·       Russia Arms Vietnam Against China

·       Military Aid To Yemen To Double After Botched Christmas Attack.

·       China To Be More Aggressive

Sen. Harry Reid’s (D) Nevada racists comments has him on a hotspot and backing and filling. Of course Obama was immediately  forgiving. It was Reid who hypocritically blasted Sen. Trent Lott (R) Miss for comments supporting Strom Thurmond’s Dixicrats.

Obama has finally brought himself to confess America is at war, and with a wink and nod accepted blame for what he called a systemic failure leading up to the near fatal Christmas airliner bombing attempt.

The word “vigilance” is sometimes mocked as reactionary and jingoistic. But the failures in the war on terrorism – even rebranding in “non-war” terms — during the past few months have been failures of vigilance.

After warnings to American officials from his father, a radicalized Nigerian with ties to Yemen — holding a one-way ticket and no luggage — is allowed on a plane headed to Detroit. A man in Afghan military fatigues — covering a bomb vest — entered a CIA base in Afghanistan for an intelligence debriefing, without being screened – many died.  An Army psychologist — with a history of making provocative jihadist arguments and known to classmates as a “ticking time bomb” — is assigned to Afghanistan and reports for processing at Fort Hood – many more died.

After the Christmas attack, Homeland Security Secretary Janet Napolitano alarmingly concluded, “One of the things that may come out of this awful day is perhaps a renewed sense of urgency.”

Her statement is a confession that vigilance has faded over time. Some of this is a natural process — a human desire for normalcy, the tendency of civilized people to repress unpleasant realities. Vigilance is like a knife that dulls when it is not used.

Which is precisely why vigilance requires leadership. Urgency is either sharpened by rhetoric and expectation — or it is sharpened by tragedy.

Obama can’t be held responsible for every mistake at every level of government. But every level of government takes its cues from the president and his main advisers. And it is difficult to argue that the Obama administration has even attempted to create an atmosphere of urgency in the war on terror. The listless, coldblooded and clueless response of the Hawaii White House to the Christmas Day attack was only the most recent indication. Over the last year, nearly every rhetorical signal from the administration — from the use of war-on-terror euphemisms such as “overseas contingency operations” and “man-caused disasters” to its preference for immediately categorizing terrorism as the work of an “isolated extremist” — has been designed to convey a return to normalcy, a contrast to the supposed fear-mongering of the past.

Add to this the Holderization of the war on terrorism. Attorney General Eric Holder began his work not with a high-profile assault on al-Qaeda but with a high-profile assault on the CIA — making clear to every ambitious officer that counterintelligence is a dead end of recrimination and legal bills. And now both the mastermind of Sept. 11, 2001, and the underwear bomber are headed toward celebrity trials. According to White House terrorism adviser John Brennan, the decision to prosecute Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab in civilian court was made almost immediately by the Justice Department — though the president now concedes that “al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula trained [Abdulmutallab], equipped him with those explosives and directed him to attack that plane headed for America.”

This civilian prosecution strategy would make sense if the goal is punishment for an attempted mass murderer. But it makes no sense if the goal is vigilance in the war on terrorism — gaining information to prevent future attacks. Abdulmutallab evidently talked a bit with FBI investigators when first captured. But any defense lawyer — and now he has one — will urge him to withhold information for use in bargaining with prosecutors down the road. The reality here is simple and shocking: A terrorist with current knowledge of al-Qaeda operations in Yemen has been told he has the right to remain silent.

As a foreign terrorist, he does not have that right (as even the Obama administration has conceded by its use of military tribunals in other cases). And granting Abdulmutallab that privilege only because he tried to commit murder on American soil is an incentive of disturbing perversity.

The president has occasionally talked of a war on terrorism. But lip service is different from leadership. In the war on terrorism, 2009 was not a year of urgency and vigilance. It was a year of lullabies, hot toddies and Ambien — though it nearly ended with a bang.

The crucial issue now is what will be done from this point forward, and frankly that is seriously in doubt.

Discalced (dis-KALST) adjective: Without shoes. ETYMOLOGY:From Latin dis- (apart, away) + calceare (to fit with shoes), from calceus (shoe), from calx (heel). The word discalced is often used of members of religious orders who go barefoot or wear sandals.

Vietnam is purchasing six submarines from Russia along with other weapons system in what analysts say is a bid to counter China’s growing regional military power.

Hanoi announced a large arms deal for the submarines last week amid concerns that Vietnam is preparing to defend its interests in the resource-rich South China Sea, where Chinese military forces have increased their presence and aggressiveness in the past several years.

“I think their primary rationale is to counteract the military build-up that the Chinese have had in the South China Sea,” said Richard Bitzinger, a regional defense analyst with the S. Rajaratnam School of International Studies in Singapore.

