There is so much wonderful nervousness in Tehran right now. Ayatollah Khamenei probably knows he's going to die without any of the great victories he has pursued:  Lebanese democracy has not yielded, there is no Islamic Republic in Iraq, and Israel is still there. Indeed, our recent adjustment to his agents' behavior in Iraq - arrests of Iranians, exposure of their weapons supply - must send chills through his malignant body, since it shatters the great lie in which he and his followers had so passionately believed: that America has no stomach for war, and will break and run when attacked systematically. Other wonderful news is that physical attacks against the Revolutionary Guards and the Basij-the prime instruments of repression-are taking place all over Iran.  See Jack Wheeler's Pelosi's Primrose Path for details. All this adds to the intensity of the War of  Persian Succession, the fierce power struggle within the regime for the succession to Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei.  The political war between the two men who fancy themselves the logical tyrants of the Islamic Republic-Rafsanjani and Ahmadi-Nezhad-is heating up by the hour.

The streets are frozen solid here in Washington, its dangerous to even walk to the Metro much less drive around, and I am having so much fun.  It's a tossup over what's more hilarious, the global warming freaks in Congress having to cancel a hearing about how we're all going to fry because of snow blizzards and freezing rain, or the talking news heads endlessly blathering about Anna Nicole. Most fun of all though is how GW is leading Pelosi Galore right down Primrose Lane - right this way, Nancy. First he gets her to waste enormous amounts of time in full public view trying to get an impossibly stupid "non-binding" resolution devoid of meaning that has outraged her radical left hate-America base - because they want her to spend her time on defunding the war. Now that she's making an empty fool of herself to normal voters and infuriating her most fervent supporters at the same time, Bush gets her into a frothing tizzy over Iran.  "The President has no authority to go into Iran," she hyperventilates, thinking that GW is about to land the Marines at Bandar Abbas, seize the Iranian oil fields, bomb the nuke facilities into radioactive rubble, and plunge the world into genocidal chaos. The lady is being played like a Stradivarius, and she doesn't even know it.  She's oblivious!  This is a thing of sheer beauty.  It can snow and freeze all it wants.  I'm enjoying the view.

In this occasional series on science, which started a year ago (2/06) with The Search for Dark Matter, I discussed Einstein's concept of special relativity last August in A Personal Journey Through Relativity.  Jack Wheeler provided an engaging account of it two years ago (2/05) in Aristotle, Einstein, and Ayn Rand. Einstein though did not have a Theory of Relativity  -- ‘a' as in one.  He had two.  His Special Theory is about the relativity of time.  His General Theory is about the relativity of gravity.  The puzzles and paradoxes of the first pale in comparison to those of the second. So much so that most anyone can visualize clocks telling time at different rates and astronauts coming back from another galaxy much younger than the people they left on earth.  The math and explanations may be hard but one can at least visualize the effects of special relativity. It seems well-nigh impossible to visualize gravity not as a force but as a manifestation of curved space.

The Mother of All Corrections issued by the Washington Post Saturday (2/10) illustrates what is wrong with our intelligence agencies, and -- especially -- with news coverage of them. The inspector general of the Department of Defense had been asked by Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich, then the ranking Democrat on the Senate Armed Services Committee (and now, alas, its chairman), to determine whether the intelligence analysis on Iraq done by the Pentagon's Office of Special Plans under then Under Secretary Douglas Feith violated the law. On Feb. 8, acting Inspector General Thomas Gimble issued his report.  Washington Post reporters Walter Pincus and R. Jeffrey Smith wrote a story about it, which appeared on the front page of last Friday's paper.  They managed to confuse the IG report with a press release sent out by Sen. Levin over two years ago.

I very much appreciated the responses and comments regarding The Fragility of Islamofascism posted in the TTP User Forum.  I also received requests to explain the Koran's "Satanic Verses" more fully. The saga of the Satanic Verses starts with the earliest accounts of Mohammed's life written by accepted Islamic scholars such as Ibn Ishaq (died 767 AD) and al-Tabari (d. 923). "Accepted" means by Islamic tradition.  Mohammed supposedly died in 632 and Ishaq wrote about him over 100 years later - so could not have interviewed anyone who knew him.  Yet we only know of Ishaq through quotes of him by Tabari, who lived 300 years after Mohammed. Thus the earliest source of Mohammed's life and the alleged founding of Islam was written three centuries later.  The saga of Mohammed is a myth for which there is no genuine historical evidence whatever.  I discussed this in The Myth of Mecca, written a few days after the Moslem attack on America of September 11, 2001. So we are talking "sacred history" here, not actual history.