Who knows how long this will hold, but Iran knows says it has a deal with Russia on uranium enrichment:
The head of Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization said Sunday that his country had agreed in principle to set up a joint uranium enrichment project with Russia, a potentially significant breakthrough in efforts to prevent an international confrontation over Iran’s nuclear ambitions.
The devil, of course, is in the proverbial details. [I thought the US was the devil.-ed. Sorry. I forgot.]
Ariel Sharon is 78 today. This blog salutes this great leader, even though, as we all know, he is in a coma and it is not exactly a happy occasion. More at Pajamas with a photo from better times. Sharon was a handsome man in his youth. [Weren't we all?-ed.]
UPDATE: Speaking of Pajamas, check out the latest coverage of the Philippine coup situation from Richard Fernandez/Belmont Club who knows the territory.
According to the Telegraph:
In the past decade, 200 books and films about Stalin, some eulogies, have appeared. Polls show that 18 per cent of Russians believe he was their best leader since 1917, while almost 50 per cent view him in a positive or very positive light.In May the first major museum dedicated to Stalin in half a century will be opened in Volgograd by his three grandsons. Among the exhibits will be telegrams from Stalin to Churchill, a model of the train he lived in after the 1917 revolution and his famous cap.
Valentina Klyushina, the deputy curator of Volgograd’s famous statue to Mother Russia, is an enthusiast for the project, even though her mother was jailed for seven years in Stalin’s time.
Well, at least she wasn’t starved to death like most people. (via Allah who is back and blogging at Alarming News. The hell with the Russians. What does this mean? Howard Dean does the Danish cartoons?)
There’s been a lot of blogospheric hullabaloo about yesterday’s pro-free speech/pro-Denmark demonstration in front of the Danish Embassy in Washington. It’s deserved. It was a great thing to have done and I wish I had been there.
But…
Let’s be honest: only a hundred people or so showed up. What’s up with that? The daytime population in DC is about a million. The usual (eloquent) suspects were there, but who else? Blog coverage was good, but the mainstream media was barely present , no matter what kind of face you want to put on it. Now they may not have wanted to show for such an occasion, but greater (even decent) numbers might have forced them into it. I know it’s hard work, but I remember from my old days on the left – “You’ve got to organize!” Next time – a little planning, please.
Of course that’s first and foremost Omar and Mohammed of Iraq the Model. This morning, at the top of PJ, you can read Omar’s report on the extension of the curfew in Baghdad for three days. He also notes:
The defense minister in a press conference currently on Iraqi TV gave statistics to correct what he described as “exaggerated media reports” about civilian casualties and attacks on mosques since the attack on the Samarra shrine:
Mosques attacked/shot at without damage: 21 not 51
Moderately damaged: 6 not 23
Mosques destroyed totally: 1 not 3
Mosques occupied by militias: 1 not 2 (evacuated later).
Civilians killed: 119 not 183
Will these significantly revised figures be reported by the US press? Note widely, I would imagine. I think we have all seen regarding Iraq that things are rarely as good as they seem (massive election turn-outs) or as bad as they seem (this latest near civil war). Perhaps the adage of its being darkest before the dawn will apply here. The Iraqis have been forced to look at their worst selves. How will they react?
According to Reuters:
People who regularly drink green tea may have a lesser risk of mental decline as they grow older, researchers have found.Their study, of more than 1,000 Japanese adults in their 70s and beyond, found that the more green tea men and women drank, the lower their odds of having cognitive impairment.
Apparently the Japanese also have a lower rate of Alzheimer’s and dementia than Europeans and North Americans. [Say what?-ed. Shut up and drink your tea.]
Well, you have to say one thing for Ken Livingstone, the trendy racist mayor of London, at least he acknowledged, or anyway implied, the existence of the Holocaust by comparing a Jewish reporter to a Nazi concentration camp guard. That’s something of a plus these days, although that doesn’t stop me from regarding the mayor as less than pond scum. Still, I have to agree with david t at Harry’s Place that the way to deal with these maunderings is not via the guilty finding of the Adjudication Panel of England but by the ballot box. (links at Harry’s) However… and it’s a big HOWEVER… Mr. Livingstone has been around for quite a few years now and neither the bien-pensants over at Harry’s nor their allies have done a damn thing about it via rational argument or free elections. In fact, the trend seems to be going solidly in the other direction. Ken Livingstone is the Mayor of Londonistan now and serving his constituency quite well. I’m sure they don’t find him the least bit anti-Semitic, just factual (except for that silly blunder about the existence of the Holocaust). So it’s all well and good to be high-minded about the Ken Livingstones and the David Irvings of the world, but where does that leave us? I wish I knew the answer to that because we have crossed the line from what the Chinese call “interesting times” to plain, ordinary bleak ones.
UPDATE: Livingston has apparently been suspended for a month.
A new PJM video on the subject of the Google – Yahoo – China is up at China Syndrome. I hope people like this one. Tom Lantos was quite an impressive fellow to interview and I think he’s on the side of the angels on this one. We interwove our interview with some CSPAN clips of the Congressional hearing in which he grilled the Yahoo lawyer who doesn’t look too happy to be there. Lantos’ personal history – he is a Holocaust survivor – gives his commitment to human rights extra weight.
The man blogging as Spook86 at the In From the Cold blog has an interesting post this evening on the violence in Iraq around the Samarra shrine bombing. Like many, he sees the hand of Zarqawi in this madness. Who am I to disagree? (And I don’t.) But the more interesting part of the Spook’s pronouncements are at the end:
Using information operations to connect Zarqawi to the Samarra attack–based on solid evidence–would turn his tactical success into a strategic defeat, and further undermine the insurgency.Unfortunately, the U.S. has long-standing problems in countering enemy propaganda and information operations. I found this article in an Air Force journal, written more than five years ago, which describes some of our difficulties in overcoming Serb propaganda during Operation Allied Force. It’s a bit long, but take a glance, and see if you find any similarities between what happened in 1999, and what we see in Iraq today.
Until we understand that all forms of public information are a battlespace that must be contested and defended, we will face an uphill battle in winning the struggle for hearts and minds. In football, “Hail Mary” or if you prefer, “Hail Allah” plays should have a low probability of success. Zarqawi’s desperation heave in Samarra can also be deflected, if we use all the tools at our disposal, including information operations.
I know what he means. Having just returned from a few days in Washington, I have the sense that one of the areas our government is weakest in is in the construction of just such “information operations.” They are frankly too square to handle it. I certainly enjoy the whiff of power and the aura of history in DC, but when it comes to thinking “outside the box,” Inside the Beltway is out to lunch. (Okay, not always, but they could use a little Graham Greene and a little Sigmund Freud.)
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