Towards the beginning of his speech President Obama made an impassioned plea: don’t mind the dithering. As the President said no plan before him would commit any troops to Afghanistan before 2010. Therefore, no resources were kept from the fight. But the President misses the point.

The President dithered as he asked our NATO allies to contribute more troops. So much so that the British Secretary of Defence complained. The harm in dithering was not in directly denying resources to the fight. The harm in dithering was that it undermined support among our allies and among Americans and consequently their ability to contribute more to the fight.

That said, I still object to the time line as unhelpfully artificial but when you're a politician you got to keep the base in line.

According to Le Monde the United States will begin withdrawing forces from Afghanistan before the end of his first term. Not sure if this comes as a surprise to you but it does to me. This seems to border on being outrageous. It took the President this long to say that? If it is dangerous to withdraw from there now, then what's so magical about 2012? Unless I'm missing something this is pure popularism to try and mitigate the political costs for him.

I'm surprised that the television networks aren't covering this. Front page of Le Monde and their iphone app sent out a mass text.

Here's hoping two years will give us enough time to give Afghanistan a fighting chance.

According to the FT the Swiss surprised the world by banning minarets. Turnout was high at 53% and the measure passed with 57% of the vote. Surprised? According to Urlrich Schluer, politician behind the measure, this vote was about symbolism. The purpose? To make it clear that there can only be one law in Switzerland, Swiss law, and that aspects of Sharia law are unacceptable.

It is interesting to watch how immigration plays out in Europe. I hope that we don't take them as a model though. Too much hostility to immigrants, of any kind, will undoubtedly alienate their larger ethnic community. Looking at the demographics such a policy would have no mean consequences.     

Interestingly it seems that the Dutch and Danish might try and follow suit.

It is interesting to see Climategate develop. I don't think that it definitively falsifies the thesis of man made climate change. The FT has a good take on it. The Telegraph has a slightly different one. The Toronto Sun has published an interesting story about the flaws found in a particular program (which I found reading Neo-Neocon). Neo-Neocon also links to another blog discussing the issue.

All of this coupled with an attempted conspiricy to delete emails pertaining to a freedom of imformation request and blackballing journals just proves at least one thing serious skeptics have been saying all along: the scientific community has prejudged this and is trying to keep us from contributing.