Iranian Attack on Israel?

Little Green Footballs reports that:

A barrage of Katyusha rockets has been launched at northern Israel, and for the first time one has reached the city of Haifa.

CNN has reported that at least one of the weapons was a long-range ballistic missile (not just a Katyusha rocket), fired by Iranian guards.

If this report is true it represents a clear act of war on the part of Iran. Iranian prime minister Ahmedinejad, out of Muslim solidarity, is threatening Israel with terrible consequences if they attack Syria, but it looks as if the Iranians may have already overplayed their "solidarity" hand.

Determining the Past

According to cosmologist Thomas Hertog the universe consists of many pasts, and it is not until an observation is made in the present that one of these fuzzy potential pasts becomes actual. It's as if the universe is like a vast quantum event made real by a particular observation.

It sort of reminds me of the movie Frequency where a man is able to communicate with his father in the past and change what actually occured. Every time this happened, however, it changed the present.

This raises a fascinating question, at least for me. If God is not bound by time, and if the present can determine the past, and if God answers at least some prayers, is it possible that God, in response to prayer, might change the past? Of course, as in the movie Frequency, if He did change the past it would revise the present and we would never know that the past had been altered, or even that we had prayed for it to be altered.

The universe is certainly a strange place.

Stop Whining

GOP outrage over a Democratic ad that shows flag-draped coffins of U.S. soldiers is almost as silly as the hue and cry over the Valerie Plame affair. I fail to see what's wrong with an ad that presses home the fact that there have been casualties in this war. Instead of whining about Democratic tastelessness Republicans should be pressing them to explain what they would do differently to prevent those casualties.

The answer of course is that they would either do nothing differently or they would cut and run. Force them to admit this in public debate and their use of the ad will be seen by voters as either hypocritical or symbolic of defeat and surrender. This seems to be a more grown up response than complaining that Democrats aren't playing fair.