The arms deal was signed Dec. 15 during a visit to Russia by Prime Minister Nguyen Tan Dung. Ironically Russia is reported to be selling $2.7 billion in arms to China.

Russia’s Interfax news agency reported that Vietnam agreed to buy six Kilo-class diesel-electric submarines in a deal estimated to be worth $2 billion.

Disputes between Vietnam and China have been growing in recent months over disputed waters, including the Paracel Islands where Vietnamese fishermen have been harassed by the Chinese military.

Vietnam Deputy Defense Minister Lt. Gen. Nguyen Chi Vinh called the maritime tensions “a matter of concern” two weeks ago. Analysts called it one of the most outspoken expressions of concern by Hanoi.

Dung confirmed in Moscow that the arms deal included submarines along with aircraft and “military equipment.” Advanced warplanes include 12 Su-30MK2 aircraft, among Russia’s most sophisticated export jets. The Su-30MK2 is comparable to the U. S. F-15 and superior to most other fourth generation fighters.  It is inferior to the U. S. made fifth generation F-22 (now cancelled) and F-35 joint strike fighter.

Good news for Gilbert Arenas. He got “Athlete of the Year” from “Guns & Ammo” magazine.—Leno . The momcompoop Arenas has been suspended indefinitely by the NBA for bringing a handgun into the locket room.

US official spokesmen have stepped up their rhetoric against al Qaeda in Yemen but do not have the manpower resources to open another anti-terror warfront in addition to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Iraq and to a lesser degree Somalia, Washington sources report.

This inadequacy is cloaked by the heated rhetoric, the closure of the US and British embassies in Sanaa for fear of a terrorist attack, the two governments’ declared intention of establishing a police force to fight al Qaeda in Yemen and a further injection of US counter-terror funding to the Sanaa government, although the chances of its survival - or president Ali Abdullah’s loyalty - are fairly low.

Yemeni “commentators” described as “productive” his talks in Sanaa Saturday, Jan. 2 with visiting Gen. David Petraeus, chief of the US Central Command, with regard to action against al Qaeda. But Washington has a problem with the Yemen president: In the ten years since al Qaeda blew up the USS Cole in Aden harbor, Salah has conducted a dual policy, on the one hand, posing as America’s faithful ally in the war on the Islamist extremists, while, on the other, maintaining close back-door ties with al Qaeda in Yemen and giving them his protection.

Yemen’s revolving door for captured terrorists is part of this two-faced presidential strategy and accounts for al Qaeda’s mounting strength in the country. Any effort to contain this strength would be further doomed if the Obama administration were to go through with repatriating to their homeland 100 Yemeni Islamists released from Guantanamo Bay.

The US president’s top counter-terror adviser John Brennan told US television audiences Sunday: “Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula poses a serious threat” which would be exacerbated by its reinforcement.

The day after his talks with Gen. Petraeus, Salah detached troops for the provinces east of the capital to ward off al Qaeda’s increasing presence there, but this was no more than a token gesture. His deals with Washington are unlikely to stand up for more than a few weeks or lead to the culling of al Qaeda strength in the country and, anyway, he has no military strength to spare from his other warfronts.

The Obama administration, facing mounting public criticism of the security lapses which led up to the failed attempt to blow up Northwest Airlines flight 253 on Christmas day, is picking its way through this minefield in response to American fears and demands for a tough hand against the terrorists.

In the last of his three speeches on the subject on Saturday, Jan. 2, President Obama fingered al Qaeda in Yemen as the authors of the attempt after its organization, Al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula’s claim of responsibility. Now, he must follow through with a form of retaliation, even though by now the Islamist terrorists’ have abandoned their known hideouts and gone to ground among friendly native tribes or Yemen’s lofty mountains in the south.

The threat of an attack on the US embassy in Sanaa is longstanding. Al Qaeda controls parts of four Yemen provinces, Abayan, Baida, Shabwa and Hadramout, covering nearly 200,000 sq. km, almost a third of Yemen’s total area (530,000 sq. km. - slightly smaller than California). No more than a skeleton staff of two or three officers normally mans the US embassy in Sanaa, the ambassador and most of the personnel working out of well-guarded and fortified safe houses. The British embassy diplomatic staff is likewise very small.

Yemen is sunk so deep in three chaotic wars against two insurgencies and al Qaeda that the notion of a police force is risible. So too is for the US to rely on its armed forces to contain al Qaeda.

Military sources report that for months now, Yemeni armed forces have been staggering from one defeat to another against the Houthi rebels in the north, further undermined by the pullout of Saudi troops last week.

An even more menacing insurgency led by the Southern Engine movement is fighting to separate southern Yemen from the North and declare independence from the strategic Red Sea port of Aden.

Yemen claimed to have carried out two air strikes against al Qaeda hideouts in Shabwa on Dec. 17 and Dec. 24. They were in fact the work of US drones.

