The Telegraph reports:

Iran’s hardline spiritual leaders have issued an unprecedented new fatwa, or holy order, sanctioning the use of atomic weapons against its enemies.

In yet another sign of Teheran’s stiffening resolve on the nuclear issue, influential Muslim clerics have for the first time questioned the theocracy’s traditional stance that Sharia law forbade the use of nuclear weapons.

One senior mullah has now said it is “only natural” to have nuclear bombs as a “countermeasure” against other nuclear powers, thought to be a reference to America and Israel.

The pronouncement is particularly worrying because it has come from Mohsen Gharavian, a disciple of the ultra-conservative Ayatollah Mohammad Taghi Mesbah-Yazdi, who is widely regarded as the cleric closest to Iran’s new president, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

Nicknamed “Professor Crocodile” because of his harsh conservatism, Ayatollah Mesbah Yazdi’s group opposes virtually any kind of rapprochement with the West and is believed to have influenced President Ahmadinejad’s refusal to negotiate over Iran’s nuclear programme.

The comments, which are the first public statement by the Yazdi clerical cabal on the nuclear issue, will be seen as an attempt by the country’s religious hardliners to begin preparing a theological justification for the ownership – and if necessary the use – of atomic bombs…

(A) bus strike, which has led to the jailing of more than 1,000 drivers, was originally sparked by an industrial dispute over unpaid wages benefits. But the robustness of the state response has indicated the nervousness of the Ahmadinejad regime over any internal dissent.

Reports from Iran say that Massoud Osanlou, the leader of the bus drivers’ union, was arrested at his home by members of the Basij, the pro-regime militia, and had part of his tongue cut out as a warning to be quiet.

If Teddy Roosevelt was in the White House, he’d quote that fatwa after he used precisely those nonconventional weapons to eliminate the Iranian nuclear weapons development program.

John Dvorak is predicting it will. The Joy of Tech mocks, but I think the argument makes an awful lot of sense.

Apple has always said it was a hardware company, not a software company. Now with the cash cow iPod line, it can afford to drop expensive OS development and just make jazzy, high-margin Windows computers to finally get beyond that five-percent market share and compete directly with Dell, HP and the stodgy Chinese makers.

The Humboldt Current is back off the cost of Northern California again this winter, and with it vast numbers of Humboldt squid (Dosidicus gigas). The San Francisco Chronicle’s Tom Stienstra tries to scare us.

The most horrifying vision for a scuba diver is not the silent charge of a 20-foot great white shark.

No, it gets worse than that.

The ultimate nightmare of the deep is to encounter a pack of Humboldt squid and then face being devoured in a series of softball-chunk sized bites as they compete for each scrap.

These giant squid reach six feet and 180 pounds, armed with sucker discs with 25,000 to 60,000 teeth, as detailed in a Chronicle story a year ago (archived at sfgate.com). They have 10 tentacles, including two long tentacles they use to pull their prey in to their razor-sharp beaks. They school in roaming hordes and then gang up to swarm in feeding frenzies. When set off, they will even eat each other and anything else in their path.

They have returned for a second straight year off the Bay Area coast this winter, roaming the marine seamounts, often 400 to 2,000 feet deep.

A report has been confirmed that that a group called Seawolves Unlimited has not only led dives amid the Humboldt squid, but has filmed the encounters and attacks.

“In order to safely dive with the Humboldt squid, they use diver protection platforms and wear armored wet suits,” said Craig Buttner, who previewed the film.

At one point, you can see squid try to eat a scuba diver, but are repelled when they clasp onto the armor, Buttner said.

The 45-minute video now in post-production will be shown for the first time at a free seminar called “Dancing With The Demons.” The event is scheduled March 10 at 7:30 p.m. in Millbrae, 10 minutes south of the San Francisco Airport, at the New Vision United Methodist Church at 450 Chadbourne.

Buttner says it’s a clear, high resolution copy shot in the crystal waters in the Sea of Cortez. I’ll be getting a copy as soon as available to provide a synopsis.

The show is sponsored by the Northern California Underwater Photographic Society. video excerpt

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National Geographic also has a video on the “Red Devil” Squid.

Scott Cassel article Dancing with Demons.

Those yearning for close encounters of the cephalopoidal kind can book a trip here.

Time, Inc. yesterday launched a long-awaited humor web-site aimed at young men. The web site is called Office Pirates. (What is this Gen Y thing about pirates anyway?)

One video featuring an older boss who can’t cope with email was kind of fun. Leland Wire

Born February 22, 1732 – Died December 14, 1799

“Let us raise a standard to which the wise and honest can repair; the rest is in the hands of God.”

Boston Magazine attributes Summers’ demise to bad manners.

