Moving Over The Waters.

Conditions: Overcast, Cool, Annoying.


Iraq IS Getting Better(?)

Holy crap, could the rumours be true?

All in all, violence in Iraq has dropped precipitously since late summer. With Al Qaeda declared dead, former Sunni resistance fighters wearing American-supplied uniforms, and the Mahdi Army lying low, killings in Iraq are way down. The security situation in Iraq is far better than it's been at any time since 2005. Many American antiwar critics, who are invested in the notion that no good news can come out of Iraq and who (secretly or openly) revel in the Bush administration's Iraqi failures, are reluctant to admit that things are getting better.

Perhaps they worry that, if the situation in Iraq improves, the prospect of Democratic gains at the polls next November will diminish. Perhaps they've convinced themselves that Iraq's ethnic and sectarian divide is so enormous that partition is the only solution, and that Iraq doesn't deserve to be a country anyway. Perhaps their distaste for President Bush (which I share) is so all-consuming that they fear any improvement in the situation will be credited to the President - something they can't tolerate.

- Truthout.org

And this is an important point. Iraq improving in some ways validates President Bush's steadfast determination to keep troops in the country until it can fend for itself. So if that policy starts to come true, it reflects well upon President Bush's decision to stick to his guns. But know this, while Bush may well have done the right thing in staying in Iraq, no matter how peaceful the country becomes it will never, EVER, diminish the simple fact that he authorised an illegal, immoral and unnecessary war that cost the lives of around half a million innocent people. Anything that he ever does now or in the future will never diminish that one simple damning fact. May he forever writhe under the weight of guilt the truth assigns to him.





Baghdad On The Map.

This caught my eye, Google maps accumulate orbital photography of various cities onto their website knowledge base, and here's the map of part of Baghdad.



(I doubt that's just a fender bender.) Let's take a visit.




Promoting War Upstairs.

Since the dawn of Reagan, war hawks in the U.S have dreamt of that final frontier of warfare: space. Instead of transporting men and weapons across the globe in order to shoot them at the enemy, wouldn't it be cooler to just hang the weapons (and men) over the heads of everyone, like the sword of Damocles, and at the push of a button drop them all down almost instantly. Well, that time is rapidly approaching with the latest program announced from the pentagon

The new program, dubbed Falcon, for "Force Application and Launch from CONUS," centers on a small-launch-vehicle concept of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. The agency describes Falcon as a "a reusable Hypersonic Cruise Vehicle (HCV) capable of delivering 12,000 pounds of payload at a distance of 9,000 nautical miles from [the continental United States] in less than two hours."

Hypersonic speed is far greater than the speed of sound. The reusable vehicle being contemplated would "provide the country with significant capability to conduct responsive missions with quick turn-around sortie rates while providing aircraft-like operability and mission-recall capability," according to DARPA.

The vehicle would be launched into space on a rocket, fly on its own to a target, deliver its payload and return to Earth. In the short term, a small launch rocket is being developed as part of Falcon. It eventually would be able to boost the hypersonic vehicle into space. But in the interim, it will be used to launch small satellites within 48 hours' notice at a cost of less than $5 million a shot.

Conferees added $100 million above the Bush administration's request for nearly $200 million to accelerate "space situational awareness." That is code for protecting U.S. satellites in space and being able to attack the enemy's satellites.

"Enhancing these capabilities is critical, particularly following the Chinese anti-satellite-weapons demonstration last January," the conferees wrote in their report. They were referring to a Jan. 11 incident in which a Chinese guided missile destroyed an aging weather satellite in orbit.

- WashingtonPost.com

You know, in the best possible light, some future utopia could have wars being fought out in orbit between automated satellite killers, leaving us humans well out of it down here on Earth. They wouldn't actually need to kill anyone to win. A man can dream.




Ho Ho Ho ...ly Crap.

Lo, it is November, and therefore the whole Xmas madness fever thing is being broken out left and right. Sigh. From the lighter side, an Australian recruitment firm has told potential Santas not to say "Ho Ho Ho".

Two Santa trainees from Westaff, which supplies hundreds of men in red suits to Australian shopping centres, have quit over the politically correct new greeting, the Daily Telegraph reports.

Trainees were told the traditional phrase could scare children and be taken as derogatory to women.

"We ask our Santas to try techniques such as lowering their tone of voice and using 'ha ha ha' to encourage the children to come forward and meet Santa," Westaff's national Santa co-ordinator Sari Hegarty told the paper.

- Ninemsn.com.au

Ha-Ha-Ha!




Mars Gets A Little Closer.

Are you ready for something awesome?





- Really big, high-resolution topographical images from Mars, both very alien and hauntingly beautiful. And no burning cars. ...Any more.

- danharlow.com




Long Term Forecast For The Solar System.

So, beyond the whole oil-running-out and global-warming-killing-us-all malarkey, what lays in the significant future for Earth, and the solar system in general. This animated slideshow gives you a rundown on the highlights. (spoiler: it's kind of a downer ending.)



YTMD Slideshow





Film Review: Death Proof.

It's impossible to talk about Death Proof without first talking about Grindhouse, so here we go. Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez are very good friends, and have worked together before on a range of projects. They decided to each make a shortish themed B-movie and then join them together for a double feature treat they called Grindhouse. Rodriguez's contribution was a crazy zombie apocalypse movie called Planet Terror, Tarantino's was Death Proof. Unfortunately, the double feature did not perform well at the box office, and so they were split up into two separate films.

Death Proof had extra material put into it to pad the running time out to two hours, and it shows. The film doesn't really have much of a plot, or rather, the plot that is there is diluted by a large amount of gossipy dialog scenes between the characters. However, it certainly does set the characters up very solidly before the mayhem starts, ensuring that the audience cares a little more for a character they know, rather than a cypher they don't know.

Kurt Russell though is the star of the show. He's a charming psycho killer with a muscle car, out for kicks. He's effortlessly able to be both ice cool and dangerously quirky at the same time, winking at the camera and even able to get us to feel a little sorry for him. And once things start rolling, it all becomes very exciting very quickly. Stunt women Zoë Bell also stars as one of the lead characters, so when it's time for the death defying stunts they can get the camera right in close so you can clearly see it's Bell herself hanging grimly to the hood of a car as it's being knocked around at high speed by Russell. It's a very impressive and very, very exciting sequence, and worth the amount of character time at the start of the film. Three and a Half references out of Five.




End Transmission.