The latter attack, which killed 36 al Qaeda high-ups, took place the day before the Detroit-bound airliner was threatened by an al Qaeda bomber.

The logical conclusion from this sequence of events is that American military action in Yemen had no effect on the plot to blow up an American airliner.

The most popular boys’ names in 2009 were Ethan, Noah, and Logan. The least popular boy name for 2009: Tiger Madoff Gosselin.- Leno

Sensing weakness and seeing opportunity the Chinese Foreign Ministry has reshuffled its leading diplomats with a view to waging a more aggressive “quasi-superpower diplomacy” in the coming decade. Foremost among the changes is the soon-to-be-announced posting of Vice Foreign Minister He Yafei to Washington.

He, 55, will replace incumbent Ambassador Zhou Wenzhong, who has reached the mandatory retirement age of 65 and is tipped to return home.

Meanwhile, the official Chinese media reported Jan. 4 that three new vice foreign ministers had been appointed. They are former UK Ambassador Fu Ying; former Japan Ambassador Cui Tiankai; and former Assistant Foreign Minister Zhai Jun. The three rising stars are expected to be in charge of European, Asian and African affairs, respectively.

Of the three, the suave and elegant Fu, 57, has attracted the most attention. Of Mongolian descent and daughter of a PLA general, Fu is the second female diplomat since 1949 to have attained the rank of vice minister. (The first was Mao Zedong’s niece, Wang Hairong, who was vice foreign minister during the Cultural Revolution.)

A former ambassador to Australia and the Philippines, Fu has played a pivotal role in raising China’s profile in Europe and in boosting the country’s ties with the EU, its largest trading partner.

Yet it is He’s imminent move to Washington that has become the talk of the cocktail circuit in Beijing. A fluent English speaker who studied international relations in Switzerland for a year, He served in China’s missions in the U.S. and United Nations for many years.

Often spoken of as a future foreign minister, He is considered a hawk who will be pushing hard to establish de facto diplomatic equality between China and the U.S.

Just last month, He made headlines at the Copenhagen climate-change summit when he told a press conference that the U.S. representative, Todd Stern, “either lacks common sense or is extremely irresponsible.”

Many official Chinese analysts see Beijing taking a more aggressive stance toward the U.S. For example, Cui Liru, president of the prestigious China Institute of Contemporary International Research, sees “a new balance of power” between the superpower and the quasi-superpower.

“In the past, the U.S. was proactive and we tended to be reactive. In many areas, the U.S. was on the offensive and we were on the defensive,” Cui commented concerning bilateral ties over the past several decades.

“There will be some changes of posture in the coming 10 years,” the senior government adviser noted.

It is also significant that the generation of “returnees” — Chinese who had studied in the West — has gained dominance over the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi, also a former ambassador to the U.S., studied in Britain, as did Vice Foreign Minister Fu.

Vice Foreign Minister Cui has a master’s degree from Johns Hopkins University.

It is a mistake, however, to think that diplomats who had received formal training in the U.S. and Europe tend to be more conciliatory toward the West. If anything, such officials tend to assume a hardline stance, if only to reassure the big bosses in the Chinese Communist Party that they have not succumbed to the proverbial “sugar-coated bullets of capitalism” during their years abroad.

The NFL Playoffs have begun with generally boring blowout games. Except for the overtime dustup between Green Bay and the Cardinals.

Concurrently, I had been telling people that in listening to some of Mozart’s more sublime passages (try Ave Verum Corpus), I had a distinct impression that he had gone to heaven and brought them back.  Then I read Walter Isaacson’s Einstein, in which the great physicist is quoted as saying, “Beethoven created his music, but Mozart’s music is so pure it seems to have been ever-present in the universe” (p.38).  On another occasion, Einstein remarked that while Beethoven had to compose his music, Mozart snatched his from the universe, “the way I snatch my ideas from the universe.”

Tricks of the mind?  Humility?  Silly metaphors?  Or is Jung’s “collective unconscious” at play again, informed by the very crypto-structures of reality itself?  I’m sometimes bemused in watching programs on savants on the more serious television channels.  The narrator will suddenly blurt out, “Savants have knowledge they have never learned,” and then quickly change the subject, knowing what has been stated is is taboo in the context of reductionist science.

My stepdaughter Marla was born deaf, and deafness is a condition that tends to cause certain neural connections to be made differently than they are in “normal” people.  She has now had cochlear implants in both ears and has 96% hearing.  (That loud applause you hear in the background is for Dr. Thomas J. Balkany and the Audiology Clinic at the University of Miami.)  The first inkling I had of her possessing stunningly different abilities came when, as a seven-year-old with only a couple of piano lessons under her belt, she began pounding away at the piano as children do.  Suddenly she came up with about four measures of perfect, professional-sounding jazz.  I dropped the pot I was washing and looked over at her in a state of shock as the name of Oscar Peterson flashed through my mind.  She looked at me, smiled and asked, “You like it?”

