Popular Science;

What follows is our assessment of the current status and the future of the key alternatives to gasoline. We predict, based on the educated guesses of industry experts, how much of the U.S. market each alternative will hold in 20 years—and, as a result, where that will leave that wretched villain, gasoline.

Shift Happens

Weather Control Machine

Ahead of their time, in the year 1900.

In Canada the law effectively prohibits using guns in self-defense but this a daily occurrence in America. It just rarely gets much attention when it happens. Here’s a couple of items from yesterday:

The Cleveland County district attorney on Thursday dismissed a murder charge against a woman accused of fatally shooting her husband.
Tina Weaver acted in self-defense when she shot Ronald Todd Weaver, 41, at their Kings Mountain home on Nov. 25, court documents said.
“The dismissal completely exonerates my client from any criminal wrongdoing,” said Weaver’s attorney, David Teddy.
There was a history of domestic violence between the couple, court documents said, and Weaver’s husband had severely beaten her just before the shooting.

Guns don’t kill wife-beaters, beaten wives with guns kill wife-beaters.
And a definite Darwin award for this fellow:

A man who police said broke into an Army officer’s south Augusta house to steal guns was fatally shot Wednesday by the soldier living there.

Yeah, stealing guns from soldiers usually makes for a short career.

Part two;

Despite so much bad news, much of which I deliver, it’s heartening that most of the Iraqis are not fearful of Americans. What many Iraqis REALLY want—and they say it clearly—is to communicate directly with Americans at home.

Call your office;

KABUL, Afghanistan, April 26 — Infant mortality has dropped by 18 percent in Afghanistan, one of the first real signs of recovery for the country five years after the fall of the Taliban regime, health officials said Thursday.
Afghanistan faces many challenges, its health minister said yesterday, but he noted “clear signs of health sector recovery and progress.”
“Despite many challenges, there are clear signs of health sector recovery and progress throughout the country,” Dr. Muhammad Amin Fatimi, the health minister, told journalists here.
The number of children who die before their first birthday has dropped to 135 per 1,000 in 2006 from 165 per 1,000 live births in 2001, according to a countrywide survey by Johns Hopkins University, he said.
That represents a drop of 18 percent, and means that 40,000 to 50,000 fewer infants are dying now than in the Taliban era, Dr. Fatimi said. “Thanks be to God they are celebrating, laughing and smiling,” he said. “These infants are the future builders of our country.”

More good news of a different sort.

Dropping to 200ft, it swooped close to the motorcyclists – and the two men could not believe their luck: some of the passengers were holding the parts of a long-barrelled heavy machine-gun.
Six of the bikes slewed to a stop, their passengers leaping off and aiming their weapons at the helicopter in what appeared to be a well-practised drill, while the others took off across country. The Apache banked away to begin its attack run.

Don’t think of them as Black Hawks – think of them as flying neonatal units!
Update Uh oh. I don’t think this is the “spring offensive” the Taliban had in mind.
Update 2 More good news! The US Supreme Court rejects Khadr case.

Henry Payne;

Toyota made headlines today as the world’s best-selling auto company, beating GM for the first time. At the same time, the Union of Concerned Scientists has declared Toyota America’s greenest auto company, just behind Honda. Enviros say green is what put Toyota on top.
Think again.

Yesterday

[Was the] 92nd anniversary of the start of the Armenian Genocide, marking the day when much of the Armenian intelligentsia in Constantinople was arrested and later killed. Over the next several years, the Ottomans used World War I as cover to kill more than million people. […]
One last point: Never give up your guns.

Venezuela launches Zeppelin to tackle rampant crime.

Venezuela launched a Zeppelin on Thursday to patrol Caracas, seeking to fight crime in one of Latin America’s most dangerous cities but also raising fears that President Hugo Chavez could be turning into Big Brother.

Why, that’s hard to believe!

