The Size of Things

Here's something to play with if you have a few minutes to spend being fascinated. It's an interactive animation that gives you a sense of how big the universe is and how small the smallest things are. Check it out here.

Thanks to First Things for the link.

Who's the Doofus?

So last October an atheist marched in a Halloween parade dressed as "Zombie Mohammad." This insult to the Prophet so incensed a Muslim onlooker that the man leaped upon the hapless infidel and began to strangle him until removed by the police. The assault landed both the Muslim and the atheist in court where the judge dismissed the assault charges against the attacker and proceeded to insult and lecture the victim, calling him a "doofus," of all things.

It turns out that under sharia law, which the judge invoked, the Muslim man was justified in trying to kill the wretched blasphemer, but of course the parade wasn't in Iran or Saudi Arabia, it was in Pennsylvania. Who would have thought that Pennsylvanians are now subject to sharia law?

Andrew McCarthy has the story at National Review along with the transcript of the judge's lecture. It reads as if the judge may have been a couple of martinis over his limit. Let's hope so. The alternative is that the judge is pretty much of a doofus himself.

Machiavelli's Advice on Iran

Iran has consistently denied that it's pursuing its nuclear program for the purpose of building weapons, but nobody believes them, or at least, one hopes that nobody believes them. Jamie Weinstein's column at The Daily Caller leaves room for doubt:

Many foreign policy elites, perhaps epitomized by CNN host Fareed Zakaria, confidently assert that Israel specifically, and the West generally, can live with a nuclear Iran. The Iranian leadership isn’t suicidal, they tell us. Ignore Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s repeated calls for Israel to be wiped off the map, or Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei’s statement that Israel is a “cancerous tumor of a state” that “should be removed from the region,” or the supposed moderate former Iranian President Akbar Rafsanjani’s casual remark that the “application of an atomic bomb would not leave anything in Israel but the same thing would just produce damages in the Muslim world.”

They’re just posturing or joking or have been misinterpreted, we’re told. Israel and the West can live with a nuclear Iran, foreign policy intellectuals in New York, London and Berlin proclaim.

Other nations have nukes, of course, and it might be wondered why we should be especially concerned that Iran has them.

The answer is that no other nation supports terrorism around the globe to the extent that Iran does. No other nation is led by people who believe that they can effect the return of their messiah by launching a nuclear holocaust, and no other nation has sworn to wipe another nation off the map as soon as they have the capability to do it. Iran has done all three.

Weinstein quotes the widow of a physicist who had been working on Iran's nuclear weapons until he was killed in Tehran by unknown assassins:

Mostafa’s ultimate goal was the annihilation of Israel,” Fatemeh Bolouri Kashani told the Fars News Agency this week. She was referring to the wishes of her late husband, Mostafa Ahmadi Roshan Behdast, an Iranian nuclear scientist assassinated on the streets of Tehran in January.

Maybe Mostafa was just joking, although it must be said that Muslims aren't particular noted for their wonderful sense of humor.

Recently we wrote about the statement by a top Iranian official who declared that Iran must launch a preemptive strike against Israel, a declaration that all but forces Israel to attack first to avoid being preemptively obliterated.

Weinstein closes with this:

But while Western policy elites exude confidence in the rationality of the Iranian regime, we see from Kashani’s comment about her late husband that those intimately involved in making a nuclear Iran a reality believe it is their mission — likely the very reason they got involved in the nuclear project to begin with — to eliminate the Jewish state. And we aren’t talking about some uneducated bumpkin. This was a highly-educated nuclear scientist.

Machiavelli wrote that when war can not be avoided it can only be postponed to the advantage of the other side. It seems that war is coming once again to Israel one way or another, and the longer it is deferred the harder it will be for Israel to prevail and certainly the higher the cost they will pay. War with Iran will be a horrific thing, as we've said on numerous occasions on this site, but a nuclear weapon in the hands of Iran would be even worse despite whatever the naifs among our elites tell us.

Perhaps the biggest question for American citizens is, what will the United States do if Israel decides it doesn't want to wait until it's too late to find out whether the Iranians are just joshing about reducing them and their children to ashes?