On another occasion she jumped up on my lap at the computer and took control of the mouse.  (People born deaf are nothing if not aggressive, but she was so charming that I didn’t mind postponing what I was doing.)  She found a word game consisting of a string of letters out of which one was to make quite a number of words of different lengths.  Between us we managed to get all but one seven-letter word.  I couldn’t come up with one and suggested that we give up.  She said, “No, I have it!”  She typed in what looked like gibberish to me, and I remarked that it didn’t mean anything.  Then she hit “Enter” and the game took the word.

I asked her where she had got it, and she said, “I heard it once on TV.”  Well, words that a person who has probably done a million pages of reading in multiple languages has never encountered tend not to be used on Spongebob.  I looked it up in Webster’s Unabridged, and it was there.  And no, I was too stunned to write it down, so I don’t know what it was.  Maybe she does.

The name Marla means “high tower” in Greek.  Maybe there’s an antenna on there somewhere.

Science is hard-pressed, to say the least, to come up with a plausible—and I stress the word “plausible”—explanation of such phenomena.  She was not surprised at her ability to play jazz at that level, at least on that one occasion.  Furthermore, she was completely confident that she knew an appropriate word to finish the game.

Is there, indeed, a ghost in the machine?  Is science being hypocritical in proclaiming that it operates objectively, examining all the facts and coming to reasonable conclusions, when it also sweeps anything not matching its preconceived notions under the carpet?  I am referring, of course, to anything that smacks of a reality beyond the purely reductionistic.

Barack Obama’s administration is handling their power and influence like a Chicago bully rather than like a United States President. And the White House’s bullying of Fox News is getting way out of hand. No surprise that Obama and his Chicago crew are not enamored with Fox News but they have crossed a line into very scary territory.

The White House war on Fox News seemed to take a new turn after Fox was the first, and for a while only, news media to show the public the disgraceful films of ACORN employees. Fox then had the audacity to run negative reports on Van Jones, a White House environmental adviser, one of many advisers who were never vetted. Therefore it came as a surprise to the WH to see that Fox discovered Jones had signed a statement indicating the government was involved in the 9-11 collapse of the Twin Towers. With Van Jones’s quiet resignation, Fox is continuing to investigate other Czars and unvetted advisers. To add insult to injury, the MSM (mainstream media) are now paying more attention to the stories that Fox News breaks and quicker to go after the stories themselves.

To make matters worse Chris Wallace, the Fox Sunday New’s host, actually had the gall to have someone fact-check what the assistant secretary of the Department of Veterans Affairs said. Chris Wallace explained “She criticized ‘Fox News Sunday’ last week for fact-checking — fact-checking — an administration official,” Wallace said Sunday. “They didn’t say that our fact-checking was wrong. They just said that we had dared to fact-check.” Wow. What kind of people is Obama hiring? Isn’t shutting down the media that disagrees with you the first thing a dictator does?

Shortly after the fact-checking debacle, Obama, acting more like a spoilsport, then a President, announced that on a single Sunday morning he would be on every major network, including the Spanish network, but not on Wallace’s Fox Sunday News show.

In the latest attack on Fox News, the White House senior advisor David Axelrod and White House Communications Director each separately reiterated the new Obama lie that Fox New is “not really a news station”. On Sunday, White House chief of staff Rahm Emanual provided a telling insight into what the core group running Obama’s presidency is thinking “It’s not so much a conflict with Fox News,” Emanuel told CNN’s John King. “I suppose the way to look at it and the way … the president looks at it, we look at it is: It’s not a news organization so much as it has a perspective. And that’s a different take. And more importantly, is not have the CNNs and the others in the world basically be led in following Fox, as if what they’re trying to do is a legitimate news organization …”

Wow. They are afraid that the MSM networks, which basically glorify Obama’s presidency with no questions asked, might be influenced by Fox and who knows, the MSM then might even do a negative story. But the frightening part is that as in typical Chicago style politics, the chief of staff is warning the MSM that if they ever act like Fox News, which I guess means to stop deifying Obama, then the White House will go after them, too. As a further signal of how the White House treats their enemies; the number of interviews the President has granted to each network stands as: NBC-12, CBS-11, ABC-9, CNN-7 and Fox News just 2.

But the blatantly unfair treatment of Fox News by the White House has not gone unnoticed. First, ABC’s Jack Tapper asked the following of White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs “It’s escaped none of our notice that the White House has decided in the last few weeks to declare one of our sister organizations “not a news organization” and to tell the rest of us not to treat them like a news organization. Can you explain why it’s appropriate for the White House to decide that a news organization is not one.” Gibbs couldn’t explain it. And even the venerable Helen Thomas, who is as liberal as they come, has chastised Press Secretary, Robert Gibbs, for trying to control and manipulate the media.

