Iran is a bit closer to nuclear technology than previously thought.

Iran has successfully enriched uranium for the first time, a major development in its quest to develop nuclear fuel, former President Hashemi Rafsanjani said Tuesday.

Current President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad added that the country “will soon join the club of countries with nuclear technology.”

…

Iran’s nuclear chief, Vice President Gholamreza Aghazadeh said Iran has produced 110 tons of uranium gas, the feedstock for enrichment. The amount is nearly twice the 60 tons of uranium hexaflouride, or UF-6, gas that Iran said last year that it had produced.

Yup, what we need now is an even more strongly worded UN report. Or how about promises of US aid if they stop pursuing this? Never mind that it’ll encourage other countries to try to go nuclear so they can get a shot at some cash. (Oh, and if you think Ahmadinejad would take the money and be nice, you’re only half right.)

And while all these oh-so-stern looks continue, a country who’s leader said he wants to wipe Israel off the map continues merrily on its way to be able to do just that. If we wind up making military strikes against Iran to prevent these madmen from getting the bomb, there’s no doubt in my mind that the anti-war crowd will say we should have let the negotiations “work”. Well, for future reference, this isn’t working, and if we wait until after they have the bomb, negotiations won’t be possible. I certainly hope Iran can be persuaded, but based on everything up to now, it doesn’t look like that’s going to happen.

Speaking to a crowd in northeastern Iran, Ahmadinejad was quoted by state television as saying, “Enemies can’t dissuade the Iranian nation from the path of progress that it has chosen.”

Progress indeed.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

The French government throws in the towel.

French President Jacques Chirac has announced that the new youth employment law that sparked weeks of sometimes violent protests will be scrapped.

He said it would be replaced by other measures to tackle youth unemployment.

This is what comes of the entitlement mindset. Some folks get some benefit from the government and soon they believe it is, not simply a benefit, but a right that they are entitled to. Liberal politicians here should take note. (Actually, conservatives should, too.)

What really makes this sad is that in this case, as I’ve mentioned before, the people are asking to return to a situation that actually works against them in the guise of a worker benefit. As with most liberal ideas (sounds good in theory, fails miserably in practice), it took the French government longer to figure this out that one would have hoped, so now when they try to correct the problem, the rioters think they’re losing something. (“It must be bad if my union leader says it is.”) The liberal entitlement nanny-government mentality is so ingrained that the Kool-Aid drinkers only see things through the us-vs-them, rich-vs-poor, worker-vs-corporation lenses. Sounds like American liberal class warfare politics, which it is.

And, as I said before, such economic policies have produced a stagnant French economy and rampant unemployment. But now, the rioters have made their point; we want to protect our jobs by continuing policies that cause unemployment. That may sound crazy, but no more crazy than the economic platform of our very own American Democrats.

What will the repealed law be replace by? Free market reforms? Nah, too conservative.

The new package of measures includes offering state support for employers hiring young people who face the most difficulties in gaining access to the labour market.

They’re going to pay employers to hire those whom they can no longer fire. That might help a little, if at all, but it’s not the root cause of the problem. The problem is the idea that companies shouldn’t be allowed to fire workers. The worker/employer relationship is a give and take one, but when you give all the rights in that relationship to the worker, naturally the employer will have to protect himself in other ways. In this case, the employers don’t hire as freely. The result is high unemployment. And when employers can’t fire people, and thus there is one less big incentive to work hard, you get a stagnant economy.

This isn’t a surprise to conservatives, nor apparently to liberals who’ve watched their finely tuned theories fall apart before them. But it’s a lesson lost to those who’ve grown up in the liberal French mindset.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out. Comments welcome.)

Global Warming Update: Professor Bob Carter (a geologist at James Cook University, Queensland, Australia) has some points to note about the temperature trends being used to predict global warming, and what they’ve been recently showing.

For many years now, human-caused climate change has been viewed as a large and urgent problem. In truth, however, the biggest part of the problem is neither environmental nor scientific, but a self-created political fiasco. Consider the simple fact, drawn from the official temperature records of the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, that for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero).

