COPING WITH NEW TECHNOLOGY: An amusing video.

J.D. JOHANNES SAID IT BEST: “Support the troops. Let them win.”

UPDATE: By contrast, Charles Schumer promises another Vietnam.

To some people, Vietnam wasn’t a defeat, but a victory. To them, the right side won. And lost. Naturally, they’re happy to repeat the experience.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Mickey Kaus thinks the Senate stalemate is “win-win.”

MORE: Further thoughts on Iraq and Vietnam:

Okay, let’s compare Iraq to Vietnam, in the terms Balko has chosen. Over 58,000 American troops died in 12 years in Vietnam. 3000 have died in Iraq in 3 years. At that rate, Balko will be waiting 57 more years for our troop dead toll to reach 60,000. By the very measure Balko invokes, it would appear that our leadership in Iraq has been far better than it ever was in Vietnam. Of course, by his measure our leadership in WWII must have been truly abysmal, since we lost over 400,000 troops in four years.

Iraq is not Vietnam and Vietnam was not WWII. We’ve had our share of competent and incompetent leadership during all three conflicts, and I won’t argue that the lower death toll in Iraq indicates better leadership, but rather that measuring our leaders’ competence and the worthiness of a war by means of relative death tolls is silly, you might even say “shameless”, considering that the death toll has nothing to do with whether it is right to be fighting. The measure of a war should not be whether our leaders are competent, or how many people die, but rather, whether our goals are just and good and achieveable, and whether there is any viable alternative to war that will achieve the same ends.

So why do people who are opposed to the war in Iraq compare it to Vietnam? I suspect that the InstaPundit is right: “To some people, Vietnam wasn’t a defeat, but a victory. To them, the right side won. And lost. Naturally, they’re happy to repeat the experience.”

And read the bit about the war as a “consensus identity narrative,” too.

AN ANTI-WAHABBI TRANSLATION of the Koran.

MEGAN MCARDLE: “One of the areas of foreign policy in which I do not think that George Bush has made anything appreciably worse is North Korea. Of course, this is because it doesn’t actually get much worse than Crazed Dictator Worshipped As God By Millions of Starving Citizens, Who Has a Nuclear Weapons Programme. So it’s not as if this actually redounds to Mr Bush’s credit. What puzzles me, actually, is the many people I know who purport to believe that Mr Bush has somehow egregiously fouled things up, here. . . . It seems glaringly obvious to me that unless we invade North Korea or Iran, these countries will continue their quest to stockpile a little doomsday.”

COPYRIGHT PROBLEMS for the MPAA.

MORE ON WIKIPEDIA PROBLEMS.

GREGORY BENFORD ON WHAT TO DO ABOUT GLOBAL WARMING:

Benford has a proposal that possesses the advantages of being both one of the simplest planet-cooling technologies so far suggested and being initially testable in a local context. He suggests suspension of tiny, harmless particles (sized at one-third of a micron) at about 80,000 feet up in the stratosphere. These particles could be composed of diatomaceous earth. “That’s silicon dioxide, which is chemically inert, cheap as earth, and readily crushable to the size we want,” Benford says. This could initially be tested, he says, over the Arctic, where warming is already considerable and where few human beings live. Arctic atmospheric circulation patterns would mostly confine the deployed particles around the North Pole. An initial experiment could occur north of 70 degrees latitude, over the Arctic Sea and outside national boundaries. “The fact that such an experiment is reversible is just as important as the fact that it’s regional,” says Benford.

Is Benford’s proposal realistic? According to Ken Caldeira, a leading climate scientist at Stanford University and the Carnegie Institution’s Department of Global Ecology, “It appears as if any small particle would do the trick in the necessary quantities. I’ve done a number of computer simulations of what the climate response would be of reflecting sunlight, and all of them indicate that it would work quite well.” He adds, “I wouldn’t look to these geoengineering schemes as part of normal policy response, but if bad things start to happen quickly, then people will demand something be done quickly.”

Read the whole thing.

UPDATE: A suggestion that this solution is too good to try. What if it worked?

PATRICK FITZGERALD, indicted. By Victoria Toensing.

BAGHDAD TODAY: A report from Mohammed Fadhil: “The progress made so far invites hope and optimism, but it’s still too early to celebrate.”

UPDATE: This sounds good: “Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki told President Bush on Friday that the increased effort to provide security in Baghdad had gone exceedingly well so far, Mr. Maliki’s office said in a statement. . . . Maj. Gen. Joseph F. Fil Jr., commander of the First Cavalry Division in Baghdad, told reporters on Friday that there had been a substantial reduction in violence in the past 48 hours, which he attributed both to the increased troop presence and the decision by Sunni and Shiite militants to keep a low profile.” Stay tuned. This sounds promising. Unfortunately, too many members of the U.S. political classes have now put themselves in a situation where success is politically more dangerous than failure.