When visitors came to his office, Summers propped his feet up on a table, sometimes with his shoes off. He often appeared in public with a toothpick dangling from his mouth. He repeatedly mangled the names of people he was greeting or introducing. If someone said something he deemed uninteresting or foolish, he would conspicuously roll his eyes. Other times Summers would stare into space when being spoken to, as if no one else were in the room. “Larry’s always looking away,” says one junior professor. “At first you think he’s scanning the room for someone more important, but no, he’s just looking away.” And then there was the recurring problem of his eating and talking at the same time, during which Summers sometimes sprayed saliva on his audience….

The Harvard Crimson… repeatedly noted how Summers’s lack of social graces impeded his interaction with students and faculty. The new president’s manners, or lack thereof, were so widely discussed that student reporters were really just transcribing an omnipresent campus conversation.

Summers also had a bizarre habit of falling asleep in public. Eyewitnesses caught him dozing at a talk by Pakistani President Pervez Musharraf, a lecture by United Nations head Kofi Annan, a speech by Mikhail Gorbachev in Sanders Theatre, a service at Harvard Hillel, and a festival celebrating cultural diversity.

When he was more engaged by speakers, Summers often acted derisively toward them. At one fall 2001 meeting with the law-school faculty, a female professor asked a question that Summers didn’t think much of. “That’s a stupid question,” he responded. Later that autumn, he brusquely terminated an interview with a female journalist from the Financial Times after a disagreement over whether his remarks were on or off the record. Just as they had at Treasury, his aides insisted that Summers’s style was typical of the intellectual free-for-all that characterized economics seminars and that people shouldn’t take it personally. Inevitably, they did.

So great was the bewilderment over Summers’s lack of social skills that some in the Harvard community wondered if there might be a clinical reason for his behavior: a neurobiological disorder called Asperger’s syndrome.

But today’s Wall Street Journal front page story hints that the Corporation really abandoned Summers because the Harvard president, already under fire from the left, failed to defend Harvard’s invaluable money management team, led by Jack R. Meyer, in a controversy last year when bolshies criticized their compensation:

According to people familiar with the situation, Mr. Summers also alienated Jack R. Meyer, who until last year was chief executive of Harvard Management Corp. The group oversees Harvard’s endowment and posted strong gains under Mr. Meyer’s tenure. He and about 29 others in the fixed-income group left the affiliate last year. Although it wasn’t the catalyst for his departure, Mr. Meyer was disappointed Mr. Summers didn’t stand up to alumni who criticized some employees’ pay, these people say. The controversy reached a head in 2003, when the top two HMC investment managers earned $35.1 million and $34.1 million, respectively.

Meyer’s mananagement team increased the portion of Harvard’s endowment they administered by an average of 16.1% per year over a decade, growing it by billions (from $4.8 to $22.6 billion over the period from 1990 to 2004), so Summers’ failure in this department was no simple symbolic culture wars’ defeat. Harvard stands to lose an incalculable amount of asset growth as the result of Summers’ cowed posture in response to personal damage sustained in previous quarrels with the left.

Christopher Hitchens demands (in a must-read editorial) that we stand up for Denmark.

The incredible thing about the ongoing Kristallnacht against Denmark (and in some places, against the embassies and citizens of any Scandinavian or even European Union nation) is that it has resulted in, not opprobrium for the religion that perpetrates and excuses it, but increased respectability! A small democratic country with an open society, a system of confessional pluralism, and a free press has been subjected to a fantastic, incredible, organized campaign of lies and hatred and violence, extending to one of the gravest imaginable breaches of international law and civility: the violation of diplomatic immunity. And nobody in authority can be found to state the obvious and the necessary—that we stand with the Danes against this defamation and blackmail and sabotage. Instead, all compassion and concern is apparently to be expended upon those who lit the powder trail, and who yell and scream for joy as the embassies of democracies are put to the torch in the capital cities of miserable, fly-blown dictatorships. Let’s be sure we haven’t hurt the vandals’ feelings.

Larry Summers is resigning (under faculty fire) as president of Harvard. He had been brought in by the Corporation, in the Spring of 2001, as a representative of Clintonian Democratic Party centrism, with the goal of wresting that university’s management and destiny out of the hands of representatives of the aberrant culture of leftwing radicalism which has flourished in post-1960s academic institutions the way kudzu flourishes beside Southern highways. Summers was given a vote of no confidence by the faculty of Arts and Sciences last March as punishment for a mild remark speculating on the possibility of intrinsic gender differences playing some partial role in the smaller numbers of females working as professionally as mathematicians, scientists, and engineers.