Yes, you did read that right. And also, yes, this eight-year period of temperature stasis did coincide with society’s continued power station and SUV-inspired pumping of yet more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

In response to these facts, a global warming devotee will chuckle and say “how silly to judge climate change over such a short period”. Yet in the next breath, the same person will assure you that the 28-year-long period of warming which occurred between 1970 and 1998 constitutes a dangerous (and man-made) warming. Tosh. Our devotee will also pass by the curious additional facts that a period of similar warming occurred between 1918 and 1940, well prior to the greatest phase of world industrialisation, and that cooling occurred between 1940 and 1965, at precisely the time that human emissions were increasing at their greatest rate.

Does something not strike you as odd here? That industrial carbon dioxide is not the primary cause of earth’s recent decadal-scale temperature changes doesn’t seem at all odd to many thousands of independent scientists. They have long appreciated – ever since the early 1990s, when the global warming bandwagon first started to roll behind the gravy train of the UN Inter-governmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – that such short-term climate fluctuations are chiefly of natural origin. Yet the public appears to be largely convinced otherwise. How is this possible?

Read the article to find out

Spring Break is upon us, and time to spend next week with the family. Enjoy yours, and see you after I get back.

A decade or so ago, I recall Paul Harvey talking about a new study. He introduced the story with something like, “And today’s story with the most lasting importance may be this…” The study noted that people in a hospital who were prayed for seemed to do better and heal faster than those who weren’t, even if they didn’t know that they were being prayed for. It might have given me a little lift if not for the fact that it didn’t seem to matter to whom the prayers were spoken. It seemed to me that trying to make God do hamster tricks would be useless at the least and counterproductive at worst. If Satan can do wonders, surely he can heal those who are prayed for in the name of a false god and game the results. Prayer is not an exact science. It’s not a science at all, frankly. It’s part of a relationship, it’s a conversation. It’s not a precise chemical reaction.

Keep that in mind when you hear this.

Prayers offered by strangers had no effect on the recovery of people who were undergoing heart surgery, a large and long-awaited study has found.

And patients who knew they were being prayed for had a higher rate of post-operative complications like abnormal heart rhythms, perhaps because of the expectations the prayers created, the researchers suggested.

Because it is the most scientifically rigorous investigation of whether prayer can heal illness, the study, begun almost a decade ago and involving more than 1,800 patients, has for years been the subject of speculation.

The question has been a contentious one among researchers. Proponents have argued that prayer is perhaps the most deeply human response to disease, and that it may relieve suffering by some mechanism that is not yet understood. Skeptics have contended that studying prayer is a waste of money and that it presupposes supernatural intervention, putting it by definition beyond the reach of science.

It’s not so much that it’s in the supernatural realm. It’s that studying the actions of a person, God in this case, cannot be done statistically. If someone were to study you and see if you acted the same way to the same circumstance over and over, it would be trivial to foul up the outcome, intentionally or otherwise. And prayer is a matter of faith, but how do you measure or control for that? This study and others like it, regardless of the outcome, are pointless from the beginning. Its core assumption–that God or the supernatural world can be experimented on–is faulty. The article notes that other studies on prayer have shown mixed results, which is what I would expect.

In a hurriedly convened news conference, the study’s authors, led by Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston, said that the findings were not the last word on the effects of so-called intercessory prayer.

Indeed it isn’t. That will come, however. Madeline Murray O’Hare could not be reached for comment. >grin<

As usual, Scott Ott at ScrappleFace puts it all in perspective.

“As it turns out, God was not impressed by our academic credentials, our substantial funding base, and our rigorous study protocols,” said lead researcher Dr. Herbert Benson, a cardiologist and director of the Mind/Body Medical Institute near Boston. “I get the feeling we just spent 10 years looking through the wrong end of the telescope.”

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

UN Security Council passes a resolution against Iran dealing with the nuclear situation. Iran is terrified.

No, not really. As usual, ScrappleFace nails it.

Is the President’s NSA wiretapping program unconstitutional, impeachable or at least censurable? The jury is still out on that, as the details are still being investigated (though that hasn’t stopped Sen. Russ Feingold from acting from a position of ignorance). The main thrust of the argument is that the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court had jurisdiction, and that going around them via executive order was illegal.