This week, however, the White House went too far. According to an article by the NY Times; The Obama administration on Thursday tried to make “pay czar” Kenneth Feinberg available for interviews to every member of the White House pool except Fox News. But to their suprise ABC, CBS, NBC and CNN all stood up to the White House’s and in a united front said either all of us, including Fox interviews Feinburg or else none of us will.

Perhaps the MSM finally remembered the Freedom of the Press and how the media is supposed to react to being manipulated even if the person manipulating them is ordered by Obama, himself. And how did Obama’s administration react to this surprising stand? By punishing all of the networks! They said that by not including the Fox network each journalist would only have two minutes for their interview instead of the five minutes as promised when they were excluding Fox. How childish can you get? And doesn’t the President have more important issues to worry about, like two wars, increasing unemployment, etc. etc.

Unless, of course you get the flu shot. Getting this shot seems like a no brainer and yet I have overheard a number of conversations where people are saying they refuse to do so. This gets me extremely angry with their stupidity, especially since I am one of the few legitimate folks who can’t get the shot. Why am I exempt? Well about 10 years ago, I would make sure that I got the shot every year. But the last few shots made me ill, not in the normal way of giving you flu like symptoms but instead gave me severe stomach cramps. Long story short, I had developed an allergy to eggs. I learned that the flu shot is egg based and apparently I became allergic to both the shot and eggs. So I now can not take any shot that is egg based.

Even without the shot I wasn’t feeling very worried about this flu for my sister who is a nurse had said that it was hitting younger people a lot harder than older people. She said older folks had lived through similar strains of flu in the past. She was basically correct except for one small detail, her definition of old. The 60 Minute show said the same thing she did except that they defined old as anyone born before 1950. Oops. Turns out that I am not in that protected group of “old people” as I had thought because I was born in 1958 which is after the cutoff date. So again, anyone born since 1950 needs to get the new flu shot.

Then this morning the Drudge Report had an article from yesterday’s Sun Sentinel. This report was about the health officials from my state, Florida, drawing up a plan to deal with critically ill flu patients. I was reminded of something I first learned about by watching MASH – the TV show about a mobile hospital during the Korean War. In the show, when the doctors were inundated with wounded soldiers they would first do a triage, separating the soldiers into three categories: soldiers who were dying or couldn’t be saved were put in one group; the second group contained soldiers who were severely injured but could be helped and the third group were the soldiers without life threatening problems. The first group was made comfortable while they were dying, the second group was immediately rushed into surgery and the third group was assisted only after they were done with the first group.

It now appears as if my state, and probably yours, too, is looking into doing its own triage to meet the growing H1N1 problem. As much as I hate to admit it, I have to agree with the health official’s idea of triage. We have limited number of beds and hospitals and more importantly a scarcity of ventilators so the doctors have to make hard choices.

Today’s triage is really no different than the old TV show. The report stated that the Florida Health official’s goal would be “to focus care on patients whose lives could be saved and who would be most likely to improve”. So just as in the TV show, patients who are critically ill, who aren’t responding to the ventilator and who they deem have a slim chance of recovering will be made comfortable but will not be placed on any of the scarce ventilators. On the other hand, patients who show no life threatening problems, only typical flu like symptoms will be told to go home, drink fluids and rest. The patients, however, who do have life threatening problems, which are primarily respiratory, and have been deemed to have a strong chance of survival will be admitted to the hospital and will be put on one of the few ventilators.

Triage requires making some very difficult life and death decisions. Could you imagine being told that your elderly grandmother or your son with AIDs or your sister with cerebral palsey would most likely be denied life-saving treatments? Conversely, normally healthy people, who have developed severe breathing problems from the flu, will be provided hospital beds and ventilators. However they will be monitored every 2-3 days and if the patient isn’t responding or is getting worse they may end up in that first group and their ventilator given to someone else with a better chance of survival.

The H1N1, according to 60 Minutes is not nearly as virulent as the flu pandemic of 1918 which killed over 50 million people worldwide. This flu is expected to kill less than 1 percent of the population but this is still a significant number. And it assumes that people act responsibly and get the flu shot. After learning all these new flu facts I almost think not getting a shot should be criminalized because many of those without shots will end up hospitalized and using scarce resources that could have saved someone else’s life. So please, get the shot, to save not just your own life but somebody else’s life, too.

Carl Jung wrote a good deal about “meaningful coincidences,” such as the one that took place when he was counseling a lady who spoke of a dream she had had the previous night about an Egyptian scarab.  Just then there was a banging at the window.  Jung opened it, and in flew a beetle of the European species that most resembles the scarab.