In the 18th century, tyrannical presidents of the great American colleges first ruthlessly purged faculties and student bodies of New Light deviationists from Congregationalist Orthodoxy, then later when the Great Awakening prospered, also purged the Old Light survivors of earlier efforts at uniformity.

Summers’ defeat deserves to be viewed as a modern repetition of the ancient struggles at Harvard and Yale over the fine points of theology. Summers represented the worldly and optimistic party of affirmative Democratic governance, adaptable to post-Reagan changes in the national agenda, reconciled to the necessities of the free market, and committed to technocratic pragmatism. He is being driven out by a consensus loyal to a culture of conformity in thrall to leftist extremism, committed to the politics of ressentiment, the apocalyptic condemnation of Euro-American history, and to the rejection of market capitalism.

When Summers dared to criticize Afro-American studies professor Cornell West and suggested that popular notions of feminine victimhood might possibly be exaggerated, the result was much as if one of his 17th century predecessors had ventured upon criticism of Predestination, and expressed doubts concerning some of the articles of the Augsburg Confession. Summers’ defeat represents indubitably the triumph of a reactionary orthodoxy at Harvard, and an explicit rejection of the idea of a reconciliation between the academic community and the diurnal political reality of America in the 21st Century.

My wife’s Thinkpad has expired, so I will have to let her borrow my computer for much of today.

We live in a country whose citizens contentedly surrender nail clippers and Swiss Army knives to board an airplane, and accept as standard operating procedure body searches of white-haired grannies in the name of flight security. Could anyone have predicted that the sale of Britain’s Peninsular & Orient Steam Navigation Company to Dubai Ports World giving authority over terminals in ports in New York, New Jersey, Baltimore, New Orleans, Miami and Philadelphia to an Islamic-controlled company might produce alarm?

The democrats astutely recognize an opportunity to score off the Bush Administration again, and even ultra-liberals like Hillary Clinton and Chuck Schumer are leaping aboard a rapidly accelerating juggernaut of opposition to the commercial surrender of US ports to the paynim.

But suppose the administration had played it the other way. Michael Chertoff, head of Homeland Security, holds a press conference denouncing the sale, and calls for Congressional action to overturn the U.S. Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS) rubberstamp approval of the British sale. The next day’s editorials in the Times and Washington Post denounce the anti-Islamic bigotry of the Bush Administration, noting that Dubai is, in fact, a US ally in the War on Terror, that the port terminals were previously foreign-owned, and that the only other bidder was a Singapore company. Democrat leaders in Congress attack the administration in press conferences held at mosques.

By acquiescing compliantly to the deal, Rove has put Crusading fire into the democrat opposition’s belly, and persuaded prominent leaders of the Congressional left to march in Michelle Malkin’s parade.

Any day now, Karl is going to get Bush to announce his intention to outlaw coercive interrogations of Islamic terrorists, and we are going to see Hillary Clinton acting like Jack Bauer, promising personally to make every single one of the rascals talk.

Jim Petersen in the Wall Street Journal explains how the Endangered Species Act made it possible for disappearing owls to function as surrogates for non-endangered trees.

Last month the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service published a call for proposals to develop a recovery plan for the northern spotted owl. It’s about time: The owl was added to the nation’s burgeoning list of threatened and endangered species nearly 16 years ago. That it took so long helps explain why only 10 of the 1,264 species listed under the federal Endangered Species Act (ESA) have ever recovered.

If my gut reading is correct, the owl won’t be No. 11. It is already doomed across much of its range, and the reason is well known among field biologists who have been observing the bird for some 20 years. More aggressive barred owls are pushing them out of their 21-million-acre home range, or killing them, or both. In any case, spotted owls are fighting a losing battle, a fact that has me wondering if the Fish and Wildlife Service isn’t whistling past the graveyard.

Barred owls, not to be confused with common barn owls, migrated from their native East Coast environs a century or more ago. No one knows why, and until they started killing already-threatened spotted owls, no one cared. Now they do. Just how long it will take the barreds to finish off their brethren isn’t known, but the situation has become so precarious that a federal biologist recently opined that shooting barred owls might be the only way to save spotted owls.

How and why the government failed so miserably in its costly attempt to protect spotted owls is a sordid tale that illustrates what happens when science is politicized. Begin with the fact that protecting owls was never the objective: Saving old-growth forests from chainsaws was. The owl was simply a surrogate — a stand-in for forests that do not themselves qualify for ESA protection. But if a link could be established between harvesting in old-growth forests and declining spotted owl numbers, the bird might well qualify for listing — a line of thinking that in 1988 led Andy Stahl, then a resource analyst with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, to famously declare, “Thank goodness the spotted owl evolved in the Northwest, for if it hadn’t, we’d have to genetically engineer it. It’s the perfect species for use as a surrogate.”