Jerry Bowyer, TCS;

This morning I read that the Virginia Tech shooter died with the name Ismail Ax written in red ink on his arm. The mainstream press doesn’t seem to have a clue as to what this might mean. To quote Indiana Jones, “Didn’t any of you guys go to Sunday School?”

Via Rantings of Doom;

1. go to www.google.com
2. click on “maps,” above the search bar…
3. click on “get directions”
4. type “New York” in the first box (the “from” box)
5. type “Paris” in the second box (the “to” box)
6. click on “get directions”
6. scroll down to step #23

Via Sigmund, Carl and Alfred;

[Irena] Sendler used her status as a Warsaw municipal welfare officer to roam the ghetto, ostensibly to combat contagious diseases.
But according to Yad Vashem, the Israeli Holocaust memorial centre which has already honoured Ms Sendler as a “righteous gentile” for her actions, she used her visits to hand out money, clothes and medicines.
She disguised herself by donning a Star of David armband used by the Nazis to mark out Jews, and organised escape plans for thousands of children. Some were carried out in bags, while others were saved crawling through the network of sewers common to the ghetto and the rest of Warsaw.
Once they had escaped, the children were farmed out by Ms Sendler to Warsaw families, orphanages or convents, where they were hidden. For each success, Ms Sendler buried a jar containing the child’s name, to help families reunite after the war.

I once led a noon hour mission that involved securing all objects within 20 feet of our home room teacher’s desk (including the drawers and his chair) with Crazy Glue.
Imagine the fun had we been able to coat every surface with strawberry jam.

The latest spy photos show the Department of Defense has established a base at the north pole of Saturn. Or maybe a clearer picture would show the hexagon to be a Star of David, revealing it to be the work of the Israelis. Luboš Motl explains the latest mysteries.

A New Power Rises in Iraq
Michael Totten;

Fourteen months ago I flew to Erbil, the capital of Iraqi Kurdistan, from Beirut, Lebanon, on the dubiously named Flying Carpet Airlines. Flying Carpet’s entire fleet is one small noisy plane with propellers, cramped seats, and thin cabin pressure. Only nineteen passengers joined me on that once-a-week flight. Everyone but me was a Lebanese businessman. They were paranoid of me and of each other. What kind of crazy person books a flight to Iraq, even if it is to the safe and relatively prosperous Kurdistan region? I felt completely bereft of sense going to Iraq without a gun and without any bodyguards, and it took a week for my on-again off-again twitchiness to subside.
Last week I flew to Erbil from Vienna on Austrian Airlines to work for a few weeks as a private sector consultant with my colleague Patrick Lasswell. This time I didn’t feel anything like a fool. Almost half the passengers were women. Children played on their seats and in the aisle with toys handed out by the crew. We watched an in-flight movie and ate the usual airline lunch fare served by an attractive long legged stewardess. The cabin erupted with applause when the wheels touched down on the runway. The pilot announced the weather (sunny and 60) in three languages and cheerfully told us all to have a great day. Have a great day may seem an odd thing to say to people who just arrived in Iraq, but this is Kurdistan. I did, indeed, have a great day.

As usual, lots of photos.

New mall construction – lots of photos of construction, actually.

Kurdistan’s rise flips Iraq on its head. The Kurds are ahead, but they started from nothing. Under Saddam’s regime they had the worst of everything – the worst poverty, the worst underdevelopment, and worst of all they bore the brunt of the worst violence from Baghdad. 200,000 people were killed (out of less than four million) and 95 percent of the villages were completely destroyed.
The Kurds seem happy and well-adjusted. Scratch the surface, though, and any one of them can tell you tales that make you tremble and shudder. Everyone here was touched by the Baath and by the genocide. If living well is the best revenge, the Kurds got theirs.

There’s much, much more there, so take the time to read it all. And pass along the link to your friends. There is more to Iraq than Baghdad and people deserve to know it.

John Podhoretz;

Valerie Plame Wilson has been testifying for an hour, and while it appears on a chart, the name of Richard Armitage — the actual person who actually leaked her identity to Robert Novak (and, a month earlier, to Bob Woodward) — has yet to be spoken. Scooter Libby’s name? Ten times.

