J.D. JOHANNES: “I’ve been out living among the Iraqi Police. . . . The Baghdad Security Plan is working and can achieve an endstate. It took the Brits 12 years in Malaya. We are following their plan. The biggest enemy we have is an over active media and spineless Host Nation government which is intimidated by the JAM and has the JAM as key constituent group.”

Meanwhile, read this post on a related subject.

DEFINING PATRIOTISM down.

HERE’S MORE on the disappearance of Iranian Deputy Defense Minister Ali Asgari.

MIKE RAPPAPORT looks at special interests and majority mistakes.

THOUGHTS ON LOTS OF SUBJECTS, from The Anchoress.

A LOOK AT HIGH DYNAMIC RANGE PHOTOGRAPHY, from Popular Science. Complete with step-by-step instructions.

By the way, people keep asking me if there’s any connection between Popular Mechanics and Popular Science. Nope, other than the word Popular in their names, there’s not.

CHRISTINA HOFF SUMMERS WRITES ON “The Subjection of Islamic Women And the fecklessness of American feminism.”

JAMES OBERG on women astronauts, the Mercury 13, and bad journalism.

THE TROOPS AND GENERAL PETRAEUS: A report from Michael Yon. Be sure you read the letter from Gen. Petraeus.

A MCCAIN comeback.

THIS LOOKS INTERESTING: Ian Stewart’s Why Beauty Is Truth: A History of Symmetry.

Sounds very cool. It should do well with NUMB3RS fans!

MICHAEL WESTFALL interviews Dave Hardy about the Second Amendment, and his new documentary on the subject.

GLOBAL WARMING UPDATE: If we’re going to listen to all these rich people on the subject of global warming, surely we should at least end the subsidies for corporate jets. But noooo, they’re complaining. . . .

U.S. airlines, which already share the sky with corporate jets, are pushing to share their tax burden too.

President George W. Bush is proposing to cut the amount passenger carriers such as American Airlines and Continental Airlines pay in federal taxes each year by $1.68 billion. Most of that obligation would be shifted to small-jet operators, including General Motors Corp., Exxon Mobil Corp. and NetJets Inc., the business-jet charter company owned by Warren Buffett’s Berkshire Hathaway Inc. . . .

Should Bush’s proposal become law, the impact on owners and operators of the small jets “is going to be significant,” says Ed Bolen, whose Washington-based National Business Aviation Association trade group represents more than 8,000 companies including NetJets, GM and Exxon Mobil.

Given the much greater greenhouse impact of these private jets as compared to flying commercial, that seems appropriate. In fact, I’d say that ending this subsidy is only the beginning. If you’re worried about global warming, and want the rich to do their fair share in fighting it, call your Senators and Representative.

And congratulate the Bush Administration on its pro-environment policies!

UPDATE: The Daily Aviator says I’m wrong: “Reynolds is a sharp guy, but he obviously hasn’t spent any time researching the issue, or he would know that this is actually a set up for the takeover of the public’s airways by a private company. I suspect he’s been the recipient of political insider distributions urging his post today.”

Nope, unless seeing the link on Drudge counts as an “insider” distribution. And reader Joe Hosteny sends a lengthy rebuttal that’s worth your time. Click “read more” to read it. Here’s the beginning:

While I applaud the fact that you bring attention to the hypocrisy that frequently surrounds the use of corporate jets, I think you should look a little more into the proposed increase in fees for private aircraft before you advocate them so willingly.

First of all, the airlines are using these fees to fight the onset of air taxi services, and lower cost charters. It really has nothing to do with “sharing” costs as they suggest. They simply want to put stop these nascent businesses from taking hold.

That’s a good point. I think that air taxis services and lower cost charters should be treated more favorably than corporate or private luxury jets, as they have economic incentives to keep load factors — and hence efficiencies — high. And they offer other benefits, as well, something I explored in this column last year. Maybe we need a special “greenhouse” excise tax on corporate and luxury jets instead!

NATURE’S CLIMATE CHANGE BLOG features warnings about biofuels:

Warnings that switching to biofuels as a ‘clean’ energy source could threaten food security and increase deforestation have become increasingly stark this week. . . .

The report warned that increasing production of liquid biofuels, such as ethanol and biodiesel, could increase the price of agricultural commodities with negative economic and social impacts, especially for the world’s poor who spend a large proportion of income on food. It also raised the issue that, where forests are cleared to make way for energy crops, GHG emissions may actually be higher overall from biofuels than from fossil fuels.