ILYA SOMIN OFFERS THOUGHTS ON prison rape and what to do about it.

SURRENDER RESOLUTION FAILS. It’s nice to see the Senate Republicans show a little backbone.

Meanwhile, I note that N.Z. Bear’s VictoryCaucus.com has been growing by leaps and bounds. Just look at this traffic, as of first thing this morning:

UPDATES: Thoughts on what it means, from Austin Bay.

THINGS BEGIN TO fall apart in Venezuela.

K.C. JOHNSON: “I don’t consider it common practice at most blogs to, upon receiving questioning comments, eliminate the original post and replace it with something else.”

COMMENTS ON THE NEW DEMOCRATIC SENATE AND THE WAR, from Bill Frist.

FOR CAMILLE PAGLIA, “peak experiences” seem to come easily. Plus, this advice: “When people come up and try to hand you underwear, it shows good instincts not to accept it.”

BYRON YORK LOOKS AT “The Thing That Cannot Be Spoken at the Libby trial.” Because if it were, the whole thing would collapse.

THE WASHINGTON POST SLAMS MURTHA:

Mr. Murtha has a different idea. He would stop the surge by crudely hamstringing the ability of military commanders to deploy troops. In an interview carried Thursday by the Web site MoveCongress.org, Mr. Murtha said he would attach language to a war funding bill that would prohibit the redeployment of units that have been at home for less than a year, stop the extension of tours beyond 12 months, and prohibit units from shipping out if they do not train with all of their equipment. His aim, he made clear, is not to improve readiness but to “stop the surge.” So why not straightforwardly strip the money out of the appropriations bill — an action Congress is clearly empowered to take — rather than try to micromanage the Army in a way that may be unconstitutional? Because, Mr. Murtha said, it will deflect accusations that he is trying to do what he is trying to do. “What we are saying will be very hard to find fault with,” he said.

Mr. Murtha’s cynicism is matched by an alarming ignorance about conditions in Iraq. He continues to insist that Iraq “would be more stable with us out of there,” in spite of the consensus of U.S. intelligence agencies that early withdrawal would produce “massive civilian casualties.” He says he wants to force the administration to “bulldoze” the Abu Ghraib prison, even though it was emptied of prisoners and turned over to the Iraqi government last year. He wants to “get our troops out of the Green Zone” because “they are living in Saddam Hussein’s palace”; could he be unaware that the zone’s primary occupants are the Iraqi government and the U.S. Embassy?

Murtha is the face of today’s Democratic Party on the war. This is bad for the country, and likely to prove unwise politically.

UPDATE: Related item on the “armor shortage” claims here.

ANOTHER UPDATE: Blasting an idiotic Republican.

MORE: Further thoughts on armor from J.D. Johannes: “As one who has been in a lot of humvees and has been lens-to-detonator with IEDs, I have a mixed feeling about the armor debates.” Read the whole thing.

WHY THE PELOSI DEMOCRATS scare China. “Will there be a United States-China trade war? Protectionism is a major concern on Wall Street right now. In a recent analysis, Morgan Stanley chief economist Stephen Roach compared U.S. trade friction with China today vs. that with Japan in the 1980s–and found today’s circumstances far more worrying.”

DAN GERSTEIN: “If the liberal blogs want to understand why so few people outside their narrow echo chamber take them seriously, and what it will take to gain the broader credibility they crave, they should look no further than their handling of the recent flap over John Edwards’ foul-mouthed blogger hires.”

(Via Danny Glover).

UNDERREPORTED NEWS from France.

ALAN BOYLE on how to fight a killer asteroid.

PERSONALLY, I think that this will gain votes for Hillary.

WHAT HAPPENED IN IRAQ, while Congress was voting. From The Mudville Gazette.

JOHN SCALZI’S NOVELETTE The Sagan Diary gets a strong review from Professor Bainbridge: “Along with a Dunhill cigar and a glass or three of port, it made a great after-dinner treat.” He notes that it “differs radically” from Scalzi’s other books. I’m reading Scalzi’s next book, The Last Colony, now. It’s a sequel to Old Man’s War and Ghost Brigades, so it’s not such a departure. It’s good though. It’ll be out later this spring.

ENDING THE “CULTURE OF CORRUPTION:” Check out the Sunlight Foundation’s Open House Project.