I used to teach a graduate seminar in the works of Miguel de Cervantes, back when such a monumental volume as Don Quixote could be assigned and the better students would actually read it.  At the same time I was devouring popular books on modern physics, and eventually it occurred to me that, while the two parts of Don Quixote appeared in 1605 and 1615, Albert Einstein’s special and general theories of relativity were produced by him in 1905 and 1915, respectively, 300 years later in the two cases.  Was that a mere coincidence or a meaningful coincidence?, I wondered.

Let’s look at what each of them was saying.  Just for one example, as he is about to charge a flock of sheep and kill a number of them, Don Quixote says, “I tell you, Sancho, and it is therefore true,” that the sheep in question are the two armies involved in a great battle he has read about in one of his chivalric novels.  For his part, Einstein denied us the delusion that time is an absolute thing, so that we can imagine that all entities in the universe are acting at the same moment.  So maybe Don Quixote isn’t so far off in projecting into the present a battle he presumes took place in an earlier age.

Then, what about his statement that something is true because he declares it to be true?  (Sounds like a lot of today’s politicians, doesn’t it?)  Einstein also set in motion something the quantum mechanics people have had a deuce of a time wrestling with, namely the question of when and where a potential event becomes “real.”  The Copenhagen interpretation insisted that it only becomes real when a conscious being actually observes it.  Einstein and others fought that idea with claw and fang, but without much success.

I had the great privilege of holding a brief conversation with John Wheeler, who worked with Einstein at Princeton and later gave a name to the black hole phenomenon.  Wheeler had to leave for an appointment, but handed me offprints of a couple of his recent articles.  One was entitled, “Delayed Choice Experiments in Physics.”  He took off from the strange experience of some astronomers who found themselves viewing what appeared to be two identical galaxies in the same region of space.  The odds against this are so overpowering (notice that I didn’t say “astronomical”?) that they knew it could hardly be true.  As it turned out, they were viewing a single galaxy whose light was being bent by the sheer mass of an intervening galaxy and going around both sides of it.

The mind-boggling part is what came out of this.  They realized that they could set up their instruments so that the light from the far galaxy would come around the left side, the right side, or both sides, and that whichever one they chose was the way it had happened billions of years ago.  In other words, they were able to choose in their day what they wanted to have happened in the distant past, and that was the way it happened.  Wheeler eventually concluded that physicists were stuck with the idea that reality only takes place in the mind of a conscious observer.

The even weirder things now going on in membrane theory with its “multiverse” are grist for someone else’s post.

Now, back to Don Quixote.  How far off is he in declaring that he decides what is real?  The fact is that he has concluded before Wheeler & Co. that reality takes place in the mind of the observer.  Unfortunately, he still has to pay for the skewered sheep.

My point, though, is that the appearance of the two parts of Cervantes’s novel and Einstein’s theories of relativity 300 years apart may in fact be a meaningful coincidence.

However, don’t try to declare your checkbook balanced when the bank’s perception of your account balance differs from yours.  For some reason, the Copenhagen interpretation doesn’t work at that level, more’s the pity.  There may be hope, though, in M theory, in which there are millions of universes in which that checkbook is balanced.

Six-year old Zachary Christie is a first grade student in Newark, Delaware and a newly minted and very proud Cub Scout. He may also be sentenced to 45-days in REFORM SCHOOL for bringing one of his Cub Scout utensils to lunch at school. You see the utensil is a combined spoon, fork and knife to be used for camping.

The gadget feel out of Zach’s bag and was spotted by a school official who immediately seized it and charged the desperado with possessing of a weapon.

He was promptly expelled and faces a disciplinary hearing on Tuesday where he could be sentenced to 45-days in a Reform School.

Pontificating school official claim they are hewing to an ironclad no exception policy that a knife is a knife and a knife is a weapon and that’s that. Zach will have his day in court at an open meeting Tuesday evening, October 13, 2009 that promises to be spirited.

The erstwhile Dillinger has many defenders including Delaware legislator who wrote to the School Board urging common sense.

Zachary’s defenders have erected a website helpzachary.com urging sympathizers to contact the Board members and if they can attend tomorrow night’s disciplinary hearing. To decide whether Zach will get a rap sheet before he gets all his permanent teeth

Zachary’s family is flummoxed by the whole thing. They point out he insist on wearing a suit to school because he takes it so very seriously. For now Zach is being home schooled.

Maybe Obama will invite Zachary and his tormenters to have an Orange Crush at the White House.

Based on this School Board’s logic I would have been gunned down in the school yard for wearing my Boy Scout sheath knife to school.

Intrepid explorer who discovered America or merciless oppressor of the native peoples who already lived here? Some paint a darker picture of Christopher Columbus these days, and nearly a quarter (24%) of adults now don’t think America should honor him with a national holiday.

