See also this overview of the “Arab spring” from STRATFOR.

As formidable as this thing is, the tip of the spear as far as Russian air power is concerned is the fifth-generation Sukhoi PAK-FA (T-50). The matchup here is with our F-22 Raptor, which we are no longer investing in.

Note: the linked page is in Japanese; you may want to have Google translate it for you.

So: zooming out just a little from U.S. politics, here’s a nice example of gravitational lensing: a “magnified” galaxy that we see as it was two-thirds of the age of the Universe ago.

Wellfleet has always been a hotspot for this sort of thing; the clean cold waters of the harbor are full of good things to eat, and the tidal amplitude can exceed twelve feet. But what’s been happening lately is puzzlingly anomalous, and nobody has an answer.

I’ll be spending the next week or so out there, and will see what I can learn from the professionals on the scene.

But there’s no question that good economic news is what the nation needs, so it would be churlish of me to rain on the parade.

Fortunately, I don’t have to, because the sedulous statistics-gatherer @Iowahawkblog spent the day doing just that. Here are a few of the observations he made as Friday rolled along:

– UNEMPLOYMENT DOWN!!!! because 1.2 million people mysteriously dropped out of the labor force last month.

– If the labor force participation rate was at Jan 2009 level, unemployment would be 11%.

– %of population over the age of 16 with jobs: Jan 2011, 58.4%; January 2012, 58.5%.

– There are 1.5 million fewer people working today than in Jan 2009. There are 13 million more people on food stamps.

– America added 2.3 million more jobs in the last 12 months. It added 3.56 million more adults.

– Today there are 3.06 Americans employed for every American on food stamps. This is the lowest it has ever been. Ever.

Today, we’re announcing the 2012 launch of African Americans for Obama.

There’s no better time than African American History Month to consider the tremendous progress we’ve made through the sacrifice of so many—or a better time to commit to meeting the very real challenges we face right now.

Visit africanamericans.barackobama.com for more information about all the ways you can get involved—from attending HBCU organizing workshops to becoming a Congregation Captain—and say you’re ready to keep making history. Thanks, and see you out there.

Does this mean the Republican front-runner can now announce the launch of Caucasian Americans for Romney? If not, why?

Update, February 3rd: a great many people pass by here every day. Nobody has an opinion about this? Is this topic really that radioactive?

The Hung system, in which the student must endure years of grueling stance and grip training along with high-impact conditioning of the forearms, is generally considered one of the most “external” systems of southern kung fu, and as such it gives the acolyte effective fighting tools earlier on than some of the more “internal systems” (such as ba gua, which by the way is pretty nifty stuff, as you can see here). But as the student advances, and understanding deepens, the system’s internal aspects come to the fore — one’s movements become smaller and more economical, and there is less and less reliance on athletic prowess, imperviousness to pain, and brute strength. In particular, three things happen: 1) the body learns to relax and deliver power only at the moment it is needed; 2) the practitioner learns to bring that power smoothly from the foundation — the legs, hips and waist — to the striking hand, in a rising, gathering wave; and 3) one learns to release all of that focused, concentrated power into the target through the striking hand, rather than letting any of it get “stuck” along the way.

This transition from external to internal as the years go by is a good thing, because, having worked at this stuff since I was 19, I am now a weather-beaten 55-year-old with creaking knees, and am simply no longer capable of the lower-body extravagances the style demands of a younger man: octopus-like leg sweeps, leaping to one’s feet from a floor-level crouch while spinning a seven-foot halberd, and so on.

But the ging! As any lifer like me will tell you, that just grows and grows. And a little goes a long way.

The article is here. It’s rather technical, and certainly won’t win any awards for prose style, but I thought if any of you out there are involved in the martial arts you might enjoy it.

Who claims victory?

This craven gesture is not only an affront to freedom of speech, and to freedom of thought itself, but it is also shamefully muddle-headed: Islam is of course not a “race”, but is rather an infectious package of ideas and ideology capable of taking any human brain, of any race whatsoever, as a host and vector.

While we busy ourselves confiscating toothpaste and strip-searching incontinent great-grandmothers, the real jihad — the non-violent conquest of the West — proceeds apace. And we’re glad to lend a hand.

Even though Egypt’s newly elected political leaders have now consolidated their parliamentary power in the wake of last year’s exhilarating “Facebook revolution”, their chief ideologist Yusuf al-Qaradawi (last mentioned in these pages here and here) realizes nevertheless that the long-overdue reforms his homeland yearns for will take time to implement, and must be phased in gradually.

Patience! It may be several years, for example, before there can be any chopping off of hands.

Learn more here.

But as divisive as Mr. Obama’s presidency has been, it would be wrong (at least in part) to blame the man: the issue is systemic. We read:

What do those numbers tell us? Put simply: that the country is hardening along more and more strict partisan lines.

While it’s easy to look at the numbers cited above and conclude that Obama has failed at his mission of bringing the country together, a deeper dig into the numbers in the Gallup poll suggests that the idea of erasing the partisan gap is simply impossible, as political polarization is rising rapidly.

Out of the ten most partisan years in terms of presidential job approval in Gallup data, seven — yes, seven — have come since 2004. Bush had a run between 2004 and 2007 in which the partisan disparity of his job approval was at 70 points or higher.

There is a broadening ideological schism in American sentiment on major issues of fundamental importance: the ever-increasing scale of federal spending and scope of intrusive federal regulation; nation-building abroad; the indifference of the Federal government to most illegal immigration, and outright antipathy to states who try to act when Washington abdicates; institutionalized racial and ethnic preferences that consistently disfavor white, Anglo-European people and culture; refugee-resettlement scams; foreign aid to nations that hate us; radical multiculturalism and non-discrimination; and so on.

The rift between these two constituencies is only getting wider and deeper and angrier, and that trend isn’t going to change. So as I’ve been saying for some time now: the practical issue is not that liberals and conservatives disagree about these things — it’s that they can’t get away from each other. This seems to me little different from the religious and ethnic tensions that have torn countries apart, often violently, throughout history. Such things rarely turn out well, and I don’t expect this will, either.

When I left New Jersey and headed for Gotham back in the mid-1970′s, I managed to land a job in a top recording studio, and since then I’ve been fortunate enough to have worked with many of the world’s best guitarists. But I’ll put John up against any of them.

You tell me. Here’s how John plays the blues. And here’s his version of the immortal Voodoo Chile.

It looks like this:

What is it? A UFO? Kvenland?

I’m dead boring when it comes to this sort of stuff — so I’m guessing that it’ll turn out to be a geological feature of some sort: a protuberant basalt column or such like, and those “drag marks” just a “shadow” caused by seafloor currents.

But hey, you never know. Maybe Kvenland.

What is also appalling is that this lurid item is what I’m passing along today from Bill’s exceptional website; in particular he has just written a set of three pieces on the “illusion” of free will (here, here, and here) that are far more worthy of comment.

But so swamped have I been with work the past couple of days that I’ll have to pass, for now (other than to say that Bill rightly zeroes in on the distinction between, on the one hand, deliberation and choice — which we certainly are capable of, and are central features of our humanity — and, on the other, non-deterministic, “free” deliberation, which I believe is asking too much).

Do go read them yourself, though. And if you like, we have a linked series of posts of our own on the subject, beginning here.

One can only hope. Find out here.