A CHRISTIAN CHINA? Lots of people seem excited by this article, which begins: “Ten thousand Chinese become Christians each day, according to a stunning report by the National Catholic Reporter’s veteran correspondent John Allen, and 200 million Chinese may comprise the world’s largest concentration of Christians by mid-century, and the largest missionary force in history.”

It could happen, I suppose, and my colleague Rosalind Hackett, who studies these things, has suggested that militant Christianity, not Islam, is likely to be the religious force of the 21st century. (She also notes that few Americans realize how much missionary activity there is by African Christians in North America.) Still, I’d be surprised if these predictions bore out. Question left as an exercise for the reader: How long, at 10,000 / day, does it take to reach 200 million?

JEROME ARMSTRONG’S S.E.C. TROUBLES, explained.

WHEN HIDDEN EXPERTS are found.

WARMEST YEAR OF THE PAST CENTURY? New analysis suggests it was 1934, not 1998 as previously thought. Not sure what that means, but it’s kind of interesting that this sort of thing remains subject to uncertainty.

UPDATE: More here.

OUCH:

An overnight post from ABC’s Political Radar: “ABC News’ Raelyn Johnson reports…All day the blogosphere has been buzzing with the question, ‘Did Elizabeth Edwards really say that?’ Finally tonight there is an answer as the Edwards campaign confirms the remarks to ABC News.”

Ed Cone reports to ABC News’ Raelyn Johnson: Bullshit.

There was a lot of buzz, but little if any of it was about the veracity of the quote. In any case, you could have done what other media outlets, and the Edwards campaign, did: contact me for details of the interview.

Don’t mess with Ed.

RUNNING OUT OF RESOURCES?

I’m often asked about our consumption of natural resources, e.g., oil, iron, and copper. Since these resources are finite and population continues to grow, aren’t we in danger of running out? My short answer is no, we’ll never run out of anything that trades in the marketplace. But, we should be concerned about running out of “resources” that have no price and no owner, e.g., wild things and the ecosystems upon which they depend. Here’s why I’m concerned about the one and not the other.

Read the whole thing.

A ROBOT ROUNDUP FROM DARPATECH, by Erik Sofge. And here’s more reporting from DARPAtech by Noah Shachtman.

IN THE MAIL: William Gibson’s new novel, Spook Country.

INDEED: “TNR’s silence is deathly.”

ASSOCIATED PRESS: “Polls show shift in attitudes on Iraq following military inroads.”

UPDATE: And there’s this:

WASHINGTON (AP) – One senator said U.S. troops are routing out al-Qaida in parts of Iraq. Another insisted President Bush’s plan to increase troops has caused tactical momentum.

One even went so far on Wednesday as to say the argument could be made that U.S. troops are winning.

These are not Bush-backing GOP die-hards, but Democratic Sens. Dick Durbin, Bob Casey and Jack Reed. Even Sen. Carl Levin, chairman of the Senate Armed Services committee, said progress was being made by soldiers.

The suggestions by them and other Democrats in recent days that at least a portion of Bush’s strategy in Iraq is working is somewhat surprising, considering the bitter exchanges on Capitol Hill between the Democratic majority and Republicans and Bush. Democrats have long said Bush’s policies have been nothing more than a complete failure.

Perhaps we’ll see less partisanship in the months to come.

JAMES FALLOWS on the dangers of excessive security. On the other hand, his final question demonstrates that hyperbole is present among the critics, too.

GREEN FAKERS: Radar on why eco-hypocrisy matters:

Take Laurie David, soon-to-be-ex-wife of Seinfeld co-creator Larry, and producer of An Inconvenient Truth and other save-the-earth extravaganzas. Though she boasts about using recycled toilet paper and compact fluorescent lightbulbs, David has been pilloried for, among other excesses, flying on private jets. Here’s what she has said in defense of her travel habits: “I’m not perfect. This is not about perfection. I don’t expect anybody else to be perfect either. That’s what hurts the environmental movement—holding people to a standard they cannot meet.”

Apparently, when you’re worth a few hundred million dollars, being asked to refrain from the most carbon-intensive indulgence known to man qualifies as “holding people to a standard they cannot meet.” Note, too, her use of emotional jujitsu: the ones who are really hurting the environment are the ones who are so impolite as to point out her bad behavior. . . . It’s always galling to be exhorted to curb your consumption by people who are living the poshest lifestyle imaginable. But the problem here goes beyond aesthetics. Eco-hypocrites undercut the very message they’re trying to peddle. How desperate could the planet’s plight be if the people who present themselves as most concerned about it consider flying first-class commercial an unacceptable sacrifice?

Read the whole thing. As I’ve said before, I’ll believe it’s a crisis when the people who say it’s a crisis start acting like it’s a crisis.