Fifty-eight percent (58%) disagree and say Columbus should be honored  with a holiday. Seventeen percent (17%) are undecided.

Sixty-nine percent (69%) of Republicans favor continuance of Columbus Day, compared to 52% of Democrats and 54% of adults not affiliated with either party. Democrats are nearly twice as likely as Republicans to think Columbus should not be honored.

Sixty-one percent (61%) of whites say Columbus deserves a holiday, a view shared by just 50% of African-Americans and 51% of those in other racial categories.

Perhaps surprisingly, younger Americans are more supportive of the famous Italian explorer than their elders. Seventy-two percent (72%) of both men and women under 40 believe Columbus should be honored with a holiday. Only 57% of men over 40 and 53% of women over 40 agree.

Columbus Day honors the anniversary of the October 12, 1492 arrival of Christopher Columbus in the Americas. But some historians look beyond his discovery of a new world to his actions upon arrival, including violence against and enslavement of those already living here, forced conversion of native peoples to Christianity and the introduction of a host of new diseases into the native population.

Despite these claims, however, 69% of Americans have a favorable impression of Columbus, down slightly from two years ago. Twenty-five percent (25%) have a very favorable view. Just 21% hold a somewhat or very unfavorable opinion of the explorer.

The overwhelming majority of adults (72%) correctly identify 1492 as the year Columbus discovered the Americas. Five percent (5%) say 1482, four percent (4% ) think 1392, and three percent (3%) say 1592. Seventeen percent (17%) aren’t sure.

More Americans between 18 and 29 years of age and those over 50 correctly answered the year of Columbus’ discovery than those between 30 and 40 years old.

However, just 12% of adults consider Columbus Day as one of the nation’s most important holidays. Thirty-seven percent (37%) deem it the least important, while 49% say it’s somewhere in between the most and least important holiday. Two percent (2%) are undecided. These numbers have held steady since the previous survey.

China’s North Korean policy suffered a setback when Premier Wen Jiabao failed to get anything substantial from Kim Jong-Il regarding the resuscitation of the so-called six-party talks being hosted by the Chinese.

However, Obama’s decision not to see his fellow Nobel Prize laureate Dalai Lama during his ongoing visit to Washington has handed Beijing a big victory in its decades-long crusade of preventing “foreign interference” in its repressive policies toward Tibet and Xinjiang.

Upon leaving Pyongyang on Tuesday with Wen, Chinese Foreign Minister Yang Jiechi claimed that the premier’s historic tour was “rich in content and weighty in outcome.”

However, on the subject of his country’s return to the negotiation table in Beijing, “Dear Leader” Kim Jong-Il only expressed “our readiness to hold multilateral talks, depending on the outcome of the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea-U.S. talks.” And while Kim reiterated Pyongyang’s theoretical commitment to the denuclearization of the Korean Peninsula, he was but repeating the same rhetorical pledges made by his aides and diplomats during the past month or so.

Newspapers in South Korea have reported that DPRK scientists have all along proceeded with their ambitious nuclear weapons program.

Wen’s North Korean diplomacy is disappointing because prior to his visit, the Chinese Foreign Ministry took the unusual step of announcing that Beijing would bolster food and fuel aid to the Stalinist regime. On top of this, Wen personally presented China’s once-and-future ally with gifts worth $20 million.

Since July, the leadership under President Hu Jintao, who takes personal charge of foreign and security policies, has also silenced domestic critics of the DPRK.

Soon after Pyongyang’s nuclear test on May 25, several renowned Chinese experts on the Koreas published articles in the official media blasting Kim’s misguided attempts to build a full-fledged nuclear arsenal. Such criticisms have disappeared from even the chat-rooms of China’s websites.

On relations with the U.S., however, Hu, who heads the Chinese Communist Party’s (CCP) Leading Group on Foreign Affairs, is said to be ecstatic over Obama’s decision not to see the Dalai Lama during the Tibetan spiritual leader’s five-day visit to Washington this week.

This was the first time since 1991 that a U.S. president has failed to vouchsafe the Dalai Lama even a “drop in” opportunity at the White House.

U.S. officials have indicated that this stems from the new policy of “strategic reassurance,” meaning essentially that Washington will make concessions to Beijing on issues such as human rights and Tibet in return for the latter’s cooperation on the financial and environmental fronts.

Chinese and foreign diplomatic sources in Beijing said since large-scale riots broke out in Tibet and Xinjiang in March 2008, Hu, who also oversees policies toward ethnic minorities, has been attacked by CCP factions outside of his own Communist Youth League clique.

Former President Jiang Zemin, who shared the limelight with Hu during the National Day military parade in Beijing last Thursday, launched bitter criticisms against Hu — and his cronies who are running Xinjiang and Tibet — for failing to maintain “socio-political harmony” in China’s restive western regions.