Speaking of that jury, it recently asked some guys who would know.

A panel of former Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court judges yesterday told members of the Senate Judiciary Committee that President Bush did not act illegally when he creaated by executive order a wiretapping program conducted by the National Security Agency (NSA).

The five judges testifying before the committee said they could not speak specifically to the NSA listening program without being briefed on it, but that a Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act does not override the president’s constitutional authority to spy on suspected international agents under executive order.

“If a court refuses a FISA application and there is not sufficient time for the president to go to the court of review, the president can under executive order act unilaterally, which he is doing now,” said Judge Allan Kornblum, magistrate judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Florida and an author of the 1978 FISA Act. “I think that the president would be remiss exercising his constitutional authority by giving all of that power over to a statute.”

The judges, however, said Mr. Bush’s choice to ignore established law regarding foreign intelligence gathering was made “at his own peril,” because ultimately he will have to answer to Congress and the Supreme Court if the surveillance was found not to be in the best interests of national security.

Judge Kornblum said before the 1978 FISA law, foreign surveillance was done by executive order and the law itself was altered by the orders of Presidents Ford, Carter and Reagan.

But isn’t the FISA law good enough that the President shouldn’t have to end-run around it?

It has been three months since President Bush said publicly that the NSA was listening to phone conversations between suspected terrorists abroad and domestically. The actions raised concerns from Congress and civil liberties groups about domestic spying, but the judges said that given new threats from terrorists and new communications technologies, the FISA law should be changed to give the president more latitude.

So five judges, including one of those who wrote the FISA Act, say that Bush was well within his rights to do what he did, and that the only caveat is the very sensible question of whether the other two branches of government thought it to be in the interests of national security. At this point, we do know that Congressional leaders were briefed on this, with only small concerns about constitutionality being expressed. Given this new testimony, it sounds like those concerns are groundless, so there’s little left. We know from the initial Times report that at least one attempt on the Brooklyn Bridge was thwarted, and there may be more that was done but is currently classified, so the national security question is on its way to being answered. Critics are having all their legs knocked out from under them.

(Cross-posted at Stones Cry Out and Blogger News Network. Comments welcome.)

Remember those flooded school buses photographed in New Orleans? Well, you can buy one.

Starved for cash, the New Orleans school district is taking a long shot and hoping to sell its flooded, unsalvageable school buses on eBay.

Some submerged to their roofs in the black flood waters, the yellow school buses were widely photographed in the days after Hurricane Katrina and have become an icon of the city’s devastated school system.

Correction: they became an icon of the city’s devastated credibility when they started pointing fingers of blame up the food chain but failed to follow their own plan that included using school buses to get the poor out of the city. Sounds like a little airbrushing of recent history by this AP writer.

Junkyard Blog covers this, as he was the guy who broke the story of the Ray Nagin Memorial Motor Pool.

Today’s Odd “Considerettes” Search Phrase – fatwas ultraviolet [#27 on Google France]

You’ve heard of WMDs, but what about CMDs?

Saddam Hussein planned to use “camels of mass destruction” as weapons to defend Iraq, loading them with bombs and directing them towards invading forces.

The animals were part of a plan to arm and equip foreign insurgents drawn up by the dictator shortly before the American-led invasion three years ago, reveals a 37-page report, captured after the fall of Baghdad and just released by the Pentagon. It is part of a cache of thousands of documents that the United States Department of Defence says it does not have the resources to translate.

Earlier this month, the Pentagon released copies in the original Arabic onto the internet in the hope that others would interpret them into English.

Handwritten on official paper, one of the reports appears to be a road map for the insurgency, with detailed instructions for training what it calls suicide bombers.

In the memo, they are described as “estishehadeyeen”, Arabic for suicide martyrs, and would almost certainly have been foreign volunteers.

The memo details a training commission to be headed by senior officers, including a colonel from the “Directory of Political Orientation”. Their job, says the report, was to “prepare a very intensive training course”, “to raise the physical fitness and train in the use of Kalashnikovs and hand grenades”.

It continues: “The largest section of the course will be specialised to focus on using the explosive material in the body, in motorcycle, in cars, and in camels”. Camels will be “provided by the Directory of General Military Intelligence”.