Wailatpu Public Policy Facilitators today announced their definitive findings on whether rural Pennsylvanians are bitter.

The results of the study are conclusive:  Pennsylvanians are bitter.

That from the lead investigator, Thomas Wright Jefferson, who also pointed out

That includes urbanites, not just rural people.  We took our study into every corner of the state, and found it to be true for European descended populations there, various hispanic populations, and african americans as well.  We did not look at Asian or other descent-based demographic subdivisions.

How did they reach this conclusion?  We'll discuss the state-of-the-art methodology below the fold.  Warning: This is a study, not a poll, and the language is a little bit technical.

Oh dear.  Even as the story of "dangerous Iranian provocations" in the Gulf of Hormuz comes unravelled for the administration, as PatriotClearingHouse has diaried on the rec list, Bush just can't seem to get Iran out from between his teeth.  

The Guardian has the story this morning of our intrepid Decider wandering the deserts of the Middle East, trying to drum up support for another fool's mission.

Systems feed back on themselves.  The disappearance of summer ice cover in the Arctic has received a fair amount of publicity, and it's easy to see how replacing light-reflecting snow with dark, heat-absorbing water can accelerate warming trends.

Another feedback mechanism is less well understood.  Much of the ground in Alaska and the Canadian North is permafrost, which has a good deal of carbon locked up in its frozen depths, both as CO2 and in the form of an even more effective heat-trapping gas, methane.

As the climate warms in the North, melting permafrost releases both gasses.  For a dramatic instance of this, courtesy Science Daily, follow below the fold.

Congressional Democrats and wavering Republicans who threaten to refuse to support another surge, and another, and another, will be accused of bringing on a bloodbath in Iraq.  This is clearly the point to which the PNAC wishes to drive us in our thinking -- that 'those people' must be militarily bludgeoned into coexistence.

In a previous diary I noted promising prospects for peace in a future unoccupied Iraq given that talks had opened between various Sunni Arab factions within Iraq.  Now, once again courtesy of the Guardian, I'd like to diary another hopeful sign, a small peace conference between Sunnis and Shiites just concluded in Finland.

The larger point is not that an Iraq without U.S. troops will be paradise, but that it's descent into further madness is only a dead certainty to those who have given us so many other dead certainties -- and dead soldiers and dead children.  Enough.

Follow below the fold.

Ahhhh.  The Guardian.  Where would I be if I couldn't skim it in the morning?  Well, I don't know, but one article caught my eye, and I thought I'd share it.  Seemed to be kind of important to me for some of its implications, and, you know, what some Iraqi's think of the whole business...  Hearing from the Sunni resistance directly, as opposed to being filtered through x number of layers of pundits and think-tankers and editors...

Here's the link

I'll share a pet peeve, first.  The use of the term insurgents to describe Iraqi fighters.  That implies that there is a stable political order that has some legitimacy, and some malcontents are rising up against it.  How the term came into standard, universal, use is beyond me.  Lumping bandits and resistance fighters and ethnic cleansers under the same heading - Insurgents - strikes me as intent to confuse and render the public powerless.  That's gotta be against the law somewhere, yeah?

Anyway, the truth is below the fold, as they say.

Whatever happened to the good old days, when disasters knew their place; where train wrecks were train wrecks and recessions were recessions; where holes in the ozone layer were just that, and global warming, well, it was something different.  

Gone, I guess.  

Here's a little tidbit to chew on from the Royal Society of Chemistry.

In light of chasm's diary today on the re-emergence of PNAC goons, Frederick Kagan and William Kristol, I thought this pair of pieces from today's Independent newspaper formed a compelling counter-weight -- a viable, comprehensive, regional, peace plan from an Iraqi politician, Ali Allawi.

It's a thoughtful, compassionate, realistic series of suggestions from one of the players in Iraqi politics, and worth the read.

"We must thank those who gave their lives for our freedom."

This is a statement we've all heard and probably used before, and as November 11 nears again, we can expect to hear it more often.  

Because the language we use often traps us in ways of thinking, I'd like to take a closer look at what may be the most uncontroversial statement any American can make.

In another thread, dabize just posted links to a new state-by-state survey of Bush's approval ratings over an 18 month period, beginning in May of 2005.  Put out by Survey USA, it is interactive, and you can view the pattern of the last 18 months by category -- liberal, conservative, age-group, etc.

http://www.surveyusa.com/...