I just wanted to take a minute out from my yummy chicken pie to recommend Mrs. Budd's Chicken Pies. They're really good.
When I get a product that has something in its title, like "Chicken soup", I look for that thing. If it doesn't have a lot of that thing I feel gypped, and rightly so. Mrs. Budd's pies have big chunks of white meat chicken, big flowers of broccoli, great little pearl onions, and lots of carrots. It's a great little meal 
Matt Wretchard at the Belmont Club has a great post on The Hunt for Ayman al-Zawahri. He helpfully recaps a lot of the news and then draws some insightful conclusions:
Even if Zawahri is not captured, the historical military invulnerability of tribal regions on Pakistan's Northwest frontier may have ended forever. Operation Mountain Storm's lethal marriage of mobility, persistent overhead surveillance and networked weapons means that small teams of men can operate effectively over wide areas -- essentially turning the tables on tribal fighters. Never again can terrorist chieftains like Osama Bin Laden invest large sums of money in caves and mountain fortresses on the assumption of their inviolability. The mud forts and honeycomb of caves, their ammunition magazines and hundreds of fighters -- representing an expenditure of terrorist millions -- is going up in smoke.
The real significance of ongoing operations in South Waziristan may be as a template for similar operations in the near future. The same principles used in Mountain Storm can be applied in the open spaces of the Sahara, the Syrian desert or the Zagros mountains deep in Iran. It isn't just the Al Qaeda that evolve. So do their foes.
I recently read a great paper on fourth generation warfare that was written way back in 1989, but is still extremely relevant and accurate today regarding the enemy we face. That paper chronicles first, second, and third generation warfare and points out that often tactics which were used in one generation become a hinderance in the next. A military has to evolve to continue to effectively wage war in successive generations.
When reading that paper it struck me how different "fourth generation" warfare is from the other three. It really makes one worry about how we'll be able to effectively deal with the enemy we face, even though no one else can hold a candle to the U.S. in conventional warfare. Judging by Wretchard's comments, it seems that Rumsfeld really is standing up to meet the challenge. All along Rumsfeld has said he needs to transform the military to effectively wage a "fourth-generation" war, and we seem to be making real progress. God bless him.
Daring Fireball: Dive Into Markdown, via Paul
Thus, Point No. 1: When I end up changing my mind on a matter of opinion, it usually is not because I had the facts wrong; it’s because I was looking at the wrong facts.
Back a few years ago Scientific American had an article entitled, 15 Answers to Creationist Nonsense. Shortly after that I had come across a response, and thought "This says exactly what I wanted to say!", and I could have sworn I blogged it, but then I could never find it again. I just came across on the Answers in Genesis web site something that must be it: 15 ways to refute materialistic bigotry, "A point by point response to Scientific American", by Dr. Jonathan Sarfati.
Saturday, March 20, 2004
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Court rejects death penalty for raping children - Yahoo! News
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Keith: Jul 4, 11:32am