As Richard Armitage was “no friend of the Bush Whitehouse”, expect this pattern to continue.
Update – A Timeline

It was almost certainly Mr. Joseph C. Wilson IV who first “outed” his wife as a CIA officer.
And he probably did this in early May 2003 after meeting with top level Democrats and around the time he began to work for the John Kerry for President campaign.
Let’s run through the chronology.

Up until March 8, 2003 Joe Wilson still contended that Saddam had WMD and that he was involved in the nuclear arms trade.

So what happened after March 8th to make Wilson change his tune about the Iraq’s WMD and re-write his findings from his trip to Niger? A version in direct contradiction to what he told his CIA debriefers, according to the 9/11 Commission?

Robert Kagan (Washington Post)

A front-page story in The Post last week suggested that the Bush administration has no backup plan in case the surge in Iraq doesn’t work. I wonder if The Post and other newspapers have a backup plan in case it does.

Richard Miniter;

The U.S. is in serious discussions with commanders of the Mahdi Army to lay down their arms, an intelligence officer directly involved in Iraq operations told Pajamas Media Tuesday.
The American intelligence official spoke under the condition of anonymity, citing the sensitivity of the issue.
The Mahdi Army, a predominantly Shia Muslim force led by Moqter al-Sadr, has terrorized Sunnis into fleeing certain Baghdad neighborhoods and has been linked to Iran. Al-Sadr has disappeared from the Iraqi capital and is widely believed to have holed up in Iran. Al-Sadr’s family and senior officers are believed, by elements of American intelligence in Iraq, to have left with him.
With al-Sadr’s paymasters gone many mid-level commanders are unpaid. And so are the fighters under them. (In the Mahdi Army, commanders are responsible for the financial well-being of the men under their command.) Some have resorted to extortion, robbery and violent crimes. They are desperate for money. And they are also being hunted by U.S. and Iraqi soldiers throughout Iraq.

US military deaths are down 60% in the past month;

The remarkable decrease in killings among the US troops came at a time when more of these troops were deployed in the Iraqi capital, especially in districts previously regarded as extremely hazardous for them such as Al-Sadr City, Al-Azamiyah, and Al-Doura.

Bill Roggio has the nuts and bolts of the Baghdad Security Plan and greater Iraq security operation. Despite the coverage given to attacks on Shia pilgrims last week, sectarian violence is down significantly.

What created such imbalance in the journalism universe that while a factually challenged James Travers is paid for free-associating on the pages of a major newspaper, an IT guy in Minnesota is providing actual analysis for free?

For those who want action in Pakistan, it seems to be coming true. The US has tried to avoid trammeling Pakistani sovereignty in the past in order to keep from destabilizing Musharraf. The deal Musharraf signed with Waziri tribal leaders has changed the American perspective, it appears. If Musharraf will not fight for his sovereignty in Waziristan, then the US apparently has decided that we do not need to honor it, and will attack AQ assets ourselves. Admiral Mike McConnell signaled this last week in testimony to the Senate. The new Director of National Intelligence told the Senators that he would focus “with great intensity” on AQ’s Pakistani outposts.
It seems as if Dick Cheney’s visit to Pakistan meant something rather significant for Musharraf. With AQ more active than any time in the last five years, and with Musharraf sitting on his hands, Cheney’s visit was meant as an ultimatum for action. If Musharraf won’t fight terrorists, then we have less interest in preventing his destabilization. Musharraf responded by arresting two senior members of the Taliban outside of Waziristan, and his lack of response thus far to American operations in Waziristan seems to indicate acquiescence to the new American policy.

The Pope is warned of a green Anti-Christ, who is “a pacifist, ecologist and ecumenist”.
Hmmm. Do the ASCII values of the letters “al gore” add to 666?
Of course they do, Luboš Motl explains.

11 dead, 100 injured in kite flying festival