Missiles, fyi

Cost of a Tomahawk cruise missile: approximately $756,000 in 2011-dollars.

Cost of an AGM-86B cruise missile: $1,000,000.

Cost of a Harpoon cruise missile: $1,200,000.

Cost of an AGM-129 Advanced Cruise Missile: $4.0 million.

But there are other options. Maybe I'd feel better our defense budget if I had some reason to believe that we were paying reasonable prices for the hardware.

Stoopid++

There is stupid. There is stoopid. And there is David Brooks.

UPDATE: Read this, ye Mighty, and despair: "The mode of thought more common in Asia is better suited to the complex networks that make up the modern world. The contextual, associational style is simply more valid. The linear style we’ve inherited from the Greeks is less adaptive toward the modern age. I think the West may be doomed."

Simple answers...

...to simple questions:

If rational, non-sociopathic people can argue about whether it's torture, then it is torture.

No one has ever seen a black person before.

So it would seem. "How do I get Michelle Obama arms?" they ask. One answer: "By being a black woman." There are other ways, obviously, but it helps.

Word.

Greeks

Lifting from Christopher Hitchens' ridiculous column in Slate, one Rabbi Michael Lerner said the following:

Along with Greek science and military prowess came a whole culture that celebrated beauty both in art and in the human body, presented the world with the triumph of rational thought in the works of Plato and Aristotle, and rejoiced in the complexities of life presented in the theater of Aeschylus, Euripides and Aristophanes.

I have no comment at the moment on Hitchen's chattering. But let's have something clear. Platonism in antiquity was not in any proper sense "rational." I will grant you "axiomatic" or "logical" or "mathematical", but all of those are crazy stretches. Plato's school was a mystery cult, and Plato's "philosopher" was more like a Buddha crossed with a Sufi mystic than what might reasonably be called a philosopher in the sense of a rational investigator.

It is a safe rule to apply that, when a mathematical or philosophical author writes with a misty profundity, he is talking nonsense.

That, or he's talking theology, which is not intrinsically nonsense as far as I'm concerned. The point being, it is not possible to rationally argue your way into knowing what God is like.

Ahem

It's already been noted, but I feel it may be worth restating, that this is the stupidest thing ever written by a man.

7. The primary meaning of “Islam” is submission. Islam requires everybody to submit to some written rules, which are final and cannot be discussed. Peace, in its Western usage, means a (written) treaty with the enemy, to which both sides submit. However, Pacifism is not as much about some specific peace treaty with any particular enemy, as it is for some abstract Peace, without even a specified enemy. So, it calls for submission to some implied treaty with unspecified enemy. Since that enemy is not named, the treaty actually requires only our submission.

That is all.