Iraq to win. Except they’re now choosing to focus on it. Umm… should that have been the plan, I don’t know, years ago?
• Booz-Allen is facing scrutiny for a no-bid contract at DHS everyone except Booz-Allen think is “beyond the scope” of what’s appropriate. In fact, no-bids of all kind are coming under increasing scrutiny, and that’s a good thing—in 2006, the federal government for the first time handed out more sole-source contracts than open-bid contracts, implying a major net-loss in transparency, fraud-prevention, and so on.
• The F-35C, the Navy variant of the new Joint Strike Fighter, looks like it is doing well. Far better than its retarded older brother, the F-22. In other Navy news, I’m sure Cebrowski’s ghost is tickled pink that network-centric warfare is making a comeback.
• Adaptive optics sure do seem cool.

Around the World

• In a lot of cultures, there is the idea of sins of the father—if a parent commits some crime, his children can be held responsible. In fact, the idea was so widespread that in the Old Testament God would brag of not killing the children of the men who had sinned against Him to demonstrate His mercy—indeed, it was considered a great virtue not to punish children for what their parents did. So, given how much the Right brags of being good faithful Christian leaders, why have we disappeared the young children of Al-Qaeda leaders?
• As the world urbanizes, we will face many choices: finding housing materials, adapting economies, tremendously higher energy demands, pollution, transportation… Really, now’s the time to get a Master’s in Urban Planning or some such.
• When the Russian opposition is in such disarray, it should be no surprise that Putin is able to maneuver with impunity.
• Things in the Central African Republic are so bad people are fleeing to Chad, which is where people from Darfur also flee. Chad is no picnic, either. Just further south, in Congo, UN relief workers are being attacked as well. All of which means we’re looking at a humanitarian disaster of unimaginable scale. Again.
• Peru’s former dictator, still living under house arrest in South America, will run for parliament… in Japan. That whacky Fujimori, always keeping us on our toes.
• Those Russians sure did know how to torture, didn’t they? Good thing we learned from them before we began abducting innocent men, women, and children off the street to go to secret prison.
• Another story on the Christian victims of the Islamists unleashed by Bush’s war… which he refuses to help through granting refugee status or emigration rights.

Back at home

• Yes, that is staggering: At the height of Apartheid, South Africa imprisoned 851 of every 100,000 black men; At the height of the War on Drugs, the United States imprisons 4,419 of every 100,000 black men. Although the U.S. contains only 5% of the world’s population, we constitute 25% of its prison population. As of December 2006, there were 2.2 million people in jail, or one for every 133 of us—an increase of 62,000. Land of the free, indeed.
• According to Jonah Goldberg, if the Germans liked something (in this case, organic produce and environmentalism), then it was fascist to like that as well. Ignoring Rod Dreher’s entire body of work on “crunchy conservatives,” the idea to fundamentally stupid: considering Goldberg used to drive a VW Passat, he doesn’t have much room to complain about what Germans like or don’t like. And since when is a luxury grocery store (or, for that matter, Hegel) totalitarian in any way? This confirms my years-long complaint about Goldberg, and extends to most of my complaints with National Review: who the hell pays these people to write?
• Hey, did you know Exodus, the Christian ministry devoted to praying really hard to become straight, is a crock of sh*t? I sure did. So, too, does their leadership, at least the honest bits of it.
• Warren Buffet pays a smaller portion of his income as taxes than his secretary.
• Something funny in this otherwise extraordinary article about how Google Maps is changing our world: Hanke, one of the main brains behind the invention, is said to have “spent four years working in Washington, DC, and in Burma on what he will describe only as “foreign policy type of stuff” for the US government before eventually joining a video game startup.” Umm… you weren’t in Burma like that if you aren’t intelligence. So Google Earth was most likely started by a former spook, and now those same agencies contract out with Google Earth and the affiliated satellite imagery companies for their services. Google Maps really has changed our world. For the better, I’d say.
• But if the new RFID/GPS future scares you (or causes worry, as it does in me), there’s always the faraday-shielded wallet. This of it as a SCIF in your wallet.