Internal Monologue

This is not good (HT: Marsh ): Turkey and Iran have dispatched tanks, artillery and thousands of troops to their frontiers with Iraq during the past few weeks in what appears to be a coordinated effort to disrupt the activities of Kurdish rebel bases. Scores of Kurds have fled their homes in the northern frontier region after four days of shelling by the Iranian army. Local officials said Turkey had also fired a number of shells into Iraqi territory.

Not very, according to this article " Flying Toilet Terror Labs " from The Register (HT: Kevin Drum via Sullivan ): Once the plane is over the ocean, very discreetly bring all of your gear into the toilet. You might need to make several trips to avoid drawing attention. Once your kit is in place, put a beaker containing the peroxide / acetone mixture into the ice water bath (Champagne bucket), and start adding the acid, drop by drop, while stirring constantly. Watch the reaction temperature carefully. The mixture will heat, and if it gets too hot, you'll end up with a weak explosive. In fact, if it gets really hot, you'll get a premature explosion possibly sufficient to kill you, but probably no one else. After a few hours - assuming, by some miracle, that the fumes haven't overcome you or alerted passengers or the flight crew to your activities - you'll have a quantity of TATP with which to carry out your mission. Now all you need to do is dry it for an h

OK, new topic here on Internal Monologue : dumbass shit we're doing in a misguided effort to make every single airplane 100% safe. Here's the latest: banning gel-filled bras (HT: Digby ). (Is this what drove Hooters Air out of business?) I like the picture up Crooks and Liars : Naked Airlines! The future of air travel. No wonder Hooters Air went out of business: they new that soon they'd be nothin' special. Can I just say that despite all our bellicose bluster, we Americans are some of the sissiest wussies when it comes to airplanes? Yes, I can. And I just did. What it is about planes that turns us into such pansy-asses? Let me just mention that according to the Fatality Analysis Reporting System Web-based Encyclopedia, there were 42,636 fatal traffic crash victims in the United States in 2003. No one gives a shit about that. But mention the possibility of someone that someone might use a liquid explosive on a plane and everyone runs around like batshit idiots. STO

Zogby : Bush Job Approval—34%. (HT: C&L )

MaxSpeak gives us all a nice little geography lesson (actually, most of it's from Juan Cole ) (HT: Atrios ): Bush Transcript : QUESTION: How can the international force, or the United States if necessary, prevent Iran from resupplying Hezbollah? BUSH: The first step is -- and part of the mandate in the U.N. resolution was to secure Syria's borders. Iran is able to ship weapons to Hezbollah through Syria. Secondly is to deal -- is to help seal off the ports around Lebanon. BUSH: In other words, part of the mandate and part of the mission of the troops, the UNIFIL troops, will be to seal off the Syrian border. Juan Cole's response : Note also that the little blue strip at the bottom of Lebanon is generally where the UN peacekeeping troops will be. They aren't in a position to "seal off" the Syrian border, which stretches far to their northeast, and can't be "sealed off" by anyone at all, being rugged and long. The blue helmets of the UN, being

...then you'll find this commercial pretty funny (HT: Blogometer ). Yes, it's a Coke commercial, and a lot of their stuff annoys the crap out of me. But this is an excellent parody. And just for the record, I think GTA III and its sequels are masterpieces (at least those I've played). Completely immoral masterpieces, certainly. But the notion that entertainment should provide some moral lesson is ridiculous. Just as flight simulators free us from the laws of gravity, if only in our imagination, GTA III gives us a universe in which we are unshackled by the laws of morality . The first time you run someone over in GTA III , and realize that t here are no consequences , the exhiliration is unspeakable. (OK, if the police are watching, there can be consequences, but the cops are easily bribed into looking the other way.) I think the best literary analogue to GTA III is the scene at the end of Nabokov's Lolita , where Humbert decides to drive down the wrong side of the

Taylor Marsh runs an article by Charles V. Pena, who discusses some numbers concerning troop levels, rotations, deployments, etc.: For a professional volunteer military force to be able to retain soldiers over time, the rule of thumb for active duty units is a 3:1 rotation ratio (meaning three units are needed to keep one unit fielded). So keeping 135,000 troops in Iraq requires an additional 270,000 for rotation or a total of 405,000 soldiers. This number is precariously close to the total size of the active duty Army, about 500,000 troops. Moreover, the U.S. Army has another 64,000 troops deployed elsewhere overseas that requires a total of 192,000 troops to sustain it. So when you do the math, the Army is about 100,000 soldiers shy of being able to keep up the current deployments. [snip] According to conventional wisdom, the force ratio required for imposing stability and security is 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants, which is what the British – often ac