Obama’s buckling under Chinese pressure, however, has been perceived by Hu and his advisers as a major Chinese triumph. Henceforward, Hu, who is also chairman of the Central Military Commission, will feel much less qualms about turning the big guns on recalcitrant Tibetan and Uighur groups in the two strife-torn autonomous regions.

Moreover, Obama’s snubbing the Dalai Lama would set a precedent that Beijing’s newly assertive diplomats will use when they try to oblige a number of European and Asian countries not to meet senior members of the exiled Tibetan and Uighur communities.

Beijing is also expected to put more pressure on Washington not to “interfere” with China’s handling of Taiwan and Hong Kong.

Since taking office in January, Obama and his top aides have largely refrained from criticizing Beijing’s policies on human rights and ethnic minorities.

Adapted, and amended from an article by Willy Lam a Hong Kong-based China scholar and journalist specializing in Communist Party politics and foreign policy.

Four-to-five assailants held  between 10 and 15 officers hostage in a building near the main gates of Pakistan’s army headquarters in capital Saturday, Oct. 10 after an audacious invasion of the complex and gunfight in which at least eight soldier including a lieutenant general and four gunmen were killed. There are reports that lodged in the HQ compound is the secret department in charge of securing Pakistan’s nuclear weapons.

As the Taliban dressed as soldiers burst into the army HQ in Islamabad, Pakistani paramilitary forces battled a second group of insurgents to recover control of a road tunnel which connects the towns of Darra Adam Khel and Kohat in the North West Frontier Province.

Pakistan special forces assaulted the building killing the assailants losing two of their own and two hostages, and capturing what is reportedly a terrorist ring leader.

On May 15, DEBKA-Net-Weekly exclusively named Kohat and the Wah Cantonment Pakistani Ordnance Complex in the city of Kamra, both in the NWFP, as keys to Pakistan’s nuclear and missile arsenals.

Military sources stressed at the time that Kohat’s fall to the Taliban would cut off Islamabad and the Pakistani high command from Kamra and its nuclear arsenal. This appeared to be the object of the Taliban push on the tunnel-road coupled with the assault on military headquarters.

In a rare news conference, Khalid Kidwai, chief of Pakistan’s strategic planning division which controls its nuclear program, rejected international fears that Pakistan’s weapons could fall into the wrong hands and warned against any foreign intervention over the issue. “‘The state of alertness has gone up,” he admitted without going into details, but stressed: “There is no conceivable scenario, political or violent, in which Pakistan will fall to the extremists of the al Qaeda or Taliban types.”

He spoke the day after the chief of Pakistan’s army, General Ashfaq Kiyani, dismissed as “unrealistic” fears that al Qaeda could seize the country’s nuclear weapons.

As reported earlier: The Islamabad attack occurred at a defining moment in Washington for the Afghan/Pakistan conflict. Obama is completing a military review of US military strategy in the two arenas with his “was council.” The conference is tilting toward shifting the US military focus away from the Taliban to al Qaeda. Obama has even said there maybe a role for the Taliban in Afghaniostan despite three factors now illustrated in blood Saturday:

·         Just as Taliban and al Qaeda are inseparable, so too are the Afghan and Pakistan warfronts.

·          Those two organizations hold the initiative, not the American army. They are capable of answering the White House’s decisions on strategy in unexpected places and ways.

·         Pakistan, America’s chosen senior ally in the war against Taliban and al Qaeda, is a broken reed in military terms and too vulnerable to lean on.

Saturday, Pakistan’s president, Ali Zardari, saw those adversaries striking inside the headquarters of his armed forces in the capital, demonstrating their ability to reach into any part of his government, including the presidential palace, and topple his regime. This is exactly the same tactic the two partners in terror are pursuing in Kabul. Insurgents or al Qaeda were also admitted to be within range of key locations for Pakistan’s nuclear and missile arsenals.

For some weeks, the Pakistani army has been concentrating a large force of more than 100,000 men for a big offensive against Taliban and al Qaeda strongholds in the lawless tribal territories of Waziristan bordering on Afghanistan. The attack on its headquarters in Islamabad carried a message: If this offensive goes forward, Pakistan’s major cities will pay the price.

On Oct. 8, a car bombing later claimed by Taliban killed 49 people in the Khyber Bazaar of Peshawar.

Monday, five people died in the bombing of a United Nations aid agency in Islamabad.

Zardari’s army chiefs are flatly opposed to the understanding he is developing with the Obama administration for $1.5 billion in US aid in return for launching a major Pakistani military offensive against Taliban and al Qaeda. They accuse the US of interfering in relations between civil government and the military.

The attack on the army’s headquarters Saturday would have been taken as a gesture of support for the opponents of a US-Pakistan alliance. It was also a warning that Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal may not be entirely safe from terrorist control.