Read the whole thing. I think that we need to think carefully before pushing too hard in any one direction here. Experimentation is good, but I don’t think we know enough to go full bore yet.

UPDATE: Reader Kirk Parker emails:

Regarding your comment on the “warnings about biofuels” item:

I think that we need to think carefully before pushing too hard in any one direction here.

Agreed, but it’s worth explicitly pointing out that “not pushing to hard an any one direction” can can most easily be achieved by following strict policies of (1) no government subsidies, and (2) no government mandates as to fuel content or formulation. “Letting the market decide”, in this case, isn’t just libertarian dogma–it’s actually the best way to ensure that the costs for things like alcohol or other bio fuel content approximate their actual cost of production–which, in turn, is at least an approximation of the energy cost and environmental impact required to produce them, and certainly a better approximation than some bureaucrat (or lobbyist for ADM) could come up with.

Indeed.

THE ANSWER TO THE EXAMINER’S QUESTION IS SIMPLE: It’s because people are afraid they’ll blow things up.

Sooner or later, you know, fundamentalist Christians are going to pick up on this lesson, engage in similar behavior, and make similar demands. Because, apparently, it works fine.

UPDATE: Bryan Preston says that I’m wrong, and that Christians won’t do such things. I tend to think that conduct that’s rewarded gets engaged in more. We’ll find out which one of us is right, soon enough.

My own experience, however, is that Christians can lose it, too. Death threats aren’t the same as murder, of course. But I was appalled at the behavior I experienced, which included nasty threats, wishes that my wife would suffer Terri Schiavo’s fate, and nasty phone calls to my home as my wife recovered from heart surgery. That behavior, from religious pro-lifers, seemed kind of un-Christian to me. So pardon me if my faith that things can never get worse is weaker than Bryan’s.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Well, Allah gets it right in this comment to Bryan’s post:

Glenn’s simply saying that if we humor one religion’s fanatics, other religions’ fanatics will act in the expectation of being humored too. He’s not saying anything about numbers. On the contrary, it’s you guys who seem to be suggesting that no Christian fundamentalist would ever resort to violence. History is not on your side.

This is not a hard one, folks. But Bryan makes it hard by arguing against “This idea of Glenn’s, which goes back several years, that Christians are just chomping at the bit to go jihadi but don’t for some odd reason.” Er, that’s not my idea. My idea is, as suggested above, that you get more of what you reward.

MORE: Some further thoughts.

STILL MORE: More thoughts here.

SCIENTOLOGISTS GO AFTER THE BBC. John Travolta is spearheading their campaign.

If Travolta flies to Britain, the planet will suffer.

UPDATE: More here.

HERE COMES NEWT.

MARK TAPSCOTT: “Now this is the kind of aggressive marketing that can put GM and Chevrolet back in the battle for America’s most popular car. Automotive News reports that Cheryl Catton, Chevrolet’s director of car marketing, is encouraging dealers to put a Camry in their showrooms right next to the new Malibu.”

UPDATE: Perhaps they can also bill it as more exciting than Barack Obama!

FORGET THE CANDIDATES’ INCOME TAX RETURNS: Don Surber lists the records he’d like to see.

I’M ALL FOR PREPAREDNESS, but this sounds like very poor judgment on the part of the teachers:

Staff members of an elementary school staged a fictitious gun attack on students during a class trip, telling them it was not a drill as the children cried and hid under tables.

Of course, if the kids, or some adult who happened to come across this, had responded violently, that would be the teachers’ fault too. (Via Volokh). It was meant to be a “learning experience,” and if nothing else, I think the students learned a valuable lesson about the adults in whose care they had been placed.

UPDATE: More thoughts here.

SPLIT DECISION: “Police at the University of Northern Colorado and the University of Colorado say allowing concealed weapons on campus is more trouble than its worth, but Colorado State University is sticking to its policy that allows permit-holders to carry their guns.”

And check out this from Clayton Cramer, too.

STILL MORE crushing of dissent.

MICKEY KAUS has a post on Bill Richardson and immigration that contains this passage:

It’s 8:15 a.m. and Richardson is running late.

As a state patrolman pushes the governor’s Ford hybrid sport utility vehicle toward 90 mph, coaxing it to an unnatural whine, Richardson punches buttons on one of his three cellphones.

Another Corzine-like speeder. But at least he’s driving a hybrid!