SOUTH CAROLINA MOVES ITS PRIMARY: Marc Ambinder looks at the fallout.

ROGER SIMON: The Netroots are Rotting: “Now, as we all know, sleaze and corruption are not unique to either side of the political spectrum. But Armstrong, Kos & their netroot cronies have made a big deal out of clean government (and they should). So this kind of allegation speaks even more deeply to their ethics, as it it would for anyone in that position.”

NIGERIA UPDATE:

Police and military forces have been unable to halt the spread of kidnapping activity in the Niger Delta oil region. With security forces and civilian body guards tied up protecting officials and foreigners, the kidnappers have switched to grabbing family members (children, parents, and so on) of prominent Delta politicians. The ransoms aren’t as large, but the money is still good by Nigerian standards.

The navy is spread so thin that it cannot protect commercial traffic, particularly ferries and regular passenger runs, from pirate attacks. The criminal gangs have been doing so well that they have taken to fighting each other over territory. In the past week, at least a dozen people were shot dead in Delta cities, as gangs fought each other in the streets. The government is barely in control in the Delta, and a coalition of gangs is offering the government a deal to ease up attacks on oil production, in return for a cut of the oil profits. In theory, these diverted oil profits would go to “the people,” but the gangsters would grab most of it, emulating the gangsters that have long been passing themselves off as politicians and elected representatives of “the people.”

Downside: Pretty obvious. Upside: Getting Iraq to be a “normal country” like Nigeria is getting easier as the gap narrows . . . .

COL. BUZZ PATTERSON really went after Jon Soltz, the antiwar activist last seen shutting up Sgt. David Aguina at YearlyKos.

THE EXAMINER: The Surge is Working: What Now?

The U.S. military surge, widely denounced as a last-ditch effort by an embattled, lame-duck president fighting an un-winnable civil war, is working. Even as vocal a war critic as Deputy Senate Majority Leader Dick Durbin, D-Ill., has now acknowledged as much, telling CNN that the U.S. military is “making real progress.” . . .

The surge is also having a positive impact on Iraq’s political equation, according to Petraeus: “We’re also heartened by the number of Iraqi tribes and local citizens who have rejected al Qaeda. We cannot attribute that to the surge but the surge certainly enabled that to move much more rapidly, we believe, than it otherwise would have.”

Military and political progress is heartening but with it comes a critical decision for war critics, especially Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, D-NV, who declared the war lost months ago, and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, who last week pledged to continue seeking withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq. Public support for the war effort has been growing in recent weeks and the expected positive report from Petraeus to Congress in mid-September will likely generate additional support for giving victory a chance. In other words, the political ground on which Reid and Pelosi are standing is shifting beneath them. Do they now really want to bring our boys home just when they are poised to win?

Read the whole thing.

FOUND: A life preserver from the Edmund Fitzgerald?

ANN ALTHOUSE: “My iPhone self-destructed in less than a week.” But there’s a silver lining.

GOOD NEWS: Search engines starting to compete on privacy.

THE NEW REPUBLIC LOOKS AWFULLY BAD in this AP story about the Beauchamp affair.

CALLING JAMES WEBB A COWARD: Seems politically unwise.

UPDATE: A related post from Ed Driscoll. And Iowa Voice is just amused.

THE DAILY SHOW SKEWERS Cape Wind opponents. (Bumped, because I like it.)

IT WON’T BE HOSTING INSTAPUNDIT: “The University of Tennessee will receive one of the world’s most powerful computers as part of a five-year, $65 million project to be funded by the National Science Foundation. . . . UT teamed with Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the NSF proposal, and the supercomputer — capable of nearly 1,000 trillion calculations per second — would be housed in the Joint Institute for Computational Sciences, a state-funded facility at ORNL.”

More at Slashdot.

TAKING ON THE “CHICKENHAWK” CANARD at The New Republic:

It should be an obvious point that in democracies, elected governments decide on policy and armed forces implement it. If you believe that armed forces should be doing the deciding–whether because of their greater expertise, or the moral superiority that comes from their greater willingness to sacrifice–then you are not a democrat (small d), but a militarist. In democracies, elected governments can certainly let their armed forces down. They can do so, for instance, by giving them a job and then failing to provide them with sufficient resources to accomplish it, as many argue the Bush administration has done in Iraq. But elected governments–and last I heard, our own included something called the “legislative branch”–cannot by definition let the troops down by debating policy, or changing it. This is the government’s job. It can do it unwisely, but the fact remains that the troops’ own job is simply to carry the policy out, however misguided it may be.

Okay, it’s not actually presented as an attack on the “chickenhawk” canard, but it seems equally valid in that context, no?

[“Chickenhawk canard”? Isn’t that a multilingual poultry pun? — ed. I like to include those little Easter Eggs. Eggs — there’s another! This is getting fowl! — ed. Switch to decaf, please.]