Bits and Pieces - February 2, 2010

The dead-tree version of the February 8 Nation arrived today with a selection of letters and Alexander Cockburn's response on his view that there is no such thing as anthropogenic global warming. They're behind a subscription wall, so you'll have to take my word that practically all of them have errors in dealing with the second law of thermodynamics. Frank Thomas gets it right. Cockburn thinks there's a layer up there, and he doesn't understand that a molecule's absorption of radiation heats it up. Ah, that greenhouse metaphor!

I'll bet that the TSA's record, while humiliating and labeling all those of us who would fly on the airlines as potential terrorists, is as bad as, or worse than, the New York City Police Department's.

Today's teenagers can identify with Holden Caulfield. I never could.

A graph of federal spending, by agency, since 1962. Health care goes up, defense goes down (as a percentage of the whole), everything else pretty much the same.

The Armchair Generalist is pretty typical of American commentators in saying that there's not much change in the new Quadrennial Defense Review. But the Brits see change a'coming.

Here's the 2010 Annual Threat Assessment of the US Intelligence Community for the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence. Iran seems to be trying to acquire a capability for making nuclear weapons is the conclusion, shaded toward questions about how far they want to go.

Meanwhile, President Ahmadinejad makes an offer to trade Iran's low-enriched uranium for those 20% enriched fuel elements for the Tehran Research Reactor. No details given; I can't tell if that's because AP doesn't get them or if Ahmadinejad didn't give them. And the details are where the problems have been in the past. (On the last two items, h/t to Steve Hynd, who goes a bit further than I would in interpreting the AP article.)