Thursday Morning Linkorama

Deriving star formation histories while writing NSF grants is thirsty work. So you know what that means.

The return of LINKORAMA!

  • Monkeys are attacking people in Delhi.
  • We move closer and closer to 1984. Rudy claims Freedom is Authority and the British want an Orwellian exercise hour.
  • If you haven’t read Fareed Zakaria’s latest attempt to inject sanity into the Iran debate, do so:

    The American discussion about Iran has lost all connection to reality. Norman Podhoretz, the neoconservative ideologist whom Bush has consulted on this topic, has written that Iran’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is “like Hitler … a revolutionary whose objective is to overturn the going international system and to replace it in the fullness of time with a new order dominated by Iran and ruled by the religio-political culture of Islamofascism.” For this staggering proposition Podhoretz provides not a scintilla of evidence.

    Here is the reality. Iran has an economy the size of Finland’s and an annual defense budget of around $4.8 billion. It has not invaded a country since the late 18th century. The United States has a GDP that is 68 times larger and defense expenditures that are 110 times greater. Israel and every Arab country (except Syria and Iraq) are quietly or actively allied against Iran. And yet we are to believe that Tehran is about to overturn the international system and replace it with an Islamo-fascist order? What planet are we on?

  • Christopher Hitchens on Islamofascism is an appropriate term for